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

// Contents.

// What you need.

• A Mac, Intel or Apple Silicon.
• An editor: DaVinci Resolve Studio 18 or later, which the application drives live — or Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro, which receive the finished work as an XML file. Choose it under Editor in the footer.
• For Resolve: Preferences › System › General › External scripting using set to Local. The free edition has no scripting API, so it cannot be driven.
• Footage from your cameras, and a recording from the mixer or board feed. The board recording is what everything else is aligned to.

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.

Run the night is the one button a first run needs. It runs the steps below in the order the night is run in — ingest, the board, the drops, then the cameras while you listen to the drops, the reels, the full set planned, the mix last — with each step's defaults, and it stops with a question exactly where a step would have refused: no board marked, no camera on the DJ, a camera without a role. The question appears under the project's name and the rail lands on the step that answers it. Every step stays on the rail to be run again or changed on its own. Stop after this file does what it says and keeps everything already placed and found.

01Ingest

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

02Cameras

Assign each camera its role — booth, FOH, roaming, drone, FPV — and, with the Presence slider, how much of the reels it gets. The cameras always add up to 100%: the one you move takes from the ones you have not touched yet. Until you move one, the reels are cut by role. Min cut is the shortest that camera is ever on screen.

A drone records no sound for the sync to match, so the row under the table places it from your word: the camera, where its first clip starts on the night's clock, Place. Every clip of it follows by its own timestamps, and the sync leaves it alone from then on.

--Folder names decide the roles

With the standard 01_FOOTAGE/CAM_A_PUPITRU layout, each camera gets its own role automatically. Without it there is nothing to guess from, and every folder arrives as Mobile / Roaming — a project can end up with three cameras in one role without anyone choosing that.

Cameras that share a role share that role's cuts between them, which is intended but rarely what you meant if it happened by accident. When the ingest says it could not guess the roles, set them in Cameras before you sync.

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.

Short clips are checked three ways before being trusted. Two of them listen to the loudness of the music; the third, added in 1.0 rc 8, listens across twenty-four frequency bands at once, which makes it far less bothered by the room and by how far the camera was from the speakers. It is used to settle cases where the first two disagreed, and to place clips neither could vouch for.

Sony cameras: keep the small .XML file that sits beside each clip when you copy a card. It holds the recording time even when the camera wrote none into the video itself, so clips from a camera whose clock was never set can still be lined up. They are a few kilobytes each and worth more than they look.

If you forgot a file, copy it into the folder it belongs in and press Update file list back on Ingest. It takes in anything the project has never seen and keeps every role, setting and position already computed — running the ingest again would discard all of it. If what you added belongs to the mixer, run this step again as well: the mixer is the event's clock, and the mix will stop and say so until you have.

If the recorder was stopped during the event, the log says so — the recorder was stopped and started again — and that silence is kept as part of the night, because it is. You will see the gap on the synced timeline and it is meant to be there. Any clip filmed inside it comes out marked whatever its match reads: there is no board feed at that moment to check it against, so it is placed from the camera's own spacing, which is good to about a second.

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 with Drops. The name you type is remembered, and every later step works on that timeline.

This is not optional if you aligned outside the application. Mix, Recipe and Reels 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.

04Drops

Finds the drops 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.

Three things have to be true at once, and the score is the weakest of them: the low end steps up and stays up for eight bars, it had been gone for the eight bars before, and it arrives loud — not merely louder than the silence it followed. The last two are what separate a drop from everything else a set does: the kick comes back after every fill and every transition too, and a kick creeping back into a breakdown is a huge jump without being a drop.

On Apple Silicon the tempo and the beat grid come from a beat tracker, so the reel windows land on the music's own bar lines. On Intel they are estimated from the energy instead — the drops are found the same way and in the same places, the windows are a few tens of milliseconds looser. The first line of this step says which you have: Rhythm analysis: librosa or numpy/scipy.

Moving the threshold answers immediately: the weaker candidates are kept too, so raising and lowering the bar re-marks the list on the spot rather than asking for another pass over the recording, and the count beside it says how many you are keeping. Only the ones above the bar get a marker and a preview clip.

A drop needs two cameras rolling to be an edit — one camera is a single unbroken shot. Drops that happened while nobody was filming are switched off, not removed: the Cameras column says how many were rolling, the log names them, and ticking one keeps it. The board records the whole night; the cameras do not film all of it. You can detect drops as soon as the board is placed, before the cameras are done, and the check runs again once they are.

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.

05Recipe

Decides which camera is on screen at each moment of each reel — on the beat grid, keeping to the presence and the minimum shot length you set on Cameras, and only ever cutting to a camera that was actually recording at that instant. The log then says what share each camera came out with, and why one came out short.

06Mix

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.

07Reels

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

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

Premiere or Final Cut: Export writes two files into 03_EXPORTS/ — a Premiere XML and a Final Cut FCPXML — each with the synced multicam, a marker on every drop, and every reel as its own sequence. Import it, and every clip is where the sync put it. Keep the footage where it was when you exported.

08Full set

The other deliverable from the same night: the whole set as one edit whose cutting follows the music — an even rhythm of about two bars a shot, as professionally cut sets are, a little tighter through a build and held on a drop's impact, every cut on the beat. Read the music listens to the recorder and writes the set's structure; Plan the set cuts the night against it, in seconds, and shows the plan — the night as a strip with the music's structure on top, the cut list with why each camera was chosen, and under it the cuts around the one you select, with one frame of it. Click anywhere on the night to go to the cut playing at that moment. Nothing is built until you say so.

Five choices, in plain words: how long the shots are (calm, standard, energetic); whether footage with no position — a drone — is cut in as cutaways; a slow push on still cameras; a push or pull on every shot of the moving cameras, off unless you tick it; and how much of the set each camera gets, as needed, a little or a lot — with everything on as needed, FOH gets about 35 % of the set and the booth camera 25 %. Tick Lock on a cut that is right and plan again: it keeps its place and the rest is rebuilt around it.

Only cameras the sync could vouch for are cut to; the log names any it left out and why. A camera that runs a few parts per million off the recorder's clock is measured on its long clips and corrected per cut — a reel never notices it, a two-hour cut on the beat does.

// When something goes wrong.

• It cannot find Resolve. Resolve Studio must be open with a project loaded, and External scripting set to Local.
• A step is dimmed. It needs an earlier one. Hovering it says which.
• A camera is in the wrong place. Drag it right in Resolve, then either enter the correction on Cameras or use Read Sync from Timeline.
• Something else. Show Logs in the footer opens the full log, and Report a problem prepares a message with the environment and the tail of that log already in it.

// 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 Ingest.

// 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 or the set are good. That is the job it is named for: it assists.