Questions & answers
48questions — what LiftShot does with a whole night's footage, what Mac it needs, what it costs, and what it won't do. Written by the musician who built it, off gigs he actually played.
Last updated August 2026
01 — 6 questions
LiftShot is a Mac app that takes a whole night's gig footage and the desk recording and gives you back every song as its own finished video, cut and graded and mixed, in both horizontal and vertical. I'm Aaron. I play five gigs a week, often more, and I film most of them. The filming was never the hard part. It was the four hours of editing afterwards, so I built something to do that bit while I'm asleep.
I did. I'm Aaron Norton, a working acoustic musician in Surrey, and I built LiftShot for my own footage first, on my own gigs, long before it was anything anyone could buy. Every number on this page is measured off nights I actually played. It isn't a studio tool that got pointed at musicians afterwards. It's a musician's tool that other musicians can now use.
No. LiftShot replaces the four hours of repetitive work after every gig: cutting the night into songs, lining two cameras up against the desk recording, grading, mixing. An editor making a proper music video, choosing the moments and telling a story, is doing a different job and doing it better than any software will. I've got a gig most nights and no budget for one, and that's who this is for.
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.
LiftShot hands you finished song files. CapCut, Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve hand you an empty timeline, and you still have to find the songs in a three-hour file, sync the desk recording to the picture, grade it and crop the vertical yourself. Resolve is free and it's very good, so if you enjoy editing, use it. I don't enjoy it at one in the morning with three more gigs that week.
Those tools take one long video you upload and cut short hook clips out of it, usually with captions and an auto-zoom. LiftShot isn't hunting for hooks. It takes a whole gig, works out where each song starts and ends, and gives you that song complete, in both shapes. Nothing gets uploaded and nothing gets generated. A song, not a clip.
02 — 6 questions
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.
No card and no account. There's no password to create: you give LiftShot an email address, it sends you a key, you download the app and sign in with the same email. That's the whole sign-up, and it's the same email you'd pay with later, so nothing changes when you subscribe. While your week is running, asking again just re-sends the same key to the same expiry.
No. There's no watermark in LiftShot at all, not on the trial, not on the free soundcheck, not anywhere. What comes out during the seven days is the same file you'd get as a subscriber, at the same quality, and it's yours to post. The trial is limited by the calendar, not by spoiling what comes out of it.
It drops back to soundchecks. The whole faceplate still works and every control still does what it did, and what comes out is a proper video file at full quality, but until you subscribe the button that renders a whole gig sits dark. Soundchecks and the look gallery stay free, taken from the middle of your first song, so you can always see what LiftShot would do with a night's footage. It doesn't turn into a dead icon in your dock.
Yes, and it's the quickest way to try it. LiftShot doesn't need a gig this week. Drop an old night's files in, footage and recording together, and it works exactly the same, because it reads what it's given rather than anything about when it was shot. If you only want a different colour on videos you've already edited, you can drop those straight in and just grade them.
Your cameras and a clean recording off the desk, and that's it. Any cameras, one or two of them, and phones are fine. The desk recording is the spine of the whole thing, because LiftShot uses it to find where each song starts and ends and to rebuild the sound. Camera audio works as a fallback if the desk wasn't rolling, but the desk feed is the one you want.
03 — 3 questions
LiftShot finds each song on the clean desk recording and cuts it out as its own video, so a three-hour file becomes a folder of songs. It reads the beat too, so the camera changes happen on the beat and not near it. A one-hour set usually comes out at 13 to 15 songs on my gigs and a two-hour gig at around 26, depending on how long you play and how much talking you do.
No. LiftShot syncs the cameras to the desk recording by sound alone, across the whole night, without you having to clap at the start of anything — multicam or a single angle, it works the same. Drop the files in and it works out which camera covers what and where each one sits against the audio. It also scans for memory card damage on the way in, so damaged seconds never turn up in a finished song.
No. LiftShot starts in full auto: drop the night's files in, press transform, and that's the whole job. If you touch a dial, that's the only control you've taken off auto. Every other strip carries on working it out for itself, and one press puts the lot back. The faceplate reads left to right in ten numbered stages, input through to output, laid out like an amp.
04 — 14 questions
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.
Less far than you think. It rests at 35, and full strength is built to be more than anyone would ship: the idea is that you see it, decide it's over the top, and back it off until it's yours. Most people sit around half. Every look starts on clean, which is the measured grade reading your own frames and fixing what's wrong, so you can also just leave it alone.
