Quickstart

Every step below, in 80 seconds:

1. Prerequisites

Before you begin, ensure you have:

• Installed Onset Engine (see Installation & Setup).
• Verified your system meets the System Requirements. (Note: A dedicated GPU is recommended for AI analysis, but rendering works great on a fast CPU. No dedicated GPU is required!)

2. Launch the App

Open the application by double-clicking OnsetEngine.exe.

3. Make a video

When you first open Onset Engine, you’ll see the welcome screen. Click ⚡ Make a video (or ⚡ NEW VIDEO in the header).

First, choose what to make, at the top of the window:

• ✂ Cut a montage finds the best moments in your footage and cuts them to the beat. For long videos, films, gameplay or a big library. The steps below are for this one.
• 🖼 Use my photos and clips shows every photo and clip you pick once, in the order they were taken, each cut on the beat. For trips, events, family and memorials, with photos, clips or both. See Use my photos and clips.

Then:

1. Your videos: + Files… adds individual videos, from any folders, and + Folder… adds every video in a folder, subfolders included. Each click adds to the list, which shows everything you picked, with ✕ to remove one. Your videos stay where they are. Pick none and the video is made from your library; once your library has a collection, choose under Use from your library which of its videos to use: all of them, or one collection.
2. Your song: browse for a music track (.mp3, .wav, etc.), or pick one of the included tracks. + Another song adds more; they play one after another.
3. Style and pace: choose a style (each one says what it looks like) and how often it cuts. Balanced is the style’s own pace; every cut lands on the beat whichever you pick. Faster pacing shows more of your clips, so with only a few videos some of them come back more than once.
4. Optional, under More options (it opens by itself when one of its options is already in use, for example a Length set in the Editor): at the top, Length sets how long the video runs, Intensity how it builds, and Shape it… draws your own curve; then describe what to show in the quiet parts and on the heavy drops; tick Keep your clips’ own sound to mix your clips’ audio under the music; choose a Clip fit for clips shaped differently from the video (vertical phone clips in a 16:9 video, say); and tick Render the full video when it’s ready to go straight to the finished video.
5. Click ⚡ Make my video.

4. While It Works

The window shows each step as it happens - Song, Videos, Edit - with a progress bar, a line saying what it’s doing, and about how long is left. Analyzing your videos is most of the wait, and it grows with how much footage you pick. With a lot of footage (more than about 10 minutes), Onset analyzes about 10 minutes of it first, spread across it, so your first draft comes quickly; you can analyze the rest afterwards. On a new library it uses the faster Standard analysis; if your library already has clips, it uses the same model as they do, so everything stays comparable.

You can close the window while it works: it comes back when your draft is ready. ⏹ Cancel stops it.

5. Your Draft

When it’s done, the window shows Your draft is ready, and your project is open in the Editor:

• ▶ Watch your draft plays the whole song, cut to the beat, in Onset’s player. On the free Demo the draft is the first minute, rendered with every effect; to watch the whole edit with the song, click the waveform under the Editor’s timeline. 🎲 next to it picks the clips again and makes a new draft.
• 🎬 Render the full video renders it with effects. On the free Demo, it renders the first minute of the edit, at 720p with the Onset Engine watermark. Progress shows in the bar above the timeline, and when it’s done you can ▶ Play it or 📂 Show in folder from there.
• If Onset analyzed part of a long video to get you here fast, the window says so: Analyze the rest analyzes all of it, so Re-roll and new edits have all of it to choose from.
• ⚙ Change settings and make another takes you back to the settings - another style, pace or song - to make another version. Your videos are already analyzed, so it’s quicker.
• Open in the Editor closes the window.Your timeline is open in the Editor, where you can swap clips, change the style or pace, and render again.