Onset Engine v1.0 — Pencils Down
After months of building, testing, and refining, we’re calling it: Onset Engine v1.0 is ready.
This isn’t a “minimal viable product” launch. v1.0 ships with the complete engine — three creative workflows, nine cinematic presets, a full VFX pipeline, and an AI that understands both your footage and your music. All running on your existing hardware. No cloud. No subscriptions.
What’s in v1.0
Three Ways to Create
- 🚀 Autopilot — Describe your vision in plain text, and the engine builds a complete beat-synced timeline. Fully automatic from ingest to final render.
- 🎛️ DJ Mode — Live-mix your clip library with zero-latency MPV playback. Energy-reactive clip selection, style lock, hype mode, and keyboard-driven control. Record or stream your VJ set.
- 🎬 Studio Mode — Full desktop editing environment with timeline visualization, library management, clip direction, and batch rendering. The two-step workflow (Generate → Render) gives you control without complexity.
Nine Cinematic Presets
Every preset is a complete visual identity — pacing, transitions, color grading, and effects, all tuned for a specific aesthetic:
| Preset | Character |
|---|---|
| Standard | Professional default with subtle zoom punch |
| Aggressive | Surgical beat-punches, strobe stutter, gritty phonk |
| Sensual | Warm film grading, bloom, bass-reactive blur |
| Raw | Hard cuts only, zero processing |
| Prestige | Hollywood cinematic with halation and anamorphic streaks |
| Trailer | Slow buildup → explosive climax with impact frames |
| AMV | Hyper-kinetic with ghost echoes, manga panels, motion streaks |
| Hypnosis | Trance state with color cycling and subliminal text |
| VHS | Authentic retro with tracking wobble, CRT scanlines, phosphor bloom |
AI That Runs on Your Machine
Onset Engine uses OpenCLIP ViT-L/14 to generate 768-dimensional embeddings for every clip in your library. This is the same caliber of vision model that powers cloud AI services — except it runs locally, on your hardware. No GPU required to get started. NVIDIA users get accelerated analysis and hardware-encoded exports.
The Driver System connects this visual intelligence to your music. JSON drivers define what “intensity” means for your genre — contrastive scoring ensures tier-specific clip selection, not just raw similarity.
New in v1.0
Features that landed in the final push:
- Vision Query Ingest — Describe what you want when ingesting footage. Only matching clips enter your library. Adaptive thresholding ensures the filter works across any content.
- Smart Preview — A 15-second beat-synced draft that renders in seconds. See what the engine will produce before committing to a full render. Re-roll for different combinations.
- Style Sampler — Renders your footage in all 9 presets in a 3×3 grid. Pick the style that fits, then apply it to your project.
- Multi-Format Export — After rendering, re-crop to 9:16 (TikTok/Reels/Shorts), 1:1 (Instagram), or 4:5 (Instagram Portrait) with face-aware framing.
- Adaptive ingest filtering — Vision Query uses distribution-aware thresholding that adapts to your footage, not just absolute similarity scores.
- Render Queue — Queue multiple renders and manage the pipeline with one-click cancellation.
The Technical Foundation
Every component is built for local-first operation:
- OpenCLIP ViT-L/14 — Vision embeddings (GPU/MPS/CPU)
- librosa — Beat detection, energy mapping, drop detection
- MoviePy + FFmpeg — Chunked, memory-safe rendering pipeline
- NVENC — Hardware-accelerated encoding (with CPU fallback)
- MPV — Zero-latency DJ playback
- SQLite — Local vector database for your clip library
- OpenTimelineIO — Export timelines to Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve
No files leave your machine. No internet connection required after activation.
Pricing
Onset Engine is a one-time purchase with lifetime v1.x updates:
- Free Demo — Full functionality at 720p with watermark. Prove it runs on your hardware.
- Core ($59) — Unlimited DJ Mode, 1080p rendering, custom drivers, all presets.
- Studio ($119) — 4K rendering, Triptych export, OTIO export, Highlights mode.
No subscriptions. No monthly fees. No cloud costs. View pricing →
Get Started
Download the free Demo and see it work on your existing hardware. The engine runs on CPU — accelerated with NVIDIA GPU.
The rhythm is in the machine. v1.0 is here. Let it drive.