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Music

A reel has one music bed. Shotwork analyzes it, draws its beats under the clips, and lets edges snap to them.

Add a song

  1. Open the Features tab.
  2. Drag the Music tile anywhere onto the timeline, or drag a song's row straight from the Library window's Music view. There is only ever one music bed, so where you drop it does not matter.
  3. Pick the audio file. A row dragged from the Library is already picked, so that dialog does not appear.

The song appears in the music lane under the clips, with its waveform, and analysis starts.

The Music tile dropped on the strip, the song picked from the library, and the lane arriving with its beat grid as analysis finishes

The beat grid

Select the music lane and the settings panel offers what the lane draws:

  • Beats draws every beat.
  • Downbeats marks the first beat of each bar, in amber. This needs the optional downbeat engine; without it, Manual downbeats: every n beats gives you a grid you set yourself.
  • Energy curve draws the song's intensity over time, so a quiet passage is visible rather than guessed at. Energy = loudness (RMS) is the default; Energy = attack sharpness reads transients instead.
A clip edge dragged with snapping on, the beat grid responding and the indicator catching beats as the edge travels

Song settings

Setting Does
Enabled Turns the bed off without removing it
Song offset Slides the song against the reel
Starts at / Ends at The part of the song to use
Level Playback and export volume
Fade in / Fade out Ramps at the bed's own edges

What happens

Analysis runs once per song and is cached, so reopening the reel is instant. The audio is decoded through the same ffmpeg Shotwork exports with.

What the beats are

Beat positions come from a tempo-tracking analysis of the decoded audio, at the reel's frame rate. Downbeats, when the engine is installed, come from a separate model that also estimates the meter. The grid is positions in time, not a tempo number, so a song that drifts or changes tempo still lines up.