Auto-edit (beat sync)

In a music video the shots change on the beat — that's where the feeling of “this edit is locked to the music” comes from. You can do it by hand: listen, drop a marker on every beat, then cut at every marker. On a three-minute track that's hundreds of cuts.

Auto-edit does that job with one button: it analyses the music, finds the beats, and re-cuts your video track to land on them. What comes out is not a finished film — it's a finished ROUGH CUT. You then look it over and fix what needs fixing.

What you need first

Auto-edit is not magic — it works with what you feed it. Meet two conditions and the result will be good.

• A track with a clear beat on the audio track. Something with an audible drum or bass works best. Slow, beatless ambient music — or a lone speaking voice — gives it nothing to find.
• Plenty of raw footage. Every cut throws a bit of material away, so the finished piece is shorter than the source. Three minutes of music will not be covered by three minutes of video — bring extra.

Running it

1. 1

   Lay down the music and the video

   Drop the music onto an audio track and your raw footage onto the main video track. The music decides where the cuts land, so without it nothing happens.

2. 2

   Press “Auto montage”

   It's the wand button in the top bar. Clicking it opens a small settings dialog.

3. 3

   Choose the cut interval

   Roughly how often to cut: “Every beat”, or about every 1, 2, 3 or 4 seconds. Cutting on every beat gets frantic (you can end up with two cuts a second) — for most work ~2 s is the sweet spot to start from. The cuts still land ON the beat, there are simply fewer of them.

4. 4

   Pick a cut level and start

   There are three levels (see below). Choose one and press “Start” — the music is analysed and it's done within seconds. It then tells you how many beats it found and how many pieces it made.

The cut levels

The level decides how much material gets dropped at each cut. The more you drop, the more the shots “jump” into one another and the punchier the edit feels.

What to do afterwards

Auto-edit is a beginning, not an ending. The good result comes from these three passes.

1. 1

   Watch it end to end

   Home, then Space. Look for one thing only: which cuts feel wrong? Did it cut mid-sentence, or slice a movement in half? Note those.

2. 2

   Fix the bad cuts

   Select a piece that didn't work and delete it (Shift+Delete closes the gap), or drag its edge so a different moment shows instead. The editor is clever, but it has no idea what's actually in the shot — that part is yours.

3. 3

   Add a few transitions

   Not on every cut — only where the meaning shifts (a new scene starts, the ending arrives). A bare cut on the beat is already the strongest transition there is; don't smother it.

Common questions