BATS - Beat detect

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Master the Rhythm

Editing to the beat is essential for music videos, commercials, and high-energy montages. Beat Detect analyzes a clip's audio, finds the beats, and places a marker at each detected beat — so your visual cuts land exactly on the music.

How it works

When you run Beat Detect on an audio clip, BAT Server:

  1. extracts the clip's audio (between its in and out points) as a temporary WAV file,
  2. tracks the beats and the tempo with the built-in DSP engine (librosa),
  3. places a marker on the clip at each detected beat — each marker is labelled with the BPM detected at that point.

The result is a clip marked at every beat: cut on a marker and your edit lands on the beat. If the clip has an in point, the marker positions are automatically compensated.

Options

Beat Detect is a built-in system preset that ships with sensible defaults:

  • Dynamic tempo tracking (default: on) – The tempo is re-detected continuously, following speed-ups and slow-downs in the song. Off = one constant tempo is assumed across the clip.
  • Tightness (preset value: 150, engine default: 100) – How strictly a beat must sit on the beat grid. Higher = fewer, cleaner beats; lower = more beats, including weaker accents.
  • Marker colour (default: yellow) – Colour of the markers placed on the clip. Any EDIUS marker type works (e.g. blue, green, …).

Advanced – every n-th beat: The beat-detection tool also supports a --nth option (e.g. --nth 2) to place markers only on every second or fourth beat. The shipped system preset does not use this option — by default every detected beat gets a marker. For very dense material, create your own preset variant with --nth to reduce the number of markers.

How to use it

  1. Select the audio clip in a BIN (Beat Detect is registered for audio clips).
  2. Right-click the clip and select Beat detect from the context menu.
  3. Wait for the job to finish (progress is shown in the BAT Server panel).
  4. The clip now carries a marker at each detected beat (labelled with BPM).

Important: EDIUS cannot add markers to clips on the timeline. Always run Beat Detect on the clip in the BIN – the markers are stored on the clip itself. Then place the clip on the timeline: the markers appear there automatically, so you can cut right on the marker positions.

Another note: Running it again adds additional markers — existing markers are not overwritten. If you want to run Beat Detect on the same clip a second time, remove the existing markers from the clip first.

Managing the preset

Beat Detect is a system preset: it appears in the EDIUS context menu, where you can temporarily disable or delete it.

With the BAT Server's assistant you create your own context-menu entries: it asks you a few questions and creates the preset file (.bat0) for the new entry from your answers. Start the assistant from the button in the BAT Server panel or via right-click → "Add function…" — both open the same thing. This is how you create, e.g., your own Beat Detect variant with a different tightness, marker colour, or --nth. A personal preset appears in the clip context menu under its own name and is launched the same way.

The mechanism behind the context menu: a preset is a template file (.bat0) that is never executed itself. When you pick the entry from the context menu, BAT Server generates a job file (.bat) from it, fills in the clip-specific values (file path, in/out points …) and places it in the jobs folder — the BAT Server then executes that job file.

For advanced users: you may edit a preset's .bat0 file directly. Since a new job file is generated from it on every run, your changes apply from the next time you use that entry.