- Works with Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro. Choose your editor in the footer. With Premiere or Final Cut nothing needs Resolve: the footage is synced, mixed and cut exactly the same way, and you get an XML with the synced multicam, every drop marked, and every reel as its own sequence. Resolve users can export it too, to hand a project over.
- No more missing reel. If two drops ended up with the same number, only one of them got a reel. Both do now.
- The framing offset does what it says. Moving a camera 10 % in Track Mapping moves it 10 % of the reel — on 4K footage it used to move it more than three times that. If you had set an offset, check the first reel you rebuild.
- Markers you place yourself are read back, whatever you call them. If you add a marker on a moment the detection missed, it becomes a drop like any other — it used to be skipped unless it happened to be named "Drop". Its tempo is measured from the mixer so its reel still cuts on the beat, and the log names what it took in, so anything you meant as a note can be unticked.
- Reading markers back keeps the rest of the project. The candidates below your threshold used to disappear at that moment, so lowering the bar afterwards found nothing to take in. They stay now, and the log no longer reports them as drops you deleted.
- The ingest tells you what each camera actually recorded — codec, bit depth, chroma and capture gamma — and says so when the combination is one nobody would choose: log recorded into 8 bits, cameras in different colour gamuts, log mixed with Rec.709. It changes nothing about your footage; it tells you before the grade instead of after.
- And it checks your files before trusting them. A file that was cut or copied mid-recording, one that reports no duration, or a mixer recording too short for the detection to read a build — each is named on the first screen rather than found three modules later.
- It says when several cameras share a role, because they split that role's cuts between them, and a project imported without the folder layout puts every camera in Roaming by default.
- Every export prints a fingerprint of what it was made from. Two runs showing the same twelve characters were given the same drops, cuts, cameras and formats — so you can tell whether what is on the timeline is the edit you approved.
- Copy diagnostics, in the footer, puts everything a support question needs on the clipboard in one click. No file names, no folder names, no footage.
- The app tells you if it is running from the disk image, from Downloads, or from a copy macOS made for itself — all three work until the first thing that writes, and then fail as though the tool were broken.
- Detect drops in part of the night. Set In and Out on the synced timeline in Resolve, press Range in the Drops tab, and only that stretch is read. Everything outside it stays exactly as you left it.
- Moved projects find their files. Copy an event to another drive and open it there: the app finds its media again and tells you what it relinked. If two files share a name it asks rather than guesses.
- One reel failing no longer stops the others. Every reel is attempted, the ones that failed are listed with the reason, and you can rebuild just those.
- Montage presets. Save the settings that worked for one event — camera priorities, reel length, the reel's sound — and apply them to the next in one click. They are saved by camera role, so they work whatever your folders are called.
- Punch-in. An optional tighter shot on the last cut before the drop and on returning cameras after it — the drop itself always lands wide. Off by default.
- Cameras recognised from the files. If your footage is not sorted into camera folders, two cards from the same camera are treated as one camera and a folder mixing two cameras is split — from what the files themselves say. Your files are never moved.
- Cyan markers: check the bar before. When a DJ opens the bass gradually, detection can land a bar late. Those markers are now cyan, with a note saying the drop may start a bar earlier.
// Changelog.
What changed, and when.
Every build, newest first. The version is in the title bar of the application and on the disk image, so you can always tell which one you are looking at.
- A very short mixer recording no longer stops drop detection. If your first recording of the night was a few seconds of test before the real one was armed, Module 5 stopped on it and never reached the rest of the evening — the hours that were perfectly fine included. Any mixer file under about eleven seconds did it, on both Intel and Apple Silicon. Short files are now read like any other: a drop inside one is found, and one with no drop in it still gives none. Nothing else about detection changed, so a project you have already run will find the same drops in the same places.
