How to add a flash on beat with Claude

Twice a second, right on each beat of the drum loop, the whole picture washes out almost to white and snaps back to normal within a quarter second.

Get this effect

  1. Switch to Code in your Claude Desktop App

  2. Install the skill (once)

    Show the prompt
    Install the Recharm video effects skill: download https://recharm-growth-staging.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/website/downloads/recharm-video-effects.zip and unzip it into ~/.claude/skills
  3. Ask for the effect

    Add a flash on beat to input.mp4
    Your track's tempo; librosa uses it to find where each beat falls: 120
    How white the frame gets on a beat: 0.85

Several videos, several effects, one ask

Put your clips in the folder, mention them with @, and ask for everything at once. Claude runs one tested script after another on each clip, then joins them.

Add a flash on beat to @clip1.mp4, put a sale badge on @clip2.mp4, give @clip3.mp4 a VHS look, then join all three with crossfades.

Settings you can change

Ask Claude to change any of these, or edit them at the top of the script.

SettingDefaultWhat it does
BPM120Your track's tempo; librosa uses it to find where each beat falls.
OPACITY0.85How white the frame gets on a beat. 1 is solid white.
DECAY0.25Seconds each flash takes to fade back. Keep it under the gap between beats.
CURVE2Fade shape: 1 fades evenly, higher drops off faster right after the hit.

Without the skill

Don’t want to install the skill? Paste this prompt into Claude Code and Claude writes the script itself.

Show the prompt
In input.mp4 (540x960, 30fps, 6 seconds, a 120 BPM drum loop), make the whole frame flash white on every beat of the music. Find the beats with librosa: decode the audio to mono at 22050 Hz and run librosa.beat.beat_track(y=audio, sr=22050, bpm=120, units="time"), which puts beats about every 0.5 seconds from 0.5s on. For each beat take the video frame at round(beat x 30) as the flash's first frame. On that frame blend every pixel 85% of the way to white (255, 255, 255): new = old + (255 - old) x 0.85, over the whole frame. Then fade the white back out over 0.25 seconds: at p = seconds since the flash's first frame / 0.25, the white's opacity is 0.85 x (1 - p)^2, reaching 0 at p = 1, so the picture is untouched again a quarter second after each beat until the next beat. Frames away from a beat stay exactly as they are; no text, no zoom and no other changes. Use Python with librosa and numpy to blend the frames and ffmpeg to read and write them. Keep the size, 30fps, 6 second length and the audio, and save it as output.mp4 (H.264, yuv420p).

Run it without Claude

This is the exact script we tested. Save it as flash-on-beat.py and run:

python3 flash-on-beat.py input.mp4 output.mp4
Show the script
#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Flash on beat: librosa finds the beats in the soundtrack and the frame flashes white on each one, then fades back.

Usage: python3 flash-on-beat.py input.mp4 output.mp4  (the input needs a music track)
Needs ffmpeg, librosa and numpy (pip install librosa numpy).
"""
import json
import math
import subprocess
import sys

import librosa
import numpy as np

BPM = 120         # your track's tempo; librosa finds where each beat falls
OPACITY = 0.85    # how white the frame gets on a beat (1 = solid white)
DECAY = 0.25      # seconds each flash takes to fade back to the picture
CURVE = 2         # fade shape: 1 fades evenly, higher drops off faster right after the hit
RATE = 22050      # audio sample rate the beat tracking uses


def probe(path):
    info = json.loads(subprocess.check_output(["ffprobe", "-v", "error", "-select_streams", "v:0", "-show_entries",
                                               "stream=width,height,r_frame_rate:format=duration", "-of", "json", path]))
    s = info["streams"][0]
    num, den = s["r_frame_rate"].split("/")
    return s["width"], s["height"], s["r_frame_rate"], float(num) / float(den), float(info["format"]["duration"])


def beat_times(src):
    """Seconds of every beat librosa tracks in the soundtrack."""
    pcm = subprocess.check_output(["ffmpeg", "-v", "error", "-i", src, "-ac", "1", "-ar", str(RATE), "-f", "f32le", "-"])
    audio = np.frombuffer(pcm, np.float32)
    _, beats = librosa.beat.beat_track(y=audio, sr=RATE, bpm=BPM, units="time")
    return beats


def flash_per_frame(beats, frames):
    """White opacity (0-1) for each video frame: OPACITY on a beat's frame, easing to 0 over DECAY seconds."""
    alpha = np.zeros(frames)
    for beat in beats:
        start = round(beat * fps)
        for i in range(start, min(frames, start + math.ceil(DECAY * fps))):
            p = (i - start) / (DECAY * fps)
            alpha[i] = max(alpha[i], OPACITY * (1 - p) ** CURVE)
    return alpha


def render(src, out):
    """Blend white into every frame by its flash opacity and save to out, keeping the audio."""
    frames = math.ceil(duration * fps)
    alpha = flash_per_frame(beat_times(src), frames)
    size = w * h * 3
    reader = subprocess.Popen(["ffmpeg", "-v", "error", "-i", src, "-f", "rawvideo", "-pix_fmt", "rgb24", "-"],
                              stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    writer = subprocess.Popen(["ffmpeg", "-y", "-v", "error", "-f", "rawvideo", "-pix_fmt", "rgb24", "-s", f"{w}x{h}",
                               "-r", rate, "-i", "-", "-i", src, "-map", "0:v", "-map", "1:a?",
                               "-c:v", "libx264", "-crf", "18", "-pix_fmt", "yuv420p", "-c:a", "copy", "-shortest", out],
                              stdin=subprocess.PIPE)
    for i in range(frames):
        raw = reader.stdout.read(size)
        if len(raw) < size:
            break
        img = np.frombuffer(raw, np.uint8).astype(np.float32)
        writer.stdin.write((img + (255 - img) * alpha[i]).round().astype(np.uint8).tobytes())
    writer.stdin.close()
    reader.stdout.close()
    if writer.wait() or reader.wait():
        sys.exit("ffmpeg failed")


src, out = sys.argv[1:]
w, h, rate, fps, duration = probe(src)
render(src, out)

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