The Engine

Editing software wants to help. It snaps, it rounds, it smooths. I needed the opposite: cuts locked to the music’s real grid, not a rounded one. So I measured the song itself. Faultline runs at 133.70 BPM. A bar lasts 1.795 seconds. Those numbers came from the waveform, not from a session file.

The engine is a Swift pipeline. It reads a cut list where every edit is written in beats, keeps a running cursor through each source clip so no moment can ever appear twice, applies the grade frame by frame, and writes the master. A full pass renders in about fifteen minutes on my laptop.

The engine also enforces taste. The photographic law is code: no posterizing, no thresholding, nothing that turns light into graphics. When I loved a shot, I protected its window in the timeline so no effect could touch it. When an effect read as processing, I deleted the register entirely. Restraint is cheaper to enforce in software than in willpower.

The whole film was made by one person on one laptop, for less than the cost of a single day of traditional production.

The film and the tool have the same author. That is the point.

The Faultline case study →