- Tempo is measured properly again on Apple Silicon. A new version of the rhythm library moved the call the app used, so tempo quietly fell back to the simpler estimate on every file. Drops were still placed on the beat; the bar length behind the reel window was the weaker measurement. Both are back to full strength.
- Two cameras on the same DJ now both appear in the same reel. rc 10 made sure a second camera in a role got used at all, but it balanced over the whole night — so the totals came out even while individual reels still showed only one of them. A camera that missed part of the evening was "owed" cuts and took every roaming slot for several reels in a row. Now the reel decides first: if both cameras were rolling at that moment, the reel cuts between them, and the totals over the night stay even anyway.
- A second camera in the same role now gets used. If two of your cameras had the same role — two roaming, say — only the first one ever appeared in the reels. The second was reached solely in the moments the first was not rolling, so on a night where the first ran throughout, the second appeared in nothing at all: synced, in the edit recipe, and in none of the finished reels. The two now share the work evenly, and how much each role gets is unchanged, so your drop priority still decides which camera opens a drop.
- Drops: it now knows what a build sounds like. Detection used to watch for the moment the bass came back, which happens at a drop and also after every fill and every transition — on a six-hour set that was four hundred markers, most of them nothing. It now asks for the build as well: the bass has to have been gone for eight bars before, and to stay for eight bars after. On the same set that leaves about one per track instead of one every three minutes.
- The threshold now decides what lands in Resolve. Markers and preview clips were being made for every candidate, whatever you had set the threshold to. Now only the ones above it get a marker and a clip. The weaker ones stay in the table, so you can still lower the bar and take them in without waiting for the audio to be analysed again.
- Recorders that split their files no longer gain a gap. A recorder writing one continuous take in half-hour chunks was being given about three frames of silence at every join, because the only clock available — the file's own timestamp — cannot measure anything finer than a second. The joins are now exact, and a recorder that really was stopped mid-event still has its break found.
- The room mic and the desk feed now actually line up. Three separate things were fighting each other in the mix and all three are fixed. The processing was cutting a deep notch at 500 Hz into the room mic — 45 dB, in the middle of where a crowd lives — every single time. Its tone controls were delaying the low mids about three milliseconds more than the top, which is heard as phasing and cannot be corrected by moving the track. And a camera's clock drifts against a recorder's: on a five-hour recording that came to a tenth of a second, so no single position could be right for the whole night. All three are now measured and removed.
- Sync and mix use the whole machine. They were doing one file at a time on one core. On a real event, four half-hour mixer files took seven minutes in a row and three together.
- Footage from another job on the same card is recognised. A card that still held a previous shoot had every one of those clips analysed against a night they were not at, and then placed days before the timeline started. They are now spotted from the recorder's own window and marked instead. Nothing is ever deleted.
- A third way of finding where a clip belongs. Short clips were
already checked two ways before being trusted. There is now a third,
which listens to the music across twenty-four frequency bands at once
instead of to its loudness — so the room, the microphone and how far
away the camera was stop mattering, and what is left is the shape of
the music itself. It is used to settle the cases where the first two
disagreed, and to place clips neither of them could vouch for.
On the test events, a clip from a camera that was already rolling before the recorder started used to land four minutes out; it now lands under five seconds out. Anything still uncertain is marked for you to check, exactly as before. - Sony cameras: the XML files beside your clips are now read. Every Sony camera writes one for each shot, and it holds the recording time even when the camera wrote nothing into the video file itself. That means clips from a camera whose clock was never set can still be lined up against their neighbours — on one real event an FX6 thought it was 2020, and its files were still placed correctly, because a wrong clock is still a consistent one.
- The cutting follows the music. Until now every reel of a night was cut to the same rhythm — only which camera came next changed. The shots now shorten where the track is loud and busy and stretch where it is not, with the occasional held shot before a hit. Everything still lands on the beat, and a reel you have already approved rebuilds exactly as it was.
- Closing the licence window while it is checking no longer quits the application. On a slow connection — a venue, or the first check of the day — closing that window could take the whole app down with it, which looked like a failure to start.
