Whole gig in.
Edited songs out.
I'm Aaron. I play five gigs a week, often more, and I film most of them. Filming was never the problem — the four hours of editing after every gig was. So I built LiftShot. It's a Mac app: you drop the whole night's footage and the desk recording in, go to bed, and wake up to a finished video of every song. Cut on the beat, cameras matched, colour graded off your own frames, audio that sounds like the room on a good night. It edits while you sleep.
Open now
Put your last gig through it — free for 7 days
The whole app, your whole gig, nothing held back. No card — just an email, a download, and a night's footage.
I'll check in a couple of times during your trial — unsubscribe anytime.
A proper hello
Me, the app on my actual Mac, and what it does — five minutes, no polish.
Free book
Film the Gig — ten short chapters on capturing live nights worth watching. Free, straight to your inbox.
Your whole job
The night, in three steps.
Set up
Point whatever cameras you've got at the stage — phones count — and press record on the desk. That clean recording is the spine of everything.
Play the gig
That's it. No operating anything mid-song, no checking angles. Do your job and forget the cameras exist.
Drop the lot in
Back home, drag the night's footage and the desk recording into LiftShot. Overnight, every song comes out cut, matched, graded and finished.
The stages on the faceplate
What it actually does.
Finds every song
It reads the clean desk recording and finds where every song starts and ends — including the one you forgot you played.
Cuts land on the beat
Camera changes happen on the beat, not near it. The edit moves the way the song moves.
Faces framed, mic on the centre line
Every shot is reframed around the performer — face in frame, mic on the centre line, the way you'd frame it by hand.
Graded like a colourist, not filtered
It reads the picture — brightness, contrast, colour, skin, noise, clipping — and grades it off what it measured. Footage that already looks finished is passed through untouched. Your face is measured off the actual frame, and the skin outranks the look: the pop lives in the room, not on you.
Cameras matched to the main
A phone at the back and a proper camera at the front stop looking like two different nights. The main camera is the reference and never moves — the others are brought to it.
A spotlight lands on you
A soft lift on the centre, edges eased back — it reads as stage lighting, not an effect. On automatic it won't blow out a bright room: it only uses the headroom the footage has. The dial under it doses movement: a slow zoom drift and a whisper of pan, so a locked-off phone stops looking locked off.
Modern, or all the way to vintage
One knob. Clean and pristine at the bottom, fine moving film grain through the middle, and a real vintage wash at the top — milky blacks, soft top end, colour pulled back. Grain and fade only. Never dust, scratches or a vignette.
The room stays in the sound
The desk feed carries the voice; the audience bed keeps the room. Levelled and finished, but it still sounds like a gig, not a studio.
Talking videos prove themselves
In talking-video mode every splice is machine-checked against the waveform before a file is delivered. If a cut would clip a word, the edit re-makes itself with that pause left uncut.
Every song comes out twice — horizontal for YouTube and vertical for Shorts and Reels. There's a talking-video mode for spoken pieces, too.
One night, one moment
Five looks.
One frame of one of my gigs, rendered five ways. No LUTs. No filter packs. Nothing gets dropped on your footage sight-unseen — it measures your frames first and grades what it measured, so the same look lands differently on a sunny garden gig and a dark pub. The look amplifies the night you actually played instead of painting over it.
The measured grade. It reads exposure, contrast, colour, skin, noise and clipping off your own frames and fixes what's wrong — highlights protected, contrast opened up. When it decides the footage needs it, a measured dose of the cinematic character rides on top so the shot pops. If the footage already measures as finished, it says so and passes it through untouched. This is where the knob rests.
Cinematic leaning orange. The same lifted, softened base as the others with the whole scene leaned warmer. Golden hour, pub lamps, candlelight, a summer evening.
The spine — the one warm and cool lean off. Teal into the shadows against warm skin, both ends rolled off instead of clipped. The one to reach for when someone says make it look like a film.
Cinematic leaning blue. Deep saturated teal fills the room and warm skin punches out of it — vibrant, not cold. Blue stage wash, night rooms, moody sets.
The full wash on the clean grade: faded blacks, a soft top end, colour pulled back, moving film grain, and a slow breath in the colour. If you want people to say that looks like a vintage filter, this is the one — except underneath it's still measured off your own frames.
Drag across to compare →
Same gig, same second, same crop — the looks colour the shot, they never reframe it. These are the app's own gallery tiles from a dark pub on a Tuesday night, every one at full Mix — the strength you'd dial back from. Vintage is the texture dial at the top of its travel; the other four run the standard light film grain.
