What's new in Onset Engine

Onset Engine ships often, and the release notes on the official site are written for everyone. This page is the PMV-maker version: what actually landed, and what it lets us do that we couldn't do before.

Start with v1.2.0 if you only read one. The beat meter is built in now: cues drawn into the video that land on every beat, plus rounds with breaks and 3-2-1 countdowns and sessions up to an hour long. If you make cock heroes, the overlay step in a second editor is gone. The meter is in the free demo too.

v1.2.0 — A beat meter, rounds and countdowns, built into the render

A beat meter that lands on every beat

The new rhythm bar draws cues into the video that travel to a target and land on it exactly when the beat sounds. Pick Lane, Falling or Pulse, every beat, half-time, double-time or downbeats only, a color and how early cues appear, and add a click track if you want a tick on each one. Every render also saves the cues next to the video as a .funscript and a .csv.

What it means for us: This is the cock hero beat meter, done for you. No more keyframing a beat bar in Resolve over a finished edit: the meter and the cuts come from the same beat analysis, so they can't drift apart, and the .funscript is timed to the video you just rendered. It's on every plan, the free demo included.

Rounds, breaks and a 3-2-1 countdown

Several songs become rounds, each with its own pace and beat setting, an optional break between them with a 3-2-1 countdown, and a title card. With the meter on, a label warns just before the beat changes.

What it means for us: That's the classic cock hero structure without stitching anything together: a slow first round, a double-time second one, a break, a countdown into the finale. Core and above.

Length: anywhere from 1 to 60 minutes

Choose how long the video runs, and your songs (or rounds) repeat until it's that long, or it ends on a bar line before then.

What it means for us: Long sessions without building a 40-minute playlist by hand. Core and above.

Shape it: draw the build, mark the holds

Draw how intense the edit is over the song, starting from Build to the drop, Wave, Staircase, Plateau or Two peaks, and mark holds: stretches cut as long takes with the beat effects at rest, labeled Hold on the meter. It's in the Editor and in New video.

What it means for us: Slow, teasing stretches and a build that peaks where you want it, not just where the song happens to get loud. Core and above.

Learn my taste

Edits pick more clips that look like the ones you rate highly, swap in and lock, and fewer like the ones you rate low, discard or swap out, including clips you never rated. It learns on your computer and nothing leaves it.

What it means for us: Big libraries stop serving up the footage you keep throwing out. It nudges the choice rather than taking it over, so the music and your driver still lead. Core and above.

Only these / Never these

Pick tags (your Subjects, like a performer you've tagged, and the automatic shot types) to build an edit from, or to keep out of it.

What it means for us: A whole edit of one performer, or no POV, without making a collection first. Never these is on every plan; Only these needs Core.

The meter, the click track and Never these are in every plan, the demo included; rounds, Length, Shape it, Only these and Learn my taste need Core. Also new: File, Edit, View, Library and Help menus with shortcuts, and several songs in one edit now cut to each song's own beat. Everything still runs offline.

v1.1.0 — New video, cuts on the hit, and a first draft in minutes

New video: one window from clips to edit

Add your videos (or use your library), pick a song, a style and a pace, and you get a draft of the whole song, cut to the beat, ready to render or to tweak in the Editor.

What it means for us: The fastest path from a folder of scenes to something you can watch. Quick Start and Autopilot are folded into it.

Cuts land on the hit

Each clip starts on its moment of impact, found by checking every frame, so hits land about 7 times closer to the beat.

What it means for us: The thrust or the slap lands with the kick, not a few frames either side of it. It's the difference between an edit that feels choreographed and one that feels roughly in time.

A first draft in minutes

With long footage, Onset analyzes about 10 minutes of it first, spread across it, then offers to analyze the rest. In testing, 30 minutes of 4K footage gave a full-song draft in under 3 minutes on an RTX 3060 Ti, and final renders run about twice as fast.

What it means for us: Full scenes no longer mean a long wait before you see anything.

Must-use clips

Pick a collection of videos every edit has to include; each is placed once, spaced evenly through the song. Core and above.

What it means for us: The scenes you care about always make the cut.

Vertical, and phone clips kept whole

Full-length vertical (9:16) videos (Studio), and Clip fit (Core), which keeps vertical phone clips whole in a 16:9 video, on a blurred background or between black bars.

What it means for us: Amateur and phone footage mixes into a landscape edit without cropped-off heads, and a vertical cut for phone viewers is a format choice, not a second edit.

