The Editor

Overview

The Editor is the main window of Onset Engine. It provides library management, timeline visualization, real-time previews, and batch rendering with granular control over every parameter.

Layout

Area	Description
Header	Version badge and the menus (File, Edit, View, Library, Help), then (right to left) ⚡ NEW VIDEO, 🎧 DJ MODE, ⚙️ Preferences,? documentation, ℹ About & Updates, 🕶 Discreet Mode, 🌙/☀ theme, 🏠 welcome launcher, and your license-tier badge
Left panel	Your library, in VIDEO, AUDIO and SUBJECTS tabs, with 📥 INGEST to add videos
Center	Video player preview with transport controls + Welcome Launcher
Right panel	Settings (GENERAL and ADVANCED tabs), with 1. GENERATE TIMELINE, Format, Quality and 🎬 2. RENDER FINAL VIDEO in a bar at the bottom that stays in view
Bottom	Timeline with clip blocks, audio waveform, and the console log

Menus

The menus next to the version badge collect what the app can do in one place:

File - New video…, open a project (Open project…, Open last project, Recent projects), Save project, Generate timeline, Render final video, Preferences…, Exit.
Edit - undo and redo a timeline change.
View - DJ Mode…, Discreet mode, and Hide Onset Engine now.
Library - Add videos…, Collections…, Back up library… (a copy of your library: ratings, tags, collections and analysis), Remove missing videos… and Reset library….
Help - the documentation, Keyboard shortcuts, What’s changed, Check for updates…, Enter license key…, support, and About Onset Engine.

Shortcuts: Ctrl+N New video, Ctrl+O open a project, Ctrl+S save it, Ctrl+I add videos, Ctrl+, Preferences, Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y undo and redo a timeline change, F1 the documentation. Help → Keyboard shortcuts lists them all.

While a job runs - adding videos, generating a timeline, rendering - the bar just above the timeline shows what it’s doing, how long it has been running and, once it can tell, about how long is left, with ⏸ PAUSE and ⏹ STOP. It stays in view whichever tab you’re on. When the job ends, the same bar says how it went and offers the next step: ▶ Watch draft and 🎬 Render video after generating a timeline, ▶ Play and 📂 Show in folder after a render, or the reason with Show details and Copy log if it couldn’t finish.

Under the job bar, notes explain how a video came out when it matters: your library is small for the song so footage repeats, some must-use clips didn’t fit, some footage is missing. Close a note with ×.

Browsing your library

The VIDEO tab lists your videos, one row each; click a row to open it and see its clips, in the order they occur in the video. Each clip card shows where the clip starts in its video and how long it lasts (for example 1:23 · 4.2s).

The search box filters by name as you type. Start with / and describe what you’re looking for (for example /dancing on a beach), then press Enter, to search by what’s in the clips: the video with the best match opens, and each card shows its rank (#1 is the closest match).

The Motion filter shows your most active clips, compared with the rest of your library: Busier half, Busiest quarter or Busiest 10%.

The CONSOLE tab tells the story of each job: what it’s doing, warnings, results. Tick Show all details to also see the engine’s per-clip detail from the next job on. A complete log of every job - including a system-information header and per-line timestamps - is always written to render.log in the project’s output folder, and 📋 Copy Log copies the last job’s complete log, ready to paste into a support request.

Two-Step Workflow

The Editor uses a deliberate two-step workflow:

Step 1: Generate Timeline

Runs clip selection in draft mode (~30 seconds). The engine:

Analyzes your music track (beats, energy curve, drops)
Matches clips to energy tiers using driver scoring
Places clips on the timeline with transitions
Displays the result in the timeline panel

Library and track fit

Once the edit is built, the engine compares it with the footage that was available for it. If clips had to repeat, most cuts come from one or two videos, or the track’s high-energy passages had little fast footage to draw on, it says so in the console with the edit’s own numbers, and suggests what to change - longer holds, a slower track, or how many more clips would cover the edit without repeats. On the Demo, when many shots ended early because their clips did, it suggests longer clips instead of slower pacing.

