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The Cuts answers: what are the actual shots, and what technique is each one pulling off? Instead of trusting a model’s guess about where scenes begin, videngineer detects real shot boundaries straight from the footage, then extracts each shot as a continuous clip — with audio — plus its first frame, last frame, and the real frames in between.
Grid of signature cuts, each a playable clip with a title like 'Intimate Static Two-Shot Bonding Frame'
Live example: Coinbase — ‘Break The Cycle’ teardown, The Cuts tab — 31 detected cuts.

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How cuts are detected

Two signals are blended:
  1. Pixel-level scene scores from the footage itself catch hard cuts precisely.
  2. Per-frame subject changes from the Blueprint catch the soft transitions that pixel-diffing misses — common in AI-generated montages where shots dissolve into each other.
When the subject changes between two sampled frames, the boundary is placed at the strongest scene-score moment inside that window — frame-accurate even when the transition is smooth. The detection threshold adapts to the video’s pacing, so a hyper-fast montage and a slow cinematic piece both resolve into sensible shots, and a genuine single-take stays one shot.

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What each cut contains

FieldWhat it holds
nameA technique-focused title — the production move, not the on-screen subject (e.g. “Lateral Tracking Corridor Walk”)
descriptionWhat’s in the shot
start_ts / end_ts / duration_secondsReal timing, read from the footage
clip_urlThe shot as a streamable MP4, with audio, up to 1080p
frame_urlsFirst frame + up to 5 real in-shot frames + last frame
tagsTechnique tags for scanning the grid
directors_briefOn demand: how_they_did_it, agent_instructions, use_cases, difficulty, animation_notes
recreation_promptsOn demand: a group_prompt plus per_frame entries (recreation_prompt, camera, transition_to_next) — see Recreation

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Exports

From the app’s Cuts tab you can download:
  • Recipe .md — the full cut list as a markdown brief you can hand to an editor or an agent
  • All cuts (ZIP) — every clip as a file

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What to do with it

  • Build your shot list from the cut titles. The technique names are deliberately topic-agnostic — “Symmetrical Family Portrait Composition” works for any subject. Your shot list is the titles, in order, with your content poured in.
  • Time your edit against the durations. If the reference holds establishing shots for 2 seconds and reaction shots for 1, those numbers transfer directly to your timeline.
  • Watch the first and last frames of each cut to understand the transitions — what image the editor cut from and to is usually the trick.
  • Reference, don’t copy. The clips exist so you can study the technique; the recreation layer turns each technique into prompts for building your own footage.

The Blueprint

The aggregate stats these shots roll up into.

Recreation

Per-cut recipes and prompts for rebuilding each technique.

Sound layer

What the audio is doing during each of these shots.

Cast

The recurring people, places, and props these cuts are made of.