Short-form video · CreatorsWith Kenil JoshiLive
ReelForge
Raw footage in, captioned short-form video out — on its way to an editor that edits for you.
The problem
Upload a talking-head clip; ReelForge transcribes it, turns the speech into styled, animated captions, lets you drop B-roll and sound over any line, and renders a vertical cut ready for Reels and Shorts.
Short-form video rewards people who post every day and punishes the hours it takes: transcribing, timing captions word by word, hunting for B-roll, exporting in the right shape.
Most tools solve it by uploading everything to someone else’s render farm. That’s slow, expensive to run, and your footage leaves your machine. We wanted the fast part now — and a path to an editor that runs entirely in your browser.
- FFmpeg pass for captions, B-roll, audio and watermark
- 1
- FFmpeg pass for captions, B-roll, audio and watermark
- experiments toward a fully in-browser editor
- 39
- experiments toward a fully in-browser editor
- priced by location, settled in paise
- ₹ / $
- priced by location, settled in paise
How it works
- 1
Upload
Clips up to a minute. Phone rotation metadata is respected, a thumbnail is grabbed and the audio extracted to 16 kHz mono.
- 2
Transcribe
Speech-to-text with word-level timestamps. If there’s no speech, you’re told so — and the upload doesn’t count against your plan.
- 3
Caption
Words are grouped three at a time into caption segments you can restyle and animate — fade, slide, zoom, bounce — previewed live on a canvas.
- 4
Layer
Search stock video, images and sound, then pin each asset to the caption segments it should cover, so it lines up with speech by construction.
- 5
Render
A worker composes everything — B-roll, audio mix, captions — into a single FFmpeg pass and emails you when the video is ready.
Decisions I’d make again
Three words per caption
The caption segment is the unit of editing. Captions read punchy, and anything you attach to a segment is timed to speech automatically.
One filter graph
Overlays, audio mix, watermark and burned-in captions happen in one encode — no chain of intermediate files.
A free tier that pays for itself
Free projects keep B-roll in your browser and expire after seven days; paid features are enforced on the server, not trusted from the client.
Experiment before you build
39 standalone experiments de-risk the in-browser editor — WebCodecs, WebGPU, OPFS, on-device speech — before any of it touches the product.
The journey so far
From the first annoyance to telling people about it. Dates come from the commit history.
Get annoyed
Captions shouldn’t take an hour
Every creator we knew spent longer timing subtitles than recording. That was the whole brief.
4 Oct 2025Build
First commit, hackathon-style
Kenil’s first commit was “Full Video Extraction.” 87 commits followed in October alone.
12 Oct 2025Build
A frontend on the edge
The web app went onto Cloudflare Workers from day one.
Nov 2025Ship
Payments and a cleanup cron
Razorpay orders with a webhook backup, and a job that expires free-tier footage after seven days to keep costs bounded.
Dec 2025Ship
B-roll in the render; a real landing page
B-roll composited server-side, project management, and the pricing, features and support pages.
9 Jan 2026Tell people
Priced for India and the world
Location-based pricing: INR at home, USD everywhere else.
26 Apr 2026Build
Exports move to a worker
Rendering left the request path for Celery and Redis — with timeouts, retries and progress steps the editor can poll.
May 2026Research
39 experiments
A programme of standalone apps to prove an editor can run entirely in the browser: decode, composite, cache, mix, export, transcribe.
Sep 2026Ship
Stock, sound and email
A stock library across four providers, audio layers, export emails and a free-tier watermark.
BuildNext
The agentic layer
On-device silence cutting, auto-reframing and smart-cut ranking — the parts of an editor that edit for you — moving from experiments into the product.
Built by
Built with
- Python · FastAPI
- Celery + Redis
- FFmpeg + libass
- Next.js on Cloudflare
- WebCodecs · WebGPU
- Razorpay · PostHog
Writing about ReelForge
- 39 experiments toward a video editor with no serversWebCodecs, WebGPU, OPFS and on-device AI: how we’re de-risking an editor that runs entirely in the browser — and where the agentic part of ReelForge will come from.Building · ReelForge
- One filter graph: how ReelForge renders captions, B-roll and audio in a single FFmpeg passFrom a canvas preview in the browser to an .ass subtitle file and one filter_complex on the server — the render pipeline behind every ReelForge export.Building · ReelForge
- A free tier that doesn’t bankrupt you: pricing ReelForge for India and the worldGeo-priced plans in rupees and dollars, payments confirmed twice and activated once, and the quiet cost controls that let a video product offer a free plan at all.Launch · ReelForge