Beat Sync: Snap Clip Edges to Music for Professional Cuts

Beat sync aligns clip boundaries to the nearest detected beats in your music track. Instead of cuts happening at arbitrary moments, they land on rhythmic accents — kick drums, snare hits, or musical transitions. The result feels polished and intentional, like a professionally edited music video.

Automatic Beat Sync

When you use Smart Add with AI and your project has a music track with beat detection, clip boundaries are automatically rounded to the nearest beat. You don't need to do anything extra — the AI trims the clip to a strong segment, then nudges the start and end points to land on beats.

This means AI-processed clips are beat-synced from the moment they appear on the timeline.

Manual Beat Snapping

When trimming clips manually, you can snap edges to nearby beats:

  • Drag a clip edge (start or end handle) to trim it
  • As you drag near a beat marker, the edge snaps to the beat position
  • Release to confirm the snapped position

Snap distance is forgiving — you don't need pixel-perfect aim. If a beat is within range of your drag position, the clip edge locks to it.

Stronger beats snap from further away. Downbeats (red dots) have a larger snap range than offbeats (yellow dots), so you naturally gravitate toward the most musically impactful cut points.

When Beat Sync Matters

Beat sync has the biggest impact on:

  • Montages — rapid cuts over music feel dramatically better when synced
  • B-roll sequences — visual clips without speech, driven purely by rhythm
  • Transitions — entering or leaving a speech segment on a beat creates a smooth flow

For speech-heavy clips where cuts are dictated by sentence boundaries, beat sync is less critical — the words guide the timing, not the music.