Render Formats

Render Types

Onset Engine supports five render types, chosen from the Format dropdown at the bottom of the Editor’s settings panel, next to Quality. Standard is available on every license; Vertical, Teaser, Highlights and Triptych need Studio and are shown with a 🔒 on Core and Demo. These formats adjust how your clips are arranged, cropped, and presented.

1. Standard Render

This is the default 16:9 output. It creates a full-length video that is strictly beat-synced to your selected music track. It fully utilizes the visual style preset you have chosen, applying the appropriate pacing, VFX, transitions, and color grading.

2. Vertical

The Vertical (9:16) format is the full-length edit in portrait, for TikTok, Reels and Shorts. It needs a Studio license. Everything else matches Standard: the same beat sync, style, pacing and effects.

• Resolution: follows Quality - 1080x1920 at 1080p, 2160x3840 at 4K, 720x1280 at 720p.
• Preview: Generate Timeline produces a vertical preview too.
• File Naming: The rendered file receives a _VERTICAL suffix, so it never replaces the landscape render of the same project. You can render both from one timeline.

3. Teaser

The Teaser format is a shorter vertical cut designed for social media.

• Drop Detection: It automatically finds the audio “drop” and starts the edit from that high-energy point.
• Pacing Boost: It applies an automatic 1.5x pacing multiplier to increase the tempo of cuts.
• Resolution: follows Quality, in portrait - 1080x1920 at 1080p, 2160x3840 at 4K.
• File Naming: The rendered file automatically receives a _TEASER suffix.

4. Highlights

The Highlights format ignores standard narrative flow and simply collects the absolute best clips from your library or collection.

• Clip Selection: It selects the top N clips based on their composite score (a blend of motion score and semantic driver alignment, if a driver is active).
• Assembly: The chosen clips are beat-synced to the music and auto-shuffled for variety.
• File Naming: The rendered file automatically receives a _HIGHLIGHTS suffix.

5. Triptych

The Triptych format produces a unique 3-panel side-by-side layout within a standard 16:9 frame.

• Layout: The engine groups the EDL (Edit Decision List) clips into sets of three.
• Cropping: Each clip is cropped into a 9:16 vertical slice (640x1080) and positioned side-by-side using face-aware vertical positioning to ensure subjects remain in frame.
• Compositing: The three panels are composited together into a final 1920x1080 video.
• Audio: The music track plays as normal. With mix_source_audio enabled, your clips’ own audio is mixed in as well - each clip audible over its own cut, at the moment it appears, rather than all three panels sounding at once. What you hear is always a panel you can see.

Clip Fit

Your clips don’t all have to match the video’s shape. Clip fit, in the settings panel’s EDIT section, decideshow a clip shaped differently from the video is framed - for example a vertical phone clip in a 16:9 video, or a landscape clip in a vertical one.

Clip fit	What you see
Crop to fill (zoom in, edges cut off) (default)	The clip is zoomed in to fill the frame, centered on faces where it finds them. Nothing is left empty, but the edges of the clip are cut off.
Blurred background (whole clip)	The whole clip is shown, over a blurred, darkened copy of itself that fills the rest of the frame.
Black bars (whole clip)	The whole clip is shown on black.

• Only clips that need it are affected. A clip within about 20% of the video’s shape (for example 16:10 footage in a 16:9 video) is always cropped, because fitting it would only add thin borders.
• Your style still applies. Zooms, shake and camera moves act on the whole frame, background included.
• The preview matches. Generate Timeline frames each clip the same way the final video will.
• The line under Clip fit tells you whether it matters. Once you’ve generated a timeline, it says how many of its clips are a different shape from the video and what will happen to them - for example “6 of 38 clips are vertical and will be cropped to fill” - or that every clip already matches and there’s nothing to change.
• Intro and outro clips are never cropped. With Blurred background they are shown whole over a blurred copy of themselves; otherwise they get black bars, so logos and titles always stay whole.
• Phone clips are shown the right way up. Clips a phone saved with a rotation flag are turned upright before they are framed.

Clip fit is saved with your project and applies to Standard, Vertical, Teaser and Highlights. Triptych always crops its panels.