Viper Setup Guide

If you want to get started with Viper, you have come to the right place! The following is a step-by-step of how to get a midi trigger working for Viper.

For the demo, I will be using a Pro Tools session on Mac, with a very artistic video I made of a screen saver. I will start in timecode view, grid mode and using the multitool.

First thing to do is to make a new track for Viper:

Viper must go on an instrument track in Pro Tools:

Here is our new instrument track:

Let’s give it a name.

Then we will add Viper to it.

Viper’s two windows appear. The plugin window lets you customize the wipe and the transparent window display it.

Let’s move the transparent window over the video:

…and move the plugin window out of the way of our track:

We’ll make a marker to show where we want our wipe to hit. We have left the wipe duration at 2 seconds so we’ll need to trigger the wipe 2 seconds before this marker.

Okay, here’s where we’re aiming for our actor to start speaking.

Let’s zoom in to create our wipe midi region.

To create our midi note, we’ll use the pencil tool:

…and we’ll change the track view to ‘notes’:

Using the pencil tool, we’ll draw any midi note of any length. Viper will be triggered by the start of the note only.

Now, we can go back to ‘clips’ view to sync up our new midi clip.

Because we have been working in grid mode, our note is nicely lined up to the frame. Now, we need to make the clip 2 seconds long. (Technically, the clip can be any length, as long as the note is 2 seconds before the end.)

We’ll go back to the multitool.

And we’ll cut our clip at the start of the midi note (key command: a).

If we select the clip, we see it is 1 second and 13 frames long. We want it to be 2 seconds long.

…so, we’ll change our selection to 2 seconds.

…and press enter.

We’ll consolidate our selection into a 2 second clip.

We now have our midi trigger clip, with a midi note which starts two seconds before the end of the clip.

It’s so beautiful, we’ll have to name it.

We’ll probably save this clip into our template, so this is nicer than ‘Viper-02’.

So now, we put our cursor where we want the wipe to hit – on our marker.

Then, we cmd + ctrl + click (using the hand tool) on our clip to align the end of it with the cursor.

Now we are ready to hit play and see our wipe in action.

We hit play and watch as the playhead passes over the midi note and starts the wipe. The two lines meet neatly on our marker and our actor starts to speak.

And that’s it!

Here’s the whole process in a GIF:

And you can grab my Pro Tools session here.

As always, for any questions please get in touch here. If you want to try Viper, you can find it here.