The Manual Same-Day Workflow
- Card dump (15 min): Offload 3 SD cards. Organize by camera: A-cam ceremony, B-cam crowd, C-cam gimbal roaming.
- Cull (60–90 min): Scrub through 300 clips. Star the first dance, bouquet toss, speeches, sparkler exit, and the 10–15 best dancing moments. Delete duplicates and dead air.
- Rough cut (60–90 min): Import starred clips into Premiere. Drop an indie/piano track. Place clips chronologically, trimming in/out to land roughly on beats.
- Fine-tune (30–60 min): Nudge cuts, add cross-dissolves, adjust clip order for emotional arc.
- Color + export (15 min): Apply a warm LUT, export vertical 9:16 for Reels.
Total: 3–4 hours. It's 3 AM. You're running on champagne and adrenaline. The cut is okay but not your best work because decision fatigue hit at clip #180.
The Two Bottlenecks
Culling is 50% of the job. Watching 300 clips to find 20 usable ones is soul-crushing at midnight. It's not creative work — it's data processing. A human is the wrong tool for this.
Clip-to-beat matching is math. Placing each clip's emotional peak on a musical accent is something your brain does intuitively — but slowly. At 60 beats per minute in a ballad, you make 60 subjective decisions per minute of output.
The Shortcut: AI Cull + Beat-Sync + OTIO Handoff
Onset Engine attacks both bottlenecks:
- AI culling: CLIP vectors and motion scoring automatically rank clips. First dances and sparkler exits score high. Table conversations and dead air score low. The top 20 clips surface in seconds, not 90 minutes.
- Musical pacing: The PRESTIGE preset maps calm footage to quiet verse sections and high-energy moments to emotional builds — matching the arc of a wedding ballad.
- OTIO export: The AI-generated timeline exports directly into DaVinci Resolve or Premiere. Clip references, in/out points, and beat positions transfer cleanly. Start color grading immediately.
- Face-aware vertical: 9:16 crop with face detection. The couple stays centered in every vertical Reel frame.
Revised timeline: Card dump (15 min) → Onset Engine ingest + render (10 min) → Review + OTIO to Premiere (10 min) → Color grade + export (15 min). Total: 50 minutes. You're in bed by 1 AM.
The Full Wedding Film (The Next Day)
The same-day Reel is the appetizer. The real deliverable — the 8-minute cinematic film — comes after a full night's sleep. And because Onset Engine already analyzed every clip, the OTIO rough cut gives you a massive head start. Swap 5 clips, add the vows audio, grade it properly. What was a 20-hour edit becomes a 4-hour polish.