EDIT
Editing by hand
The switcher, the program monitor and the timeline in detail, with trimming on the beat and recording your own switches.
The generated cut is a starting point. Everything in it can be moved, split, joined, locked or replaced, and every move lands on the music.
The layout
- Multi-cam switcher, top left: a live tile per camera. The camera on air has a violet border.
- Program monitor, top right: the cut as it plays, with the transport under it.
- Settings, on the right: the dials behind the cut. See Generating the cut.
- Timeline, along the bottom: the music, the cut and every camera’s coverage.
Playing and moving around
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Space | Play or pause. |
| L | Play forward. Press again for 2×, 4×, 8×, 16×. |
| J | Play backward, faster with each press. |
| K | Stop the shuttle. |
| ShiftL / ShiftJ | Half speed forward or backward. |
| Left / Right | Step one frame. , and . do the same. |
| Home / End | Go to the start or the end. |
The transport shows the shuttle speed. Up to 4× forward you hear the sound. Faster than that, or backwards, it plays silently, as in any editor, and the readout dims to say so.
The timeline
From the top:
- The overview: the whole set’s energy on one strip, with your queued moments and the part you are looking at. Click or drag it to travel anywhere in the night.
- The master waveform: the reference audio, coloured by where its energy sits: warm for kick and bass, violet for the body of the mix, pale blue for hats and air. Beat ticks run above and below it: taller on each bar, coral where a phrase begins.
- The ruler, counting bars and beats. BARS switches it to minutes and seconds and back.
- V1: the cut. Each shot is a block in its camera’s colour.
- A track per camera, showing when it was recording, and the audio tracks below.
Drag the handle under the waveform or under V1 to make either taller.
Zooming
| Input | What it does |
|---|---|
| Alt + scroll | Zoom around the mouse pointer. |
| Scroll with Ctrl or Shift , or sideways | Move through time. |
| Scroll | Move up and down through the tracks. |
| + / - | Zoom in or out around the playhead. |
| \ or FIT | Fit the whole set. |
The timeline changes what it draws as you zoom, and says which view you are in. Zoomed out, it shows the energy of the whole night and your moments. At the working zoom, it shows the waveforms and bar lines. Zoomed right in, it shows every beat and every frame boundary: the zoom for trimming.
Snapping
Edits snap to the grid. The SNAP button cycles what they land on: a phrase, a bar, a beat, a half beat, a quarter beat, or nothing. When a dragged edge or clip lands on a new line, the line flashes white.
Selecting and changing shots
- Click a shot on V1 to select it. Shift -click to extend the selection.
- Up and Down select the previous or next shot. Add Shift to extend. Esc clears the selection.
- 1 to 9 put the selected shot, or the shot under the playhead, on that camera.
| Action | Key | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Split | S | Cuts the shot in two at the playhead. |
| Join | CtrlJ | Joins the selected shots into one. A single shot joins the next. |
| Lock | CtrlL | A locked shot survives every reroll and regenerate. |
| Reroll | R | Redraws the selection, keeping locked shots. |
Trimming a cut point
Move the pointer onto the line between two shots and drag. The cut moves between them, one shot getting longer as the other gets shorter, and snaps to the grid. While you drag, a readout shows where the cut will land and how far it has moved, in bars and beats: +1 bar 2 beats.
To move a cut by an exact amount, select the shot, type a number of beats into the ± beats field, such as +8 or -2, and press Enter . Eight beats stays eight beats across a tempo change.
Moving a clip in phase
Hold Alt and drag a camera’s clip along its track. It moves by whole beats, bars or phrases, following the snap setting, so whatever was on a downbeat inside the clip is still on a downbeat where it lands. A label shows which bar it will land in. Two angles of the same pyro hit, an hour apart in the night, line up when you drop one on the other.
Recording the switcher
Cut the set live, like a vision mixer at the show:
- Press REC SWITCHER.
- Play, and press 1 to 9 to switch cameras as the music moves you.
- Press TAKE to lay the recorded switches into the cut, or DISCARD to throw them away. The cut is not touched until you take it.
Every switch is placed on the nearest beat as you press it, so there is nothing to tidy up afterwards. A take goes in as a single undo step.
In and out points
I and O mark an in and an out point. The monitor’s buttons jump to them, and exporting uses only that span. RESET RANGE goes back to the whole sequence. QUEUE MOMENT adds the span to the delivery queue. See Moments.
The picture
Drag across the picture. A preview only: the file, the proxies and the export are never touched.
Proxies
BEATFORGE builds a small playback copy of every camera file in the background, sized for smooth playback, so a stack of cameras plays as a stack of light streams. The switcher shows how many are ready, and each tile shows its own state. BUILD PROXIES makes any missing ones now. On the monitor, PROXIES and ORIGINALS switch between the proxies and the camera files, for checking focus. Exports always use the originals.
Log footage
REC.709, or CtrlShiftR , shows S-Log3 and V-Log footage the way it will look graded. The menu beside it picks how each camera is corrected, including a maker’s .cube LUT. It is a preview only: the files, the proxies and the export never change.
Per camera
The buttons on each switcher tile:
- Export audio: include or mute this camera’s sound in the exported mix.
- Rotate: turn the clip 90°, for footage whose orientation tag is wrong.
- Fill: fill the frame and crop, or show the whole picture letterboxed.
- Listen: hear this camera’s sound on your speakers while you work. This does not affect the export.
Right-click a tile to choose the camera’s colour on the timeline and switcher.