Press Kit

Onset Engine Launches: Local-First AI Video Editor That Syncs Cuts to Music in Seconds

One-time purchase, no subscription, no cloud upload — runs entirely on your GPU.

Onset SAS today announced the general availability of Onset Engine, a desktop video editing tool that uses on-device AI to automatically create beat-synced video edits from raw footage and a music track.

Unlike cloud-based AI video tools that require uploading footage to remote servers, Onset Engine runs entirely on the user's hardware. Video files never leave the local machine, and no internet connection is required after initial activation.

The Problem

Creating a beat-synced video edit — the kind seen in music videos, sports highlights, and event recaps — traditionally requires hours of manual work in tools like Premiere Pro or After Effects: marking beats, selecting clips, timing cuts. Onset Engine reduces this to under a minute. Users point it at a folder of video clips, drop in a music track, and click Generate.

How It Works

The engine uses OpenCLIP (ViT-L/14) to analyze every frame of ingested footage, building 768-dimensional semantic embeddings. A proprietary "Driver System" maps music energy levels to visual semantics using JSON-defined tier descriptions. At generation time, the audio analysis engine detects beats, drops, and energy curves via librosa, then matches each segment to the most semantically appropriate clips. The result is a timeline where cuts land precisely on beats and visual intensity follows the music's energy arc.

Key Differentiators

1. Local-first AI — All processing (CLIP inference, beat detection, rendering) happens on the user's GPU. No data leaves the machine. No rate limits, no monthly fees.
2. No subscription — One-time purchase ($59 Core / $119 Studio). No recurring charges, no feature degradation over time.
3. Driver System — An open, JSON-based semantic control layer that lets users define exactly what "intensity" means for their content domain. Nine built-in presets ship with the product; users can author their own.

Additional Capabilities

DJ Mode (live beat-synced playback with real-time AI mixing), Autopilot (one-click ingest-to-render pipeline), stylistic VFX (cutout pop, beauty mode, film grain, VHS effects), OTIO export to Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, and multi-format export (16:9, 9:16, 1:1, triptych).

Onset Engine requires Windows 10/11. An NVIDIA GPU is recommended for best performance but not required. A free demo is available with 720p watermarked output. The full product is available at onsetengine.com.

About Onset SAS

Onset SAS is an independent software company building local-first creative tools. Onset Engine is its first product.