A speed ramp — footage diving into slