Sync Video Effects to Music Beats
Add Rhythm to a Continuous Video
Give one continuous video a beat-driven rhythm with punch cuts, fades or zooms. Upload your video and a music track, then detect the tempo automatically or enter the BPM yourself. Set a minimum cut duration to control how often the effect appears, and choose whether to include the video's original audio. Watch the example below to compare the original movement with punch cuts at 120 BPM.
Cost: Free to use. File size and usage limits apply.
- Input
- A 6-second video at 640 × 420 px and a 120 BPM beat track
- Setting
- BPM 120, Hard (punch cuts), Min cut 0.5 seconds
- Output
- The same continuous scene with beat-timed changes in framing
Play both clips with sound to compare the movement. Download the video and beat track to try these settings yourself; a different track or effect changes the result.
How to sync a video to music beats
Add a video and a song
Click Choose files or drop files onto the preview. You need one video and one audio file, each up to 200 MB, and you can add both at once. Audio you uploaded in another tool is listed in the Choose audio menu under Audio.
Check the beat map
Set Beat sensitivity and click Analyze beats to see how many beats were found and the estimated tempo in BPM. You can skip this: Sync to beat analyzes the music automatically.
Choose how the picture reacts
Pick Hard, Fade or Zoom, then set Min cut (s) to control how often the framing may change.
Decide about the original sound
Leave Mix original audio off to replace the sound with the music, or switch it on to keep voices and ambience underneath.
Sync and download
Click Sync to beat; until then the preview shows your original clip. Play the result and Download the MP4. Continue editing keeps your files and settings so you can try another style. The result also stays in Uploads.
What happens at each beat
Beat Sync doesn't remove or reorder footage. Your video plays from start to finish at normal speed, and at every cut point the framing changes: the picture jumps to a tighter crop, crossfades into one, or reverses its zoom. It looks like a cut on the beat, but no footage is lost.
The music starts at 0:00 of the audio file and stops where the video ends; if the song is shorter, the rest of the video has no music. The result is always as long as the video, so shorten the clip with Cut Video first if you want a shorter edit.
The automatic beat detection looks for sudden rises in loudness across the frequency range, such as the attack of a kick drum, snare or strummed chord, so cuts land on audible hits rather than on an even grid. Only hits reaching about 60% of the strongest hit in the whole song become cuts. A quiet intro therefore gets few cuts if the song gets much punchier later, and songs without clear hits, such as ambient pads or slow piano, give few cut points.
Hard enlarges the picture by up to 12% and Fade by up to 10%, so at the tightest crops about a tenth of the frame is cut off on one side. Zoom enlarges by up to 12% evenly around the center. Keep faces, captions and logos away from the edges.
Settings explained
- Beat sensitivity
- 1–100%, default 50%. Higher values detect more and softer hits, lower values fewer and stronger ones. Hits below the 60% threshold never become cuts, whatever the setting. Changing it clears the last analysis result.
- Analyze beats
- Shows the number of detected beats and the estimated tempo. The count covers the whole song and includes soft hits, so expect fewer cuts.
- BPM
- 20–300 BPM, default 120 BPM. After an analysis it shows the detected tempo, folded into 60–200 BPM, so possibly half or double what you would count. Moving the slider switches to a manual beat grid: the tool then cuts every 60 ÷ BPM seconds from the video's start (every 0.5 s at 120 BPM), still filtered by Min cut (s). The same grid is used when the music has no strong hits within the video.
- Hard
- The default. At each cut the picture jumps to a new crop, enlarged by 4%, 10%, 6% or 12% in turn and shifted between center, left, bottom right and top right.
- Fade
- Gentler crops of 3–10% at the same four positions, blended with a short crossfade instead of a jump.
- Zoom
- Each section zooms smoothly into the center by up to 12% and the next one zooms back out, so the picture pulses with the music.
- Min cut (s)
- 0.05–10 s, default 0.5 s. A beat closer than this to the previous cut is skipped. One beat lasts 60 ÷ BPM seconds, and detected beats vary by a few hundredths of a second, so set about 10% below one beat to cut on every beat, or about 10% below two beats for every second beat.
- Transition (s)
- Only shown for Fade. 0–2 s, default 0.1 s. Each crossfade is limited to 45% of the shorter neighboring section, so with cuts 0.5 s apart no fade lasts longer than 0.225 s.
0turns the fades off and leaves plain jumps between the gentler crops. - Mix original audio
- Off by default, so the music replaces the video's sound. When on, the original sound plays underneath, about 5 dB quieter than the music, while the music keeps its full level. The option applies to videos that have their own sound.
Example: a 45-second clip with a 128 BPM song
At 128 BPM one beat lasts 60 ÷ 128 = 0.47 s. Assume the song has a clear hit on every beat. The default Min cut (s) of 0.5 s is longer than that, so the beat right after each cut is skipped and the framing changes on about every second beat, roughly every 0.94 s. Over 45 s that gives about 48 sections.
Set Min cut (s) to 0.4 s and the tool wants a cut on every beat, about 96 sections. A video can have at most 60 sections, so the tool thins the cut points out evenly to 60 sections. They still sit on beats, but some beats are skipped at irregular intervals. For a cut on every beat at 128 BPM, keep the video under 60 × 0.47 s, about 28 s.
Formats and limits
- Video input
- MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, M4V, MPEG/MPG, OGV
- Music input
- MP3, WAV, AAC, M4A, OGG, Opus, FLAC or WebM audio
- Output format
- MP4 with H.264 video and 192 kbps AAC stereo audio, named after your video with
_beat_syncadded - Resolution and frame rate
- Same pixel size as the video file (odd sizes rounded down to even), at most 60 fps. Upright phone clips stay upright in their original proportions.
- Output length
- Always the length of the video
- Maximum file size
- 200 MB per file
- Files per job
- 1 video and 1 audio file
- Sections per video
- Up to 60
- Processing
- On our servers with FFmpeg. The video is always re-encoded, and a job can run for up to 15 minutes.
- Watermark
- None
- Metadata
- The video's title and location (GPS) tags are copied into the result
- Storage
- Uploads and results are deleted automatically after 48 hours for guests and after 30 days for free accounts. Paid plans can keep files longer.
Frequently asked questions
Why doesn't every beat get a cut?
Three things filter the beats. Hits below about 60% of the strongest hit in the song are ignored. Min cut (s) drops beats that come too soon after the previous cut. And a video can have at most 60 sections, so longer clips keep an evenly spread selection. Lower Min cut (s) or shorten the clip for denser cuts.
Can the music start at a later point in the song?
Not inside the tool: the music always starts at 0:00 of the audio file, so trim the song first. With Split Audio and By clip length, set the clip length to the second where the music should begin; the second part in the ZIP starts there. Each part lasts only one clip length, so this covers the whole video only if the start point is at least the video's length, e.g. starting at 1:00 for a 45 s clip.
Can I use the sound of another video as the music?
The Choose audio menu lists audio files only. Extract the soundtrack first, for MP4 files with MP4 to MP3, then pick the MP3 as the music.
Can this fix audio that is out of sync with the video?
No. Beat Sync doesn't shift sound against the picture. If you mix in the original sound, it keeps its original timing.
Does beat sync lower the video quality?
Slightly. The video is always re-encoded to H.264 at CRF 22, close to the encoder's default quality, and all three styles enlarge the picture by up to 12%, which softens fine detail a little. Start from the best copy of your clip rather than one already compressed for sharing.
Is my music sent to an AI service?
No. Beat detection is signal analysis of the audio, and both the analysis and the rendering run on our own servers. No external service receives your files.