DaVinci Resolve · Premiere Pro · Final Cut Pro · macOS
You shot the routine twenty times. Syncopate It listens to the music inside each clip and builds a timeline with every take at the exact beat it belongs to — including the ones you filmed at a different speed. Works with whichever NLE you edit in.
The hour before the edit
Every take starts at a different moment. Two of them have a second run-through buried in the middle. One is a false start. One is just the dancers walking into position with no music at all. And a few were shot to the track slowed down, so they don't even match the tempo.
Laying that out by hand is an hour of dragging clips and squinting at waveforms — before a single creative decision gets made.
How it works
The reference the dancers performed to.
A whole folder of them — or straight from the Resolve Media Pool if you are using the panel. Tell it which playback speeds you used on the day, or leave it at 1.00×.
Pick your NLE and your timeline shape. Each take is matched, placed on its own track and stacked in order — roughly two seconds a clip.
Why not just use built-in sync
Waveform sync lines up cameras that recorded the same moment — same sound, same instant, same speed. Syncopate It lines up separate performances of the same song. That difference is the whole product.
The part nobody else does
Shooting to a slowed track is how you get a move to land. It also means every one of those takes is the wrong speed for your timeline, and conforming them by hand is the other half of the hour you just saved.
Syncopate It works out the speed each take was filmed at, then conforms it for you — the change is rendered into a new file before export, so the take lands on the timeline in time, not merely in the right place.
The original files are never modified. The conformed take is written alongside them, and keeps its full resolution, frame rate, codec and picture quality — 8K stays 8K.
Deliver at 25 while you shot at 29.97, and the clips stay 29.97 — every spare frame still there for the speed ramps you add later.
Vertical, square, or both
Pick Vertical 9:16, Square 1:1 or Horizontal 16:9 — or type an exact size if you're delivering to a spec — and Syncopate It builds the timeline that shape, at your footage's own resolution. Shoot 8K and the timeline is 8K, not quietly downscaled to something safe.
So the Reels cut and the landscape cut each start from a correctly shaped timeline, instead of you reframing a 16:9 sequence after the fact.
Set the timeline to 25 while your footage is 29.97 and the clips stay 29.97 — every frame you shot still there for the speed ramps you add later. Your footage is never converted to the timeline's rate.
Fans, wind machines, a room that fought you. Turn on noise reduction and say roughly which part of the track was playing — on badly degraded audio that is the difference between nothing and most of your takes.
Trust
A wrong sync doesn't look wrong. It looks completely plausible until you scrub — by which point you've built an edit on top of it.
The match is clean and the clip is placed. Nothing to check.
Placed, but the engine isn't confident. Verify one clip now instead of discovering it three hours into the edit.
Before you buy
Said plainly, because a surprise here helps nobody.
One-time purchase
Perpetual licence. Every future version free, including the Premiere panel. No subscription.
Who made this
Sean Higgins is a director and filmmaker, and the founder of Shotography Software — a name synonymous with dance videography in Australia. Across fourteen years in film and live entertainment he has worked with Tones and I, Kesha, Jason Derulo, Ricki-Lee, The Veronicas and Cyndi Lauper, and his work runs well past the camera into lighting, visual design, and directing live concerts.
He is also, unavoidably, an editor. Syncopate It exists because the first hour of every dance edit — scrubbing waveforms to find the downbeat, over and over — is an hour that shouldn't have to be spent. It was written for his own shoots first, and tested on real ones before it was sold to anyone.