How to cut a music video from your performance takes
Upload every performance take and the song master, then tell Vizard Agent the cuts should follow the beat and the lip-sync must hold. Vizard Agent maps the song's beat grid, measures how far each take drifts from playback, aligns them, and cuts between takes without breaking the mouth.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Name the two rules that govern a music video and leave the rest open. Vizard Agent needs to know that the beat drives the cut and that the lip-sync is protected, and once those are set it can be trusted with speed ramps, reverses and the grade.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
A music video cut from performance takes has one hard constraint no other edit has: the mouth has to keep matching the words. Every take was filmed to playback and every take drifted slightly, so Vizard Agent measures a sync offset per take before making any creative decision about the cut. In the session behind this article it:
- Probed every clip and the song, built contact sheets of every take, and rebuilt them after detecting cuts inside the files.
- Mapped the song's beat grid, section structure and energy.
- Tested take by take whether the clips were shot to song playback, then measured the exact playback sync offset for each of the five takes, including an awkward fifth one.
- Had each take watched shot by shot and pulled word-level timings from the vocal so the cut could respect the phrasing.
- Cut to the beat grid, applied the grade and the speed work, and checked on the render that the lip-sync survived.
- Delivered a vertical video at 1080x1920, H.264 and 30fps, 142.6 seconds long, cutting on the song's structure rather than on every drum hit.
When does this not work well?
Music video work mostly fails on the shoot day rather than in the edit. Takes not filmed to playback can't be lip-synced, because there's nothing to align to, and a master that differs from what played on set breaks the sync. Heavy speed ramps fight the mouth, so they belong on instrumental sections.
Common questions
Do my takes need to be pre-synced? No. Vizard Agent measures each take's drift from the master and aligns them itself.
What if a take was not filmed to playback? Then Vizard Agent cannot lip-sync it. It can still be used on instrumental sections.
Will it cut on every drum hit? Not unless you ask. Vizard Agent cuts on kicks, snares and section changes by default.