- Terms you can read, and agree to once. There is now a terms and privacy page, and starting a trial asks you to accept it. The short version: it assists, you check the work, and what you deliver is yours.
- A clip the board feed cannot place can now be placed against other cameras, when two of them agree on where it goes. It is marked differently from a normal result, because it is accurate to a fraction of a second rather than to the frame. It needs clips of roughly 45 seconds or longer to work — below that there is not enough for the cameras to recognise.
- The sync says why it could not place a clip, rather than only that it could not.
- Remote grades are set faster, and are now confirmed working against a live Resolve rather than assumed.
- You can drag an event folder onto the window to set the project, instead of browsing for it.
- The licences of what is bundled are in the app, under About › Third-party licences — including FFmpeg's, and where to get its source.
- A problem report can carry a summary of your project, if you tick the box. It shows you exactly what it would send first, and it contains no file names and no footage — camera roles and clip lengths only. It is how the sync and the cutting get better.
- The room sound sits where its camera does. If a camera was already rolling when the board recorder was switched on, its processed ambience was being placed where the recorder starts instead of where the camera does — out of sync with the music by exactly how early the camera was. On the event that found it, 187 seconds.
- The application tells you when a newer build exists, in one line at the bottom of the window. It opens the download page; nothing is installed for you, and nothing is sent about you.
- A file you forgot can be added afterwards. Update file list on step 1 takes in anything that appeared in the project folders since the ingest, keeping every role, every setting and every sync position already there. Before this, the only way in was to run the whole ingest again and lose all of it.
- The mix stops if the clean feed changed since the sync. The mixer is the event's clock: add a file to it and every position was measured from a different starting point. It says what changed and asks you to run the sync again, rather than producing a mix in which everything is minutes out of place.
- A drop needs two cameras rolling to become a marker. One camera is a single unbroken shot, not an edit — and the board hears the set change through every camera move.
- The drop threshold answers immediately. Detection now keeps the weaker candidates too, so moving the threshold re-marks the table on the spot — up or down — instead of asking for another pass over the whole recording. The count beside it says how many you are keeping.
- Your folders can be laid out however you like. If there is no 01_FOOTAGE, every folder holding footage is read as a source and you say what each one is in Track Mapping, as before.
- Drop priority is a slider, because it is a comparison between your cameras rather than a number worth typing.
- Everything rc 3 is, plus the licensing that was missing from it. rc 3 was built without its licence configuration and ran unlicensed for anyone who opened it. It was available for about twenty minutes. If you took it in that window, replace it with this one — the download link is the same.
- There is a native Apple Silicon build again, alongside the Intel one. Take the one that matches your Mac; on Apple Silicon the drop windows land on the music's own beat grid rather than on an estimate of it.
- The build now refuses to package an app with no licensing instead of warning about it and carrying on, and a second check reads the finished disk image before it goes anywhere: the version the app reports, whether licensing is really in it, whether ffmpeg travelled with it.
- A recorder stopped mid-set no longer moves the second half of the night. The mixer's files were laid end to end, which is right when a recorder splits one take into chunks and wrong when somebody stopped it and started it again later. On the event this was found on, 24 minutes were missing and every clip matching the recording after the gap landed that much early — with a normal match percentage beside it, because each clip did fit the file it matched. The gap is now read from the recorder's own file times and kept.
- Clips shot while the recorder was off are marked, every one. There is no board feed at those moments to check them against, so they are placed from the camera's own spacing and flagged rather than presented as settled.
- A clip the rest of its camera contradicts is moved back. Club tracks repeat, and a clip can fit a later repeat as well as its own position — on this event one sat 74 seconds out, and the two candidates scored within two percent of each other, so nothing in the audio could have separated them. A camera records its files in order, and that ordering can.