This entry rolls up v1.0.13 to v1.1.2. Those releases also brought RTX 50-series GPU support, ingest that skips damaged files instead of stopping, Undo and Redo on the timeline, turning a DJ session into a video (Studio), and a run of audio and timing fixes. The full list is on the official changelog.

v1.0.12 — A real beat + downbeat engine — electronic and EDM finally sync

The beat tracker has been replaced, and it isn't close

Onset now uses Beat This! — a joint beat and downbeat model, bundled with the app and running offline. It replaces the librosa beat tracker and, more importantly, the old assumption that every fourth beat was a downbeat.

What it means for us: If you cut to electronic, EDM or phonk, this is the release. Measured across a genre spread, the old downbeat grid was landing 0–2% correct on electronic music — effectively random — and it sometimes locked onto double the real tempo, which is why the odd track came back cutting twice as fast as it should. Beats and bars are both detected properly now. On rock and pop you'll notice a tightening; on electronic it's a different edit.

Buildup escalates on bars, not on a stopwatch

The Buildup narrative arc steps its energy tiers up on real downbeats — bar boundaries — instead of at fixed percentages through the song.

What it means for us: The build used to arrive whenever the timer said so, which on anything with a clear structure meant it landed mid-phrase and felt very slightly wrong without being obvious why. The step-ups now land on the bar, so the escalation arrives with the music. Worth re-rendering an old Buildup project just to compare.

The librosa tracker is still there as a fallback if the model ever can't load, so nothing breaks. And it's still entirely offline — Beat This! ships inside the app, it isn't a call out to somebody's API.

v1.0.11 — Discreet Mode covers everything, and Re-Roll respects your settings

Discreet Mode blurs the preview and the timeline too

Switching it on blurred the library thumbnails but left the large player preview and the timeline clip thumbnails perfectly sharp. All three now blur together the moment you toggle it.

What it means for us: The entire point of Discreet Mode is one keypress and nothing on screen is identifiable. Two of the three biggest things on screen weren't covered, which made it worse than useless — you'd think you were safe. A loaded DJ session on the timeline survives the toggle now as well.

Re-Roll respects Narrative and Pacing

Re-rolling the unlocked clips silently ignored your Narrative arc and Pacing settings, so the new selection could come back with different energy and different cut timing than a fresh Generate.

What it means for us: If a Re-Roll ever felt flatter or oddly paced compared to the Generate it came from, that's why — you were getting a default-shaped selection. It now matches Generate exactly, so Re-Roll is a fine-tuning tool again rather than a gamble.

The library stops getting stuck on "Loading…"

On some startups the clip library sat on "Loading…" until you hit refresh manually. The background scan now hands its results back reliably, and fails open instead of hanging if anything does go wrong.

What it means for us: Small, but it was the first thing you saw on launch. The version badge in the header also shows the exact build now (V1.0.11 rather than a generic V1.0), which makes it possible to tell what you're actually running.

v1.0.10 — Triptych stops trailing into black, Title Card works at 60fps

Triptych ends when your footage does

If your clips were shorter than the song, the triptych kept the full music length and played black after the last clip. It now ends with the footage, fading out picture and music together.

What it means for us: Triptych, three vertical panels in one widescreen video, is an output a lot of us use, and it was handing back files with dead air on the end that you had to trim by hand every time. A related bug that scheduled the end-fade about a third of the way in is fixed too.

Title Card works again on 60fps exports

The intro card was always generated at 30fps regardless of your render frame rate, so on a 60fps export the final stitch silently dropped it.

What it means for us: If you set a project title and got no title card, that was it. It failed silently, which is the worst kind — no error, nothing to debug, just a missing intro. An empty project name no longer produces a blank card either, and if card generation fails you now get told why.

v1.0.9 — Four features were quietly using the wrong footage or the wrong audio

Triptych panels no longer freeze

When the three clips in a group had different lengths, one panel kept playing while the other two sat frozen on their last frame. Every panel now runs the full length of its group.

What it means for us: This affected far more edits than it looked like it did. A panel plays for roughly three times the slot its clip was picked for, and the renderer was reading the short extracted clip file rather than the source video it came from — so it ran out of footage almost every time. If your triptychs have looked like stills sitting next to video, that was the bug, not your clips. Genuinely short sources now cut away to other footage instead of freezing or looping.

Thumbnails show the moment that was actually chosen

The project thumbnail is meant to be the best frame of the edit, but it was being pulled from a few seconds into the source video instead.

What it means for us: Which is exactly why so many thumbnails came back as an intro, a studio logo, or black. If your thumbnails have been consistently disappointing, this is the whole explanation.

