HowTo sync video clips to beat in music files

Hi all,
unfortunately i couldn’t reply to other threads here asking the same question that i came across:
how can i sync my video cuts to the beat of an audio track?

I wrote a little tool that can insert short red colored dummy clips on a seperate track in a shotcut project for every timestamp from a textfile. And with audacity’s beat detection you can easily create such a beat_label.txt file.

It works with multiple audio tracks and files as you can choose for which song you want that labels to be processed.

I made a 5 min video explaining the solution and the way how to get there.
Video: Shotcut HowTo cut to the beat of music

If anyone is interested and you know where i can upload a small exe file (Windows only, will work with WINE) i will provide this tool.

I think if the exe file is small enough you might be able to upload it here directly if you add .txt as the extension.

It certainly looks interesting. :clap: :+1:

Hi @smartintech, I took a look at your tutorial video. It looks like it could be a very useful technique and I’d love to try it out, if you can upload your exe file here, following @drm 's advice above. Thank you for this.

Hello,

To be in sync with the music, I generate a click track in audacity after selection of bpm, signature and number of bars, I export it as a wav file and import it in shotcut as an audio track. The clicks are very short, less than a frame width, and it is visualy easy to use. Of course I mute it, I only use the visual part.

@pfeuh - Another cool idea which I hadn’t thought of, so thanks for this idea!

I have a third option for music which has a steady beat -
Open a colour clip on a higher, unused track.
Position it above the music track and size it to the length of the first beat (drag the side edge).
Place the playhead at the right-hand edge of the clip (Alt/right arrow).
Hit C, then B many times.
You can then align your video clips to these “marker” clips.

That’s also a nice idea. But i wanted something to directely align the clips to.

I would be glad if it’s useful to you, as i was happy to follow your tutorials about animated text in videos :slight_smile:

No, I will not be hosting other people’s executables.

I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware it was against your rules.

Sorry for that. I can understand.
If anyone has an idea where to upload LEGALY, let me know.

You could always put it on Dropbox, Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive and post the link.

I hope it is ok to host executables on G-Drive and to link them here.
Let me know if not.
AudioLabel2Shotcut.exe

Thank’s Elusien as well for your work with webvfx.

I haven’t seen anything in Google’s Terms and Conditions that would prevet you from doing this.

Pretty cool workaround. Thanks for sharing!

I found a misbehaviour of transitions when inserting my beat track between background and lowest video track. Shotcut even changed a lot of entries after saving my generated file.
So i changed this and put the beat track on top, making it “not show”.
When i compare the diff of the original MLT file and my generated one after removing the beat track in shotcut, there is no difference anymore. So i consider my tool to work properly.

Here is the new version 51 (i removed the link destination to the previous ver. 50)

AudioLabel2Shotcut.exe

I did some improvments to the tool.
Link on google drive shall remain the same (i used overwrite). So have a look on the revision number.
Revision 56 is now the current one and is working fine on my projects.

Changelog:

Rev 56:
Fixed markers to be only applied within the in and out position of the audio clip (no matter what in/out times of that audio)
Rev 55:
Beat markers will not be added to the marker track further than the outtime of the music clip.
Rev 54:
Changed the generated outfilename to append a “_withMarkers” to the .mlt file.
Also added increased playlist ids to allow multiple beat marker tracks for more than one song at once in a project after using this tool multiple times.
Rev 53:
Fixed memory allocation of a buffer that made it crash on long filenames.
Rev 52:
Can apply markers also when audio clip does not start from the very beginning.

I described how it works in the video at 0:39

Link to the tool on my G drive is the same as before:

Let me know, if you have any issues with it.
I hope this is useful to someone and i want to say thankyou for all your contributions here.