Canvas & visuals
Compositing, layers, opacity, and making the picture part of the performance.
Most samplers end at the speaker. rip chopper has a stage.
The canvas is the video output of your project — the surface where every playing clip appears, live while you perform, in the preview output, and in everything you render. This page is about directing it.
The frame
Pick the canvas shape: landscape, portrait, or square. Portrait for the phone-video piece, square for the loop, landscape for everything else. Switching shapes never scrambles your clip placements — arrangements survive reframing.
Every playing clip is on stage
Hold four pads and four clips share the frame, composited together in real time. Where each one sits is up to you:
- Click a clip on the stage to select it, then drag to move and use the corner handles to scale. Snapping pulls to edges, centers, thirds, and the other clips.
- Choose how a clip fills its box: fit, fill, stretch, or tile (tile is more fun than it has any right to be).
- Composition guides (edges / center / thirds) toggle on and off from the stage.
Layers: mute groups again
The canvas needs a z-order — who draws over whom. rip chopper reuses a decision you’ve already made: mute groups are layers. Group 1 is the bottom, higher groups stack above, ungrouped clips float on top.
This sounds like a constraint and plays like a feature: your backing loop (group 1, monophonic, one at a time) naturally becomes the backdrop, and the stabs you play over it (ungrouped, polyphonic) naturally land on top. The sonic arrangement and the visual arrangement are the same arrangement.
Opacity, and the envelope in the picture
Each clip has an opacity, and — the good part — an optional Envelope → Opacity mode: the clip’s ADSR drives its transparency. The video fades in over the attack, holds at sustain, and dissolves through the release, in exact lockstep with the audio.
Long attack + long release + a held chord of three translucent clips is a genuinely beautiful thing to watch. It works identically live and in renders, because the same envelope math drives both.
Visibility
Not every pad needs to be seen:
- Hidden — audio only. For basslines and texture pads that shouldn’t interrupt the picture.
- Auto — visible while playing (the default).
- Always — prioritized within its layer while playing. For the clip that is the show.
Beyond video
A pad’s visual doesn’t have to be its video. Give a clip a still image or an animated GIF as its face, or choose Swap, press Set, and play any video chop from any bank. Set mode stays active while you change banks, and you hear the original pad’s audio under each candidate chop’s video. The global banner keeps Done and Cancel available even when the original pad’s details are out of view. Keep auditioning until the combination feels right, then press Done to keep the latest one (or Escape to cancel). A swap borrows only the chosen chop’s picture: the pad keeps its original audio, timing, effects, and trigger. This also gives audio-only clips a stage visual. You can choose no visual at all, too. And for prepared clips, background removal (Apple’s on-device segmentation) can cut the subject out entirely — a dancer with no room around them, composited over whatever else you’re playing. There’s also the inverse: reconstruct the background with the subject gone.