- The mix follows the timeline the sync came from. If you align elsewhere and press Read Sync from Timeline, the name you type is now used by every later step. Before, the mix was built from the app's own timeline whatever you named.
- Drops nobody filmed are left out instead of becoming markers to delete and reels with nothing in them.
- A file added to the project after the ingest is named out loud. A clean feed copied in late used to be invisible: the sync had already run without it, and the hole turned up in Resolve.
- Remote grades are set on the reels too, through the route that works, instead of each reel being fixed by hand on the Color page.
- The role dropdown is legible, and the progress bar arrives with the first stage of a run rather than several minutes in — with the estimate of how long is left beside it.
- Drop markers are points, not bars. Each one carried the reel's length as its duration, which drew a bar running from the drop to well past the end of the reel — a span that described nothing and read as though it showed where the reel started and stopped.
- The plan buttons show the price, and what the longer plans save per month.
- The version is now findable. The bottom right of the window opens a panel with the exact build identifier — the thing worth quoting when something goes wrong.
- Licensing. Sign in with your email address and a licence key. No password: the key is the credential.
- It works offline for seven days at a time. The application checks in when it can and keeps running when it cannot, which is what a venue with no signal requires.
- Two Macs per licence, and a self-service reset on the sign-in screen for when one of them is sold or replaced — once every 30 days.
- Three days free on your Mac, no card.
- Paying happens on Stripe's own page, in your browser. Promotion codes work there. There is no card form anywhere in this application.
- Your licence key arrives by email when you sign up.
- The interface was rebuilt around the pipeline. Seven tabs became a rail: the steps run in order, each one shows whether it has run, and a step that cannot run yet is dimmed and says why.
- A project that had been moved wrote to where it used to be. Copy an event folder to another drive, run a module, and the results went back to the original — silently, because from inside the application the save had succeeded. Fixed.
- What the sync could not vouch for is now visible in the application, not only in the log.
- The progress bar appears for every module, not just one.
- A clip could land half a musical bar out and be presented as settled. Half a bar is the worst kind of sync error: it lands back on the grid, survives every plausibility check, sounds nearly right, and puts the drop a beat early. Fixed.
- The sync now survives into the reel. A cut could be 40 ms off the audio underneath it — on the cut that lands on the drop — because the same instant was rounded twice by different routes.
- A camera cannot film two clips at once, and now the tool checks. Where the layout says otherwise, both clips are marked — nothing can say which of the two moved.
- A clip the mixer recording does not cover is no longer presented as settled. Two-second clips, and anything shot before the recorder started or after it stopped.
- The condition of the board recording is reported before anything starts — clipping, or a level so low that raising it would lift its own noise into what you can hear.
- Every clip of a small camera is checked, not a sample.
- Clips the main method cannot place are now asked about directly, by a second method, and the two have to agree.
- Ambient audio is placed where it measures rather than where it was assumed to be.
- Short clips get placed. Clips of a few seconds, which nothing could align before.
- One undated file no longer costs a camera its sync.
- A marker you place yourself is cut on the beat. The tempo is measured around it, so a hand-placed drop gets a proper reel window.
- A reel can have its own length, set per drop.
- A module that was interrupted says so when you come back.
- Reel length is adjustable from inside the application.
- Reels can take their sound from the processed mix or the ambience, not only the raw board feed — which matters when the feed is the thing that was distorted.
- Every module reports how long it took, and an optional sound when it finishes.
Earlier builds were private, and are listed for completeness.
- Markers land on the drops they name.
- Where the mixer recording sits on the timeline is measured rather than assumed.
- Drop times can be checked against Resolve.
- Fixed a crash during drop detection on Apple Silicon.
- Drop detection no longer needs gigabytes of memory.
- Read Sync from Timeline. Align the material yourself — by hand or in another tool — and the application takes your alignment and carries on.
- A log you can reach, and Report a problem in the footer.
- Disk image fixes.
- First packaged build.
Questions: hello@thedropcut.com.
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