How to make a before-and-after video with a hard contrast between halves
Upload everything you filmed to Vizard Agent and say you want a hard split between before and after. Vizard Agent reviews every clip as detailed contact sheets, picks the exact fragments for each half, then renders the two halves in different registers: one deliberately raw, one graded and cut to the music's beat.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Write the two halves as two separate briefs. Vizard Agent treats them as different jobs joined at a transition, so describing the picture treatment, the shot selection and the sound for each one gets a sharper contrast than one description of the whole video. Give it permission to keep the first half rough.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
It reviews before it decides, building contact sheets at increasing detail until it can pick individual moments rather than whole clips. The two halves are then rendered as separate pieces with different treatments, not one video with a filter change, so the contrast reads as a change in the world rather than in the grade. In the session behind this article it:
- Checked every clip's length, resolution and audio in one pass, downloaded them in parallel and tiled three frames from each short clip into a contact sheet.
- Built separate grids for the two long clips, then extracted a frame every 1.5 seconds from the main clips into two detailed sheets and read them to decide the exact cut points.
- Generated test frames of the vertical crop and checked the subject survived it.
- Searched for music, generated an impact and a riser in parallel, and analysed the track's tempo, beat times and energy.
- Rendered the first half desaturated with its own sound and the second half graded with punch-ins, then mixed the audio across both.
- Checked the 22.38-second file with a frame grid and the waveform, and analysed the transition and the back half's beat sync.
When does this not work well?
This format flatters one half and not the other, and there is a person in both. Selecting the unflattering fragments is the whole technique, so the person has to agree to the before. Retouching in the after is a claim, and a punchy second half needs many short fragments, not two long ones.
Common questions
Do I need to sort the clips first? No. Vizard Agent reviews all of them as contact sheets and decides which fragments belong in which half.
Can the second half be cut to music? Yes. Vizard Agent measures the tempo and beat times and cuts the back half against them.
Will the vertical crop cut people off? Vizard Agent renders test frames of the crop and checks the subject stays in frame before committing.