It stays silent when the match is fine, and never blocks a render.

Pacing

Pacing, in the EDIT section, sets how often the video cuts to a new shot. Balanced (the default) is the style’s own pace, so Aggressive cuts fast and Sensual slowly. Fast cuts a third more often than that, Relaxed a third less, Slow a third as often and Very slow a sixth, whatever the style. These paces hold a shot for at most four bars of the music, so on a fast song even Very slow stays under about 8 seconds a shot. Longest holds a shot for up to eight bars, ending on a bar line: up to about 15 seconds even on a fast song, for footage that wants long, steady shots.The first three are the same as Quick Start’s Cutting Pace, and a project made with Quick Start opens in the Editor with the pace it was made with. Use a slower pace when you have only a few clips, so they repeat less.

Must-use clips

To make sure particular videos appear in the edit, choose a collection under Must-use clips (in More options, under Source Collection).Every video in it is placed at least once and the engine fills the rest. See Collections.

Step 2: 🎬 Render Final Video

Once you’re happy with the timeline, click Render to produce the final video:

Full-quality rendering at your chosen quality tier
VFX pipeline applies all preset effects (signature VFX, depth, optical flow, grading)
Audio mixing - blend your clips’ own audio with the music at levels you set
Progress tracked via Crate Digger minigame

One job at a time, and the render queue:

Onset runs one job at a time. Start something else while a job runs (adding videos, Generate, Preview edit) and a note under the job bar says it has to wait; let the job finish or press ⏹ Stop.
Press 2. RENDER FINAL VIDEO while a job runs and Onset offers to add the render to the queue; it starts by itself when the current job ends.
+ Add to render queue (under Render) lines up renders of several projects or formats. ▶ Run queue runs them one after another, ⏹ Stop stops the queue, and ✕ removes a render that hasn’t started. When the queue is done, Render Complete opens for the last video it made.
Closing Onset while a job runs or renders are waiting asks first.

Clip Direction

The Editor offers progressive disclosure for clip direction:

Text Descriptions (Simple)

Two text fields at the top of the Clip Direction section:

“During quiet parts, focus on:” - purple-accented, maps to low energy tiers
“On the heavy drops, focus on:” - pink-accented, maps to high energy tiers

These auto-generate a 4-tier driver behind the scenes.

Driver JSON (Advanced)

Below an ”── OR ──” divider, the advanced Driver section lets you:

Browse for a custom .json driver file
Open the ✨ Create wizard to build a driver visually
Clear the driver with the ✕ button

Priority: Driver JSON overrides text descriptions. When a driver is loaded, the text fields dim.

Export Settings

Format and Quality sit between the Generate and Render buttons at the bottom of the settings panel; Clip fit is in the EDIT section, under Pacing.

The GENERAL tab starts with what every video needs: music, style, pacing and clip fit. Everything else (Clip Direction and drivers, Source Collection, Must-use clips, Mix Original Audio, 5-Star clips, Chronological Order, Learn my taste, Narrative, Title Card) is under More options, which opens by itself when a project uses any of them and lists the ones in use.

Learn my taste

With 🧠 Learn my taste ticked (it is by default), each timeline picks more clips like the ones you keep and fewer like the ones you throw out - including clips you have never rated. It learns from:

Star ratings in the library: 4 and 5 stars count for a clip, 1 and 2 against it.
Blocked clips (against).
The timeline: Discard counts against a clip, Lock for it, and Swap counts against the clip you swapped out and for the one you picked.

It works on how clips look, so a few choices steer the whole library toward that look. It starts once there are 5 liked clips; the line under the checkbox says how many it has so far. It only nudges the choice - the music, pacing and your driver still lead, so an edit never turns into the same few clips.

Forget clears what it learned from Discard, Swap and Lock. Star ratings and blocks stay; change those in the library. Untick the box to make an edit without it - while it is off, timeline choices are not recorded. Everything stays on your computer. Core and above - your star ratings already count when you upgrade.