Full strength is too much on purpose
The dial sets how hard the look lands. Full is deliberately more than anyone would ship — you're meant to look at it and say that's over the top, then back it off. Most people land around half. Past about eighty-five it stops guarding the highlights and lets a bright window bloom out, because that's what you asked for. On raw and clean there's nothing to dose, so it sits dim.
Clean, through grain, to a proper wash
The bottom of the knob is fine moving film grain and nothing else — it never freezes into a pattern. Past the middle the film character itself comes in and grows: milky lifted blacks, a soft rolled top end, colour pulled back, a warm lean. At the top it's genuinely washed out, because if you ask for a hundred you should see a hundred. Grain and fade. Never dust, scratches, hairs or a vignette.
Stage lighting, not an effect
A soft spotlight that draws the eye to you: the centre lifted, the edges darkened and eased back. It doesn't need to track you — every shot is already framed with the mic on the centre line. On automatic it's measured: flat even light gets a strong one, a room that already falls off at the edges gets a light one, and a bright room only gets the lift the footage has headroom for.
Nothing sits still
The dial under depth doses the life in every shot — a slow cinematic zoom drift and a whisper of pan. Locked still is a tripod. Automatic is the house touch. Full is a bold, slow push, never seasick. It applies to every shot, so footage off a phone on a stand stops looking like footage off a phone on a stand.
Five rooms, every grade, full strength
The truth gallery.
Not all footage works with all grades — that's the point of this gallery. It's me, one working musician, in five different rooms, with every grading option on the same frame of each gig. Don't expect each grade to work. Pick the one that makes the footage shine. And every one of these is at 100% mix, so whatever you pick can be dialled back.
Every sheet is a real frame from a real gig of mine, rendered by the same engine you get — nothing staged, nothing mocked up. In the app this is one click: import your footage and it shows you this gallery on your own frame, before you commit to anything.
Real gigs, not stock footage
Before and after.
Four rooms from the truth gallery, each wearing a different grade at full mix. Left is what came off the camera — picture and sound; right is what LiftShot's engine made of it, colour and audio both. Single-camera edits — the desktop app runs the same engine across the whole night and every camera you point at it.
1 · A dark pub · the cool grade
What's in it: The cool grade at 100% mix, medium depth, auto movement, cuts on the beat, framed to the mic — and the camera's own sound treated: equaliser, compression, level, limiter.
2 · A marquee, daylight · the clean automatic grade
What's in it: The clean measured grade, medium depth, auto movement — and the desk recording as the voice, with the camera's room blended under it at 75% and ducked while I sing.
3 · A function room · full vintage texture
What's in it: Full vintage texture on the clean grade — grain, fade, a slow breath in the colour — plus medium depth, beat cuts, and the camera sound treated: equaliser, compression, level, limiter.
4 · A taproom · the cinematic grade
What's in it: The cinematic grade at 100% mix, medium depth, auto movement, beat cuts — and the camera sound treated: equaliser, compression, level, limiter.
Clips start muted — unmute one to hear the audio
The same four, vertical — for Shorts and Reels
Every song ships in both formats. The vertical is the engine's own crop of the finished horizontal — same edit, same grade, same audio.
Free download
The filming cheat-sheet
Two pages — where to put the cameras, how to light yourself, what to record. The setup that makes the footage worth editing. Free, no sign-up.
Download the PDFFounding price
One price. Every gig.
Getting one gig professionally edited costs more than five years of LiftShot. It replaces the editor, the editing software and the audio software — and it does the whole night, every night, without you there. Your new problem won't be having enough content. It'll be keeping up with posting it all.
Liftshot
£19.99/month
- Unlimited renders on your Mac
- Every song, horizontal and vertical
- Cancel anytime
Mac only. Apple Silicon — an M1 or newer — on macOS 14 or later, or an Intel Mac from 2017 onwards on macOS 13 or later. Not sure? Apple menu → About This Mac: if it says M1, M2, M3 or M4 you’re fine, and if it says Intel and the Mac is from 2017 or newer, you’re fine too. There’s no Windows version.
This is the founding price. It goes up once LiftShot has proven itself out in the world — founding subscribers keep their price for as long as they stay subscribed.
No account needed — you sign into the app with the email you pay with.
Or try the whole app free for 7 days — your footage, your whole gig, nothing held back. No card.
I'll check in a couple of times during your trial — unsubscribe anytime.
After the week, soundchecks stay free forever — thirty-second previews, full quality, from your own footage.
Server rendering for slower Macs is coming as simple top-ups.
Questions
The six that come up most. There are 42 more on the full FAQ.
What do I get in the free trial?+
You get the whole app for seven days, every control working, at full quality, and you don't put a card in. Three two-hour gigs in that week come out at around 80 finished songs, and double that in files if you take horizontal and vertical. My own two-hour gigs land at about 26 songs each, though it depends how long you play and how much you talk between songs. One trial per email address.
