Auto Edit from Footage: a new timeline from raw clips

Applies to 0.11Updated 4 Nov 20263 min read

Auto Edit from Footage looks at your raw clips, finds the best moments and makes a new timeline from them: a music video cut on the beat, a story from what people say, or a montage.

Auto Edit from Footage looks at your raw clips, finds the best moments and makes a new timeline from them. It works with or without speech, and with or without music.

Open it

• AI Edit › From Footage, or
• Sequence › Auto Edit from Footage…

It uses the video clips selected in the Project panel, or every video item when none is selected. Any song in the project can be the music.

1. Look at the Footage

Click Look at the Footage. Each clip is looked at on your Mac; nothing is sent anywhere. The app finds where each shot changes, how sharp, well lit and lively each moment is, faces, and whether someone speaks and what they say. The song's beats and its loud and quiet parts are measured too.

A clip is looked at once. After that, a new kind, style, shape or length is instant.

2. Choose the kind

• Music Video: one shot every few beats, cut on the beat, faster where the music is loud. It ends on a bar line with the music faded out.
• Story from Speech: the sentences said in the clips. Repeated takes, one-word bits and unclear speech are left out. The AI can choose the sentences that tell one story and put them in order. Other footage covers long talking, and a jump cut gets a punch-in.
• Montage: the best moments, with their own sound.
• Automatic: a music video when there is a song, a story when people speak, otherwise a montage.

3. Style, shape and length

• Clean: calm cuts and a short fade at the start and end.
• Energetic: quick cuts, a whip, zoom blur, flash or glitch transition every 4 bars, and a zoom pulse on the downbeats.
• Cinematic: long shots, dissolves, slow push-ins, and a fade from and to black.

Choose 16:9, 9:16 or 1:1. The footage fills the frame; in a narrower frame each shot follows the action, faces first. The length can be as long as it needs, or from 15 seconds to 10 minutes.

4. Review, then Create Timeline

• The list shows every planned shot: its time, the clip, why it was chosen, and its transition or effect. Click a row to see the moment in the Source Monitor.
• Untick a row and the next best moment takes its place. Tick it under Left out to bring it back.
• Another Version picks other moments of the same quality.

Create Timeline makes a new sequence and opens it: V1 is the edit, V2 the footage over talking, A1 the clips' sound and A2 the music. One Undo takes it away.

Good to know

• Speech is looked for in the middle of each clip, so a clip that speaks only at its very start or end is treated as silent.
• With mixed footage, the AI keeps one story; it does not join two unrelated subjects.
• Clips on a network share are looked at faster when they have proxies. See files on a network share.