If you change a setting that picks clips (music, style, pacing, narrative, collections, clip direction, driver, 5-Star, Chronological, Learn my taste) after generating a timeline, a note above 1. GENERATE TIMELINE names it: generate again to use it. 2. RENDER FINAL VIDEO renders the timeline as it is.

Format - Standard (16:9), Vertical (9:16), Triptych (3-Panel), Vertical Teaser (9:16), or Highlights Only. Every format except Standard needs Studio; on Core and Demo they’re shown with a 🔒. See Render Formats.

Quality - the options offered depend on your license tier. Options above your tier are still listed, marked with a 🔒, so you can see what an upgrade would unlock:

Your tier	Available
Demo	720p 30fps
Core	1080p 30fps, 1080p 60fps
Studio	1080p 30fps, 1080p 60fps, 4K 30fps, 4K 60fps

Vertical and Vertical Teaser use the same resolution turned portrait: 1080p gives 1080x1920, 4K gives 2160x3840.

Clip fit - how clips shaped differently from the video are framed: Crop to fill (zoom in, edges cut off), Blurred background (whole clip) or Black bars (whole clip). Once you’ve generated a timeline, the line under it says how many clips this affects. See Clip Fit.

Higher resolutions and 60fps both increase render time substantially. See Render Benchmarks for real numbers.

Narrative Arc Modes

The Narrative dropdown controls how energy is mapped across the edit:

Mode	Behavior
Buildup → Drop	Escalates through the energy tiers on the way into the track’s main drop, then holds maximum intensity from the drop onward
Flat (constant)	Holds one mid-level energy for the whole edit, ignoring the music’s dynamics
None (follow music)	Follows the music’s own energy curve - the default

UX Features

Vision Matrix

A live 3×3 thumbnail grid that appears during ingest, showing AI analysis tags as each video file completes.

Crate Digger

A star-rating minigame that starts when you click Render. Rate unrated clips while you wait - curate your library during downtime.

Welcome Launcher

Shown in the player area when no project is open, and from 🏠 in the header. ⚡ Make a video opens New video: your videos and a song become a draft of the whole song, cut to the beat. Below it, Other ways to start: DJ Mode, and the Editor (close the welcome screen and set everything yourself). The welcome screen stays until your project has something to show.

Until you’ve made your first video, a Getting started checklist sits under the cards: add your videos, pick a song, generate a timeline, render. It ticks off what you’ve done, and each step still to do is a link that takes you to it.

Timeline Zoom

The timeline is drawn at a fixed scale, so how much room each clip gets depends on how many clips there are. A fast-cut edit can pack every shot into a handful of pixels, too narrow to show a thumbnail.

Use the − / + / Fit controls above the timeline, or hold Ctrl and scroll over it.

− / + step through zoom levels, from a quarter of the default out to 13x.
Fit picks the largest zoom at which the whole edit still fits the window.

On a 175-clip edit, zooming in takes the typical clip from about 16 pixels wide to 86, at which point nearly every shot shows a thumbnail. The waveform follows the same scale, so cuts stay lined up with the audio at every level.

Save / Load Projects

Projects are saved as JSON files in the jobs/ directory:

jobs/job_MyProject.json

All settings are persisted: preset, driver, quality, text descriptions, audio file, collection filter, narrative arc mode, and VFX options.

Advanced Tab: VFX Options (Core+)

The Advanced tab includes a VFX OPTIONS section with opt-in effects. All VFX require Core tier or higher - checkboxes are disabled on Demo.

✨ Cutout Pop Transitions - The subject is cut out of one scene and pops into the next. Uses a model that comes with Onset Engine, so there’s nothing to download. Adds roughly 5% to render time.
Beauty Mode - AI skin smoothing, with an intensity slider.
Subliminal Text - Flashes words on the beat. Only active with the Hypnosis preset; enter your words comma-separated.
Smooth Motion (60fps Interpolation) - Generates in-between frames for smoother 30→60fps motion. Adds significant time after the render itself finishes.
Depth Effects - Estimates depth in each shot to add parallax and focus pulls, with an intensity slider. The model comes with Onset Engine and runs on your computer.