The Drop Cut

// Guide.

What each step does, and what you check at it.

The application runs seven steps in order, each needing what the one before it wrote. This is what happens at each, and where your judgement is the thing that decides.

← Back to the product

// Contents.

// What you need.

ffmpeg travels inside the application. There is nothing else to install.

// Installing.

Open the disk image and drag the app onto Applications.

On first launch macOS will refuse to open it. Go to System Settings › Privacy & Security, scroll to the bottom, and click Open Anyway. Once, and never again.

Control-clicking and choosing Open, which older guides suggest, no longer works: macOS 15 removed that route for applications without an Apple Developer ID.

Open Resolve first, with a project loaded, then open the assistant.

// Preparing a project.

One folder for the event, with the footage of each camera in its own subfolder and the board recording in an audio folder. The application can create the structure for you — Create Project Structure on the first step.

Folder names are read for hints. A folder with PUPITRU, BOOTH, FOH, DRONE, FPV or MIXER in its name is recognised as that role, which saves you assigning it by hand later.

You decide

Which camera is which. Guessing from a folder name is a convenience, not a fact — confirm it in step 2.

01Ingest

Reads every folder, imports the media into Resolve, and organises it into bins. Nothing is renamed and nothing is moved on disk.

You check

That every camera you shot is in the list. A card that did not finish copying is the commonest reason one is missing, and it is far cheaper to notice here than after the sync.

02Track Mapping

Assign each camera its role — booth, FOH, roaming, drone, FPV — which is what later steps use to decide who is on screen and for how long.

You decide

The roles, and any per-camera sync correction. If a camera lands wrong in step 3, you drag its clips into place in Resolve, note how far you moved them, and type that number here.

03Sync

Aligns every clip against the board recording by acoustic analysis, using file timestamps as corroboration. It builds a synced multicam timeline from the result.

Nothing it cannot verify is presented as settled. A clip with too little overlap with the recording, a camera whose clock disagrees with the audio, two clips of one camera that overlap in time — all are marked for checking rather than quietly placed. The rule the whole step rests on is that no clip may be both wrong and unflagged.

You check

The clips it flagged, and the multicam timeline generally. Drones and FPV usually have no sound and no usable clock, so there is nothing to correlate — those it will tell you to place by hand.

If you would rather align it yourself. Align the material however you like — by hand in Resolve, or in a dedicated tool such as Syncaila — then press Read Sync from Timeline and name the timeline holding your alignment. Every clip's position is taken from it and you carry on from step 4.

This is not optional if you aligned outside the application. Steps 4, 6 and 7 read positions from the project file, not from the timeline: a clip it has no position for is left out of the edit entirely, and the reels come out wrong while looking like everything worked.

04Mix

Levels and prepares the board feed that the reels will take their sound from. It reports the condition of the recording first — clipping, or a level so low that bringing it up would lift its own noise floor into what you can hear.

You check

What it says about the recording. Neither fault affects the sync, and both affect what you deliver.

05Drops

Finds the moments the room goes up, in the board recording, and places one marker at each. Each is a point on the timeline, at the instant the drop lands, with the score and the tempo in its note.

You decide — this is the one that matters most

Audition every marker. Move the ones that are close but not right, delete the ones that are not drops, and add markers of your own where it missed something. Then press Read Markers: it takes the markers as they now stand, measures the tempo around any you added, and rebuilds every reel window on the bar grid.

Detection is good and it is not you. A false positive that reaches the export is a reel of nothing much; a drop it missed is a reel you never got.

06Edit Recipe

Decides which camera is on screen at each moment of each reel — on the beat grid, respecting each role's minimum shot length, and only ever cutting to a camera that was actually recording at that instant.

You check

The proposal, once it is on a timeline in step 7. The recipe is a starting point, and re-cutting a shot in Resolve is a normal thing to do.

07Deliverables

Builds the export timelines — 16:9, 4:5 and 9:16 — with the framing applied and the audio laid under them.

You check, before you render

Watch the reels. All of them. Vertical framing is a mathematical centre crop, so a subject standing off to one side will be off to one side in the crop — that is the moment to nudge the framing on that clip.

Nothing is rendered without you asking. The application builds timelines; you press render.

// When something goes wrong.

// Where it keeps its files.

Everything about a project lives in a .dropcut folder inside the event folder: the project file, cached analysis, drop previews and any processed audio. Move the event folder and it follows — the application reads and writes where the project actually is, not where it used to be.

Delete .dropcut/cache whenever you like; it rebuilds. Deleting the project file starts the event again from step 1.

// What it does not do.

No subject tracking or AI reframing — vertical framing is a plain centre crop, which stays predictable from cut to cut. No hardware timecode — alignment comes from the audio and from file metadata. No colour grading — clips are prepared for Resolve's own Remote Grades workflow, so grading stays where it belongs.

And it does not decide whether the reels are good. That is the job it is named for: it assists.

Questions: [email protected].

Thedropcut