LiftShot delivers every song twice, horizontal at 16:9 and vertical at 9:16, in separate folders so they drag straight into YouTube one way and Shorts or Reels the other. On landscape footage the vertical is a crop of the finished horizontal, so the edit, the colour and the sound are identical in both. Shoot vertical and it goes the other way round, with the 9:16 rendered full size. The crop sits still while you're in frame and only moves when you actually walk.
2560x1440 is the ceiling. LiftShot delivers MP4, HEVC, 30fps, at 2560x1440 where your source is that wide and 1920x1080 where it isn't, with AAC audio at 256kbps. Shoot in 4K by all means, because the extra pixels do get used: a punch-in is a real crop into your footage, and LiftShot never stretches source pixels past their native size to fill a frame. It just doesn't deliver a 4K file.
One camera is enough. LiftShot builds different shot sizes out of a single wide angle, framed on your face and your mic and cut to the beat, so a one-camera night doesn't come out flat. Give it two and you also get the match stage, where it measures skin tone on each and pulls them to a common middle, and it picks the angle: if someone blocks one camera the shot rolls to the other.
Yes, and a phone alongside a proper camera is fine too, because LiftShot works out what it's been given from the files themselves. iPhone HDR is handled: it's tonemapped down before anything is graded, so it doesn't come out grey and flat. What matters far more than the camera is where you put it and what the light is doing. A phone pointed straight at a spotlight is going to look like a phone pointed straight at a spotlight.
Video: .mov, .mp4, .m4v, .mts, .m2ts, .avi, .mkv and .webm. Audio: .wav, .aif, .aiff, .flac, .mp3, .m4a and .aac. Any frame rate goes in and LiftShot delivers 30fps; 4K and HDR go in and come out tonemapped to 1440p. Drop everything from one gig in together, cameras and recording, and it sorts out which is which.
Because a desk feed has no room in it. LiftShot builds the finished sound from your clean desk recording with the room put back underneath: the camera mic sits under it as ambience at 75%, ducking further while you're singing, so it sounds like the room on a good night rather than a dead desk feed. EQ and compression are on by default, with the amount measured rather than guessed. Reverb is off unless you ask for it.
You'll probably still get it. If a camera was rolling before the desk was, LiftShot rescues those early songs from the camera's own sound and delivers them anyway, marked in the song list so you know which ones they are. It needs the camera to have a decent head start, and if nothing was rolling that early the song is reported as no footage. That's happened to me on a first song more than once.
It still works. With no clean recording in the folder, LiftShot takes the timeline from the camera's own sound and treats it properly, because untreated camera audio always needs it: equaliser, compression, level, limiter. With two cameras and no desk, it measures which one holds the clearer voice, uses that as the main sound, and tells you which it picked rather than guessing quietly.
Yes. Drop two or more audio files with the part names in the filenames, so vocal, guitar, bass, keys, drums or backing, and LiftShot mixes them into one full bed first, then treats that bed exactly like a desk recording. Song detection runs on the mixed bed and never on a single stem, because the guitar and the vocal don't start the song at the same moment.
It's built around one performer. You teach LiftShot your face once, with a photo or any footage you're in, and from then on it frames you in every gig however crowded the room, which matters because the biggest face in shot is usually somebody in the front row. In a band, the framing follows whoever you taught it, and the vertical crop favours them. Everything else, the song splitting, the sync, the grade, the sound, is the same.
Yes, and there are two ways. Soundcheck renders 30 seconds from the middle of your first song through the entire chain at your current settings, a real video at full quality, and it saves a new version each time so you can put two settings side by side. The look gallery gives you the same frame seven times on one labelled contact sheet: ungraded, your own settings, then auto, warm, cinematic, cool and full vintage texture.
Yes. Drop the original files back in, dial a different look and press regrade: LiftShot lays the new look over the delivered songs in minutes each rather than re-rendering the night, keeps the originals, and re-crops the verticals to match. It's a grade laid over a finished render rather than baked into it, which is why it takes minutes instead of a night.
05 — 8 questions
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.
Yes. There's a separate native Intel build, not the Apple Silicon one shoved through Rosetta, and it needs macOS 13 (Ventura) or later. Plenty of working musicians are still on an Intel MacBook and I wasn't going to leave them out. An older or slower Mac takes considerably longer per gig, because almost all of the render time is video encoding, but it does the same job.
