Onset Engine, for PMV makers

I recommend Onset Engine all over this site, so this page is the honest version in one place: what it does, what it doesn't, and how the workflow actually goes. If you've read a guide here and thought "fine, but what is this thing" — start here.

What it does

You point it at a folder of clips and a song. It analyses the track (beats, energy, drops), analyses your footage with an AI vision model, then cuts a beat-synced edit where the clips match the energy of each section — slow build on the quiet parts, hard cuts on the drops. What normally takes an evening in Vegas takes minutes once your clips are analysed.

The part that makes it different from the random-clip PMV scripts floating around: it actually understands what's in your clips. That's why you can tell it "use these kinds of shots on the drops" and it does something sensible.

What it doesn't do

• It doesn't find footage for you. You bring your own library. It's an editor, not a downloader.
• It's Windows-only (10/11). No GPU required, though an NVIDIA card speeds up analysing your footage.
• It's not free beyond the demo. The demo has every feature, but it renders only the first minute of an edit, at 720p with a watermark. The whole video, without the watermark, takes Onset Studio ($79, one-time).

Why it suits this crowd specifically

• It runs entirely on your machine. Nothing uploads, ever — no cloud editor will touch this material anyway, and this one doesn't need to. There's also a Discreet Mode that blurs every thumbnail and hides the app with one keypress.
• It's built for long source scenes. Most of us feed it 20–40 minute full scenes, and it splits them into usable clips automatically.
• Performer tagging. Tag ~5 clips of someone once, and it finds every other clip of them in your library — then you can build an edit around just them.
• It speaks funscript, in both directions: export a track's beat grid for scripting, or drive an entire edit from a script you already have.
• Cock hero sessions are built in. A beat meter drawn into the video that lands on every beat, rounds with breaks and 3-2-1 countdowns, and sessions up to an hour long. All of it is in the free demo, which renders the first minute; Studio renders the whole session.

The workflow, start to finish

1. Ingest — point it at your clip folder or full scenes. It analyses everything once; after that the library is reusable for every future edit.
2. Pick a song — anything you've got. It finds the beats and the drops itself.
3. Pick a driver + preset — the driver decides which clips play at each energy level, the preset decides how it looks.
4. Re-roll and tweak — don't like a section? Re-roll it, swap individual clips, drag clips into place, or split and move cuts on the beat. Press Space to watch a clip with the song before you render anything.
5. Export — or, on Studio, click Premiere / Resolve to open it as a timeline in Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve or Kdenlive if you'd rather finish by hand.

Tutorials

Walkthroughs for the parts worth learning properly:

• How to make a PMV — the full beginner path
• Beat grid export for scripters — funscript, Audacity labels, CSV
• Pacing & energy curves — why an edit feels flat, and how to fix it
• Cock hero workflow — rounds, escalation, beat meters
• Hypno PMV techniques — loops, overlays, repetition

Is it actively developed?

Yes, noticeably so. v1.3.0 (October 2026) put every feature in the free demo and made the timeline editable by hand, less than three weeks after v1.2.0 built the cock hero beat meter, rounds and countdowns into the render. I track each release in plain language here, focused on what it changes for us rather than the full engineering changelog.