Guide
You have a two-hour recording and you need thirty seconds of it. The work is not the editing -- it is finding the moments worth cutting, and then getting landscape footage into a vertical frame without losing the DJ. Here is how to do it by hand, and how to skip it.
Open the recording in any editor and look at the audio waveform rather than the video. Drops show as a sharp jump in level after a quieter build, and mixes show as two patterns overlapping. Note the timestamps before you cut anything -- a two-hour set usually holds somewhere between six and fifteen moments worth posting.
Put the drop roughly a third of the way into the clip, not at the start. Fifteen to forty seconds works for most platforms. Starting a clip on the drop itself removes the tension that made it land.
Your footage is almost certainly 16:9 and the platforms want 9:16, so most of the frame has to go. Crop to keep the DJ in shot, and follow them if they move -- a static centre crop will lose them the moment they step to one side of the booth.
Platform interfaces cover roughly the top and bottom 14% of the screen. Anything important -- a face, a logo, a caption -- needs to sit inside the middle band or it will be hidden behind a username and a row of buttons.
The most obvious clip, and the easiest to find in a waveform. Works because the payoff is audible within a few seconds of someone starting to watch.
Two tracks overlapping. Harder to spot and often the better clip, because it shows you doing something rather than standing behind a track that is already playing.
The tension before the drop. On its own it can carry a short clip, and it is what makes a drop clip land when you include the run-up.
CueCut takes the whole set recording and does the four steps above for you: it reads the audio to find the drops, mixes and builds, tracks the DJ so the vertical crop follows them rather than sitting still, and exports finished clips framed for 9:16. A fifty minute set producing ten clips usually takes about thirty to forty minutes once it has uploaded, and you get an email when the clips are ready.
It will not always agree with you, and it returns fewer clips rather than padding a quiet set with weak ones. The clips are yours to download individually or as a zip.
Finding the moments in a two-hour recording usually takes longer than the editing does. Expect a couple of hours in total for a handful of clips, most of it spent scrubbing to work out where the good parts are.
Look at the audio waveform rather than watching the video. A drop appears as a sharp rise in level directly after a quieter section, and it is far faster to spot visually than by listening through the set.
Fifteen to forty seconds suits most platforms. Place the payoff about a third of the way in so there is a build before it, rather than opening on the drop.
Yes. CueCut takes the full set recording, finds the drops, mixes and builds in the audio, tracks the DJ so the vertical crop follows them, and returns finished clips. A fifty minute set producing ten clips typically takes about thirty to forty minutes once it has uploaded.
No. CueCut extracts the audio from the video file during processing.
Yes. Free accounts take uploads up to 25GB and Premium up to 75GB. For files that size, paste a Dropbox or Google Drive link instead of uploading through the browser, and CueCut fetches the file directly.
Upload a full recording or a shorter test section and see what it finds.