Source-audio ducking was ducking against the wrong audio

With Mix source audio enabled, the audio was lifted from the wrong position in the source file — for a clip twenty minutes into a scene, roughly the opening seconds.

What it means for us: Because the opening seconds are usually silence, the music mostly never ducked at all. Turn it back on and expect it to be a lot more active than you remember. Speed ramps are fixed in the same release — a ramp's slow-motion tail could previously come from an unrelated part of the source, giving you a visible content jump partway through a clip.

Worth knowing if you write drivers: moods, scene_types and min_rating are preferences, not filters. They weight a clip's score rather than removing it from the pool, so a clip matching none of them can still get picked when it's the best available fit — which is what stops an edit developing gaps. Only exclude_tags removes clips outright. The docs used to describe them as filters and were wrong. Onset now also warns you on load if a driver asks for a mood or scene type that doesn't exist — a hyphenated slow-motion instead of slow_motion silently did nothing before, while looking configured.

v1.0.8 — About & Updates, and the changelog inside the app

About & Updates, and an offline in-app changelog

The ℹ button in the header shows the version you're running, a Check for Updates button, and the full changelog — bundled with the app, so it reads fine offline.

What it means for us: Mostly this means you can tell whether a bug you're hitting has already been fixed without going and finding a website. The controls added in 1.0.6 and 1.0.7 — beat export, Stash import, Discreet Mode, Find More, subject filtering — all got hover tooltips in the same release.

On the update check: Onset does not check automatically. No background polling, no startup check, no timer. It contacts the network only when you press the button yourself, and it reads a small file listing the current version — it sends nothing about you or your library. Everything else in the release, changelog viewer included, works entirely offline. Worth stating plainly given who we are.

v1.0.7 — Import your Stash performers, and cut to a funscript instead of the music

Your Stash performers, imported

Onset can now read a local Stash library and pull in the performers and tags you've already curated, matching them to your footage by file path.

What it means for us: If you keep a Stash library, your Onset library arrives pre-tagged. No re-tagging, no starting from scratch — and because each performer comes in with an AI fingerprint attached, "Find More" immediately starts surfacing clips of that performer from footage you never tagged in Stash.

Cut to a funscript, not the song

You can hand Onset an external intensity curve — a .funscript, or a plain time/intensity CSV (picked in the Editor from 1.0.13) — and it drives the edit instead of the music's own energy.

What it means for us: This is the one a lot of us have wanted. Got a script you love? Build the edit around it: the cuts still land on the beat, but the pacing and clip intensity follow the script's action. You can also blend it with the music instead of replacing it. Combined with the beat export that shipped in 1.0.6, Onset now speaks funscript in both directions.

Better clips out of long scenes

Clips now end when the shot's content actually changes, instead of at arbitrary intervals.

What it means for us: If you feed it full-length scenes — which most of us do — you get noticeably more usable clips, and fewer that awkwardly span a change in position or camera. On static single-angle footage nothing much changes; the improvement shows up exactly where it was needed.

Re-ingesting no longer scrambles your library

Ingesting the same video twice used to produce different clips every time.

What it means for us: Which quietly orphaned every rating and tag you'd put on clips that no longer existed. If you've ever re-ingested and wondered where your stars went — that was why. Fixed.

Because of the clip-boundary changes, re-ingesting old footage will produce different (better) clips. Your existing library is untouched unless you choose to re-ingest.

v1.0.6 — Performer tagging, beat-grid export, and Discreet Mode

Teach it a performer once

Pick about five clips of someone, name them, and Onset finds every other clip of them across your whole library. There's a new Subjects tab for managing these, with a review queue for borderline matches.

What it means for us: This is the feature that matches how we actually organize footage. Tag your favourites once, then use @TheirName in a driver to build an edit around them. It gets sharper every time you approve a match — and it works on poses and framing too, not just people.

Beat grid export (funscript, Audacity, CSV)

One click exports any track's detected beats as a .funscript metronome, an Audacity label track, or a CSV.

What it means for us: For anyone who scripts or builds cock hero rounds: stop tapping beats by hand. It's free in the demo, ungated — take the grid even if you never render a video in Onset.

Discreet Mode

One click blurs every thumbnail, renames the window, and closes previews. Ctrl+Shift+H hides the app instantly. Optional PIN on startup.

What it means for us: Exactly what it sounds like, and overdue. Onset was already 100% local — nothing ever uploaded — but that didn't help if someone walked past your screen.

Get the latest version

Every feature above is in the current build. The free demo includes all presets, drivers, and the beat export — watermarked at 720p.

Try Onset Engine or try the free demo first - no credit card needed

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