Where does my footage go? Does it upload anywhere?+
Nowhere. LiftShot renders on your Mac and your footage never leaves it. The app only ever talks to one address, and it sends one thing: your email, to check your licence. No video, no audio, no metadata. The jobs and the finished files sit in your own Music folder. Server rendering may exist later as an optional top-up for slower Macs, and it will always be your choice, per job.
Does it use AI? Does it generate any of my footage?+
No, it generates nothing. People hear AI and think slop, and I understand why. There's a face detector in LiftShot so it knows which person in the room is you, and everything after that is measured off your own frames. Once software has regenerated your footage it isn't your footage any more, and I'm not interested in shipping that.
Is the colour grade just a LUT or a filter pack?+
Neither. There's no LUT file and no filter pack in LiftShot, and nothing invents your colour: it measures your own frames and grades from what it measured. It judges the grade song by song rather than once for the night, so a set that starts in the sun in a garden and finishes in a dark room gets treated as two different nights, because it is. The look knob runs raw, clean, warm, cinematic and cool.
What Mac do I need?+
LiftShot needs macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later on Apple Silicon, or macOS 13 (Ventura) or later on an Intel Mac. There are two downloads, one built for each, and you take the one that matches your Mac. Both are signed with a Developer ID and notarised, so you won't get the unidentified developer warning. Open the DMG, drag LiftShot Desktop into Applications, and sign in with your email.
How long does a render take?+
A two-hour gig takes my iMac eight or nine hours, which is why LiftShot renders overnight while I'm asleep instead of while I sit watching a progress bar. My laptop takes roughly double that on the same footage. Almost all of it is video encoding, so the speed of your Mac is what decides it. The app shows a live countdown worked out from your own machine's recent renders, not from mine.
Play the gig.
Post the gig.
Three gigs a week is about six hours of footage. LiftShot edits all of it, overnight, without you there. Try it free on your own gig for seven days — no card.
I'll check in a couple of times during your trial — unsubscribe anytime.
AI Video — Latest
New tools, what's worth your time, and where short-form video's heading. Our take, with a link to the source.
Runway now picks the model for you — a sign the model itself is becoming the commodity
TechCrunch reports that Runway has launched a Media Router on its developer platform: instead of naming a model, you state a preference for quality, speed or cost and it picks one for you, including models Runway does not own. Rebecca Bellan writes that Runway is positioning itself as the orchestration layer rather than just another model company, after its own Gen 4.5 lost ground to rivals from Google, ByteDance and Alibaba. Our take is that this is the direction of travel for AI video generally — the models underneath are becoming interchangeable, and what still matters is the decisions made with them: what to cut, and how the finished thing looks and sounds.
Your camera roll is becoming the timeline: a new app builds the whole short from footage you already have
TechCrunch reports that Reelful, an iOS app from former Snapchat engineer Kate Deyneka, pulls photos and clips straight from your camera roll and assembles a finished short from them, adding script, voiceover, captions and music. It's sold by the video rather than by the month: packs from $15 for five, or monthly plans capped at a set number of videos. Our take is that the input still decides the output. An app can cut and caption all day, but it can't add a performance that wasn't filmed, which is why we start from one honest take of you playing.
Why we crop the vertical from the finished edit instead of re-framing it separately
Most auto-reframe tools treat the vertical as its own job: they re-detect the subject frame by frame, and on a gig video that means drifting onto a brick wall or locking onto a punter's face in the background. We do it the other way round — the vertical is a straight centre crop of the finished horizontal, so it inherits the same framing, cuts, colour and sound. One decision made once, rather than two edits that quietly disagree with each other.
From usOpenAI has switched Sora off — a reminder not to build your video habit on someone else's model
OpenAI confirmed the Sora app and site closed on 26 April 2026, with the API following in September. Tools will keep appearing and disappearing at this pace. Our take: your gig footage is the asset that lasts — keep filming, keep the edit simple, and let the tools come and go.
Auto-edit is the 2026 default — which is exactly why a polished multi-shot cut stands out
The short-form world has gone auto-edit: tools that find the highlights, add captions and reformat for every platform in minutes. It's made churning out clips easy — and that's the point: a genuinely well-cut, multi-angle performance video now stands out from the auto-slop. Effort on the edit is the differentiator again.
The AI video-editing tools, sorted: CapCut, Opus Clip and Descript each do a different job
A clear 2026 picture: CapCut styles short-form (templates, captions, auto-reframe for Reels and Shorts), Opus Clip pulls clips out of long videos, and Descript edits by editing the transcript. Handy to know the landscape — though none of them turn one fixed-camera performance into a proper multi-shot edit, which is the gap LiftShot fills.