Split at Shot Changes

Split at Shot Changes takes a clip that already has cuts in it, such as a finished edit, a downloaded clip or a stream recording, and cuts it at each one, giving you one clip per shot.

Menu: Clip ▸ Split at Shot Changes
Needs: Nothing. The cuts are found on your Mac, with no key and no upload.
Agent tools: split_at_shotsget_media_analysis

Split a clip at its shot changes

Select one or more clips that show a video file’s picture.
Choose Clip ▸ Split at Shot Changes. It has no shortcut.
If Frame Job hasn’t looked at this footage yet, wait for the Analyzing sheet to finish.

Each selected clip is cut at every hard cut inside the part of the file it plays. All the cuts are one undo step, named Split at Shot Changes.

The command is greyed out until a selected clip shows a video file’s picture. Anything else in the selection is left alone: text, an image, a freeze frame, an audio file, a nest, or a clip with its picture turned off.

If the footage holds no shot change inside any selected clip, Frame Job beeps and nothing changes.

While the cuts are found

When the footage has already been read, the split lands at once. Otherwise the Analyzing sheet appears, with one row per file:

A file’s row reads	What it means
Waiting	Its first frame hasn’t been read yet.
A percentage, with a bar	How much has been read.
Done	Its cuts have been found.

The split lands as soon as every file is done. Editing commands are off while the sheet is up.

Stop closes the sheet and changes nothing. Frame Job saves what it has found every 30 seconds or so, and that stays in the cache, so a long file doesn’t start from nothing next time.

If the project changes anyway while the sheet is up, for example through an agent, nothing is split, and the inspector says to choose the command again.

What counts as a hard cut

A hard cut is a change from one picture to another between two frames. Frame Job compares each frame’s colours with those of the frames before it. It’s a plain measurement of the picture, with no machine learning, so the same footage always gives the same cuts.

A gradual dissolve isn’t a cut.
A single flash frame isn’t a cut, because the picture after it matches the one before.
A dissolve between flat-coloured pictures, such as slides or title cards, can be found as one cut.
Two shots with very similar colours can be missed, because the comparison looks at colour rather than at what’s in the frame.
Of two cuts within 12 frames of each other in the file, only the stronger is found.

Found on this Mac and cached

Shot changes are found on your Mac. Nothing is sent anywhere and you don’t need a key.

The results are kept in the project’s cache, so a second split of the same footage starts at once. See On-device media analysis.

Where the cuts land

Each cut lands on the project’s frame grid, worked out through the clip’s speed, speed ramp and reversal. In a project whose frame rate differs from the file’s, that’s the nearest project frame.

A cut within one frame of either end of a clip isn’t made, so you won’t get a piece one frame long at a clip’s edge.

Each cut is an ordinary split, so actions, word timings and graphics divide the same way.

Locked tracks and linked sound

A selected clip on a locked track is still cut. Its linked sound is cut with it when the sound’s track is unlocked, as with Split.

The clip ceiling

A project holds up to 4,096 clips, counting the clips inside nests. If the splits would pass that, nothing is split at all, and the inspector says how many clips the command would add and how many more would fit. The count includes each linked clip the splits also cut.

When it can’t run

Frame Job beeps and gives the reason at the foot of the inspector:

What happened	What to do
A file is missing or can’t be read	Relink it, then choose the command again.
The analysis of a file failed	The message names the file and the reason. Nothing is split.
The analysis is no longer in the project’s cache	Choose the command again, and Frame Job reads the file again.

With an agent

split_at_shots works on the clips it’s given, and lists any it can’t cut under skipped. Without a list, it takes every clip of a video file on an unlocked track, so a clip on a locked track is cut only when it’s named. It shows no sheet. It waits up to 60 seconds for the cuts, and if they aren’t ready it stops without splitting and keeps what it has saved so far, so calling it again carries on.

With no cut inside any clip, it reports that no clips were added and leaves no undo step. See Tools: cutting and deleting.

get_media_analysis, with the kind shots, reads a file’s cuts without splitting anything. See Tools: reading analysis.