First Cut — Beat-Synced Music Video Cutter for DaVinci Resolve Studio

Before You Buy — Read This First

First Cut requires DaVinci Resolve Studio. Everything it does runs through Resolve's timeline scripting bridge, and the free release doesn't expose it. If you're on the free version, this tool cannot work — please don't buy it.

• DaVinci Resolve Studio — built, tested and proven against Studio 21.1.
• Start on a fresh project. Step 1 sets the project frame rate, and Resolve locks that permanently the moment any timeline exists. On a project that already has timelines it can't change it, and it will tell you so.
• Your own music and footage. No media is included — this is the tool that assembles yours.

Your Performance Takes, Cut to the Beat, in About a Minute

First Cut takes a folder of performance takes and a music track and hands you back a finished rough assembly: takes imported and waveform-synced to the song, the tempo measured, and every shot landing exactly on a detected beat. Then it tells you, in writing, what it measured and what it assumed.

It is not a preset and not a transition pack. It is a panel that lives in Resolve under Workspace > Scripts and does the boring hour — the import, the sync, the marker maths, the hundred-cut assembly — so you can start editing at the point where taste matters.

How It Works — Four Steps

Each step is its own button, so you can stop and look at the timeline between them.

• 1. Media — pick your music, your folder of performance takes, optionally a B-roll folder, and your timeline frame rate. Creates Music, A-roll and B-roll bins, sets the rate, then waveform-syncs every take to the track. Takes with no scratch audio of the song can't sync — they're held out of the pool and named in the report rather than silently dropped.
• 2. Tempo — press Find Beat and it measures the BPM, or type one in to skip detection. It renders the track out through Resolve as a temp WAV, reads it, and deletes it.
• 3. Cut — set shot length, B-roll density and a seed, then press Build First Cut. Re-roll bumps the seed and rebuilds. V1 comes out as a continuous performance cut with B-roll on its own track above it as cutaways — switch that track off and the performance plays straight through.
• 4. Look-up table — point it at your LUT folders, select the shots you want it on, and apply. Each source clip remembers its own LUT, so a two-camera shoot can carry two different conversions.

Key Features

• Measured tempo, not guessed. Against known-BPM click tracks the detector lands within 0.01 BPM with 10 ms phase error, including tracks that don't start on the downbeat.
• It refuses to invent a beat. A confidence figure accompanies every detection. Run against an 18.7-minute speech recording it reported 1.3x and declined to claim a grid that isn't there. The detected BPM is written into the box for you to confirm or overrule — never used silently behind your back.
• Every cut on a real beat. Proven end to end on a 128-second track: 41 shots, all 40 cuts landing on a detected beat, picture and music ending together.
• No one-frame gaps. Mixed frame rates are the classic way a beat-synced assembly quietly falls apart — a black sliver at every cut. First Cut conforms off-rate source properly and then explicitly checks the finished timeline for gaps and overlaps.
• Seeded and reproducible. Every assembly is built from a stated seed, so Re-roll is a cheap, safe experiment rather than a gamble on losing something you liked.
• Genuinely scattered. The report gives you the closest reuse distance, so you can see whether the edit is actually varied or leaning on one take.
• Per-camera LUTs. The assignment is remembered against the source clip, so it survives a rebuild. Nothing is ever applied from the playhead — with no selection, the tool refuses and says so.
• Step 4 works on its own. Open a cut you made last week and press the button: it adopts what's on V1 and recovers the seed and BPM from the marker it left at frame 0. No re-import, no re-cut.
• A report that separates measured from assumed. Detected tempo is a measurement. Bar phase and shot interval are inferences. The report says which is which and saves to a text file — so when something looks wrong, you can see where it came from.
• Build-stamped. The panel header, the startup log and every saved report carry the build ID, so a bug report always says which version actually produced it.

Who Is This For?

Music video editors, multicam and dual-system shooters, and anyone who has spent an evening hand-placing markers across a four-minute track before making a single creative decision. If you shoot three or four performance takes of the same song and cut between them, this is the hour of your workflow it removes.

Known Limits in v1

Stated up front, because finding them after you buy is worse:

• Studio only. Everything runs through the scripting bridge.
• Steady grid only. Shot length is constant across the cut. Ladders, collapses and speed ramps were deliberately deferred to a later version.
• No title step. Resolve has no scripting route that places an editable title on a chosen track — anything the tool could place would arrive as a compound clip you can't touch from the Inspector. Dragging a title from the Effects Library takes seconds and gives you full control.
• A LUT is not a grade. It normalises your takes so they sit in the same ballpark. It is not shot matching; carry on from there on the Color page.
• LUTs are per camera, not per shot. Grading two shots from one camera differently is a Color page job.
• Re-grade after a re-roll. A re-roll builds a fresh timeline and re-appended clips come back without their LUT. Re-apply step 4 after a re-roll.

Compatibility

• DaVinci Resolve Studio 21.1 — built and verified against it
• Windows, macOS and Linux — LUT locations are handled for all three
• Requires Studio. The free release of Resolve does not expose the scripting access this depends on.

Installation

First Cut is a single Lua script that installs itself. Run it once and it copies itself into your Fusion Scripts folder, then appears under Workspace > Scripts > Utility > GSMixedMedia_FirstCut.

One thing to know: Resolve reads a script only when you launch it from the menu. An already-open panel keeps running the code it loaded, so after any update you need to close the panel and reopen it from the menu — otherwise the new version looks like it did nothing. The build stamp in the panel header tells you which version you're actually running.

Made by God_Send MixedMedia — DaVinci Resolve tutorials, plugins, and creative tools for editors and motion designers.