Land Your Cuts on the Beat of a Music Track

A cut that lands on a beat feels planned. A cut between beats can feel loose, even when the footage is good. DepCut snaps the edge of a clip to the playhead, so you can park the playhead on a beat and pull each clip onto it.

Set up the timeline

1. Place your clips on the main track in the order you want. Make each one longer than its slot, because you will shorten them.
2. Click the skip-back button beside the play button, which is named Back to start, so the playhead sits at 0. A new sound lands on its audio row at the playhead.
3. Add the music from Media, or from the sample library under AI Gen, Audio, then Music.
4. Drag the zoom slider in the timeline toolbar to the right until the waveform shows separate peaks.

Find a beat

1. Click a peak in the music clip's waveform without dragging. A plain click selects the clip and moves the playhead to where you clicked.
2. Press Space to listen, then press it again to stop. Use the Left and Right arrows to nudge the playhead a frame at a time.
3. Settle on the frame where the beat hits.

Pull the clip onto the beat

1. Drag the right edge of the video clip that should end on this beat toward the playhead. Within a few pixels the edge snaps to the playhead and a guide line appears. Hold ⌘ while dragging to turn snapping off.
2. If a gap opens between this clip and the next, right-click the gap and choose Remove empty space. The following clips slide up against the beat and the music stays where it is.
3. Move to the next beat and repeat with the next clip.

When the main track is the only video track, Delete and the Split and drop buttons close the gap for every row as they remove part of a main-track clip. That cuts the same seconds out of the music, so use the edge drag for this job.

Choose which beats to cut on

• As a starting point, cut on every fourth beat for a calmer piece, every second beat for a steadier one and every beat for a burst of energy.
• Change the spacing when the music changes section, so the edit follows the song.
• If a cut feels late, put the playhead a frame or two before the beat and snap to that point.

Check the result

Return to the start with the skip-back button and play the whole piece with the sound on. Each new shot should arrive with a hit in the music. If one drifts, drag that clip's right edge again. Shortening a clip leaves a gap and the clips after it stay put; remove the gap with Remove empty space to slide them up.

Titles, captions and sound clips snap the same way. Drag a title's left edge toward the playhead on a beat and it snaps there, so a word can appear exactly on the hit.

Cut your next piece to a track

Add a track to your next montage in DepCut and snap three cuts to its beats. The rest of the piece follows the same steps.