No. LiftShot is Mac only. It uses Apple's own hardware video encoder and decoder to do the work on your machine, and that's a large part of why a whole gig can render overnight at all. If you're on Windows, it's no use to you.
£19.99 a month, or £199 a year with two months free, for unlimited renders on your own Mac. Cancel any time. That's the founding price. It goes up once LiftShot has proven itself, but if you're on the founding price you keep it for as long as you stay subscribed. It's billed in pounds, wherever you are, and there's no account to create: you sign into the app with the email you pay with.
Cancel any time, and you keep everything. The videos are MP4s in your own Music folder on your own Mac. LiftShot never had them anywhere else, so there's nothing to lose access to and nothing to export on your way out. When the subscription lapses the app stops rendering new gigs and drops back to free soundchecks. Your finished songs are just files, and they stay files.
Yes. The licence is tied to your email address, not to a machine, so signing in with the same email on your laptop and your desktop both work. There's no activation count and nothing to deactivate when you change Macs. LiftShot renders one gig at a time on each machine, so two Macs genuinely does mean two gigs overnight.
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.
It renders offline. Everything happens on your own machine, and the licence is checked against a key built into the app, so no wifi at the venue changes nothing and you're never locked out mid-gig. The only thing it needs the internet for is renewing that licence, and it can go a full billing period without. If it does try to reach out and can't, it fails quietly rather than stopping you.
06 — 5 questions
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.
More than you'd think. On my own gigs a one-hour set delivers somewhere between 8 and 12GB of finished songs with both formats together, roughly 600 to 900MB a song, and that's on top of the original footage, which still needs to be on the drive while it renders. If you're doing three gigs a week, plan for the space before you plan for the time.
You don't have to do anything. While there's work in the queue LiftShot holds the Mac awake so it can't idle itself to sleep halfway through the night, and it hands that back the moment the queue drains. Leave it plugged in, leave the lid open if it's a laptop, and go to bed.
You don't lose the songs it already delivered. LiftShot keeps a record of what's been rendered, so putting the same gig back in picks up where it stopped and skips everything already finished instead of starting the night again. Every gig also gets a report listing each song and where LiftShot fell short, so you can see what didn't make it and why.
No, and nothing else will fix it either. A face burned to white by a light a metre away is a clipped signal, and there's no detail behind the white for any software to recover, mine included. A missed focus is the same. LiftShot won't redraw the frame to paper over it. That one gets fixed at the gig, by moving the light.
07 — 6 questions
LiftShot makes its own folder at ~/Music/LiftShot Local/jobs, one per gig, and the videos land in that gig's output folder split into Horizontal and Vertical, so they drag straight into YouTube one way and Shorts the other. Files are MP4, HEVC, 30fps, 2560x1440 where your source is that wide and 1920x1080 where it isn't, with AAC audio at 256kbps. A REPORT.txt beside them lists every song and where LiftShot fell short.
Because it doesn't know what you played, so it counts the songs instead of naming them. You can fix that either side of the render: paste your setlist in before you press transform and they arrive titled, or open NAME THE SONGS afterwards and type the titles against the rows, which renames the delivered files in about two minutes with no re-render.
Yes. LiftShot renders one gig at a time, but a second job doesn't fail: it waits and starts the moment the first finishes. Each gig keeps the settings it had when you queued it, so you can line up three gigs, change the look for the third, and the first two still come out the way they looked when you put them in. The output folder opens once, when the whole night is done.
It's the talking-video mode. Every splice in the edit is machine-checked against the waveform before a file is delivered, and if a cut would clip a word the edit re-makes itself with that pause left uncut, then checks again. It can't be switched off.
No. LiftShot stops at the finished files. It's a renderer, not a publisher, and it has no connection to any platform. What you get is a folder of MP4s already in the right shapes for YouTube one way and Shorts and Reels the other, and you post them yourself. If you want the posting automated as well, that's a different job and a different tool.
You can, and I do, every week. A cover of someone else's song usually picks up a Content ID claim on YouTube, which means the money goes to whoever owns the song rather than to you, and the video normally stays up and playable. I'm not a lawyer and the rules differ by country, but for a working musician posting gig covers that's the ordinary outcome. LiftShot doesn't change any of it; it just gets the video made.
Seven days, no card
The whole app for a week, every control working, full quality, on footage you already have. Put your email in and the key is in your inbox.
This page gets updated as LiftShot changes and as people ask things that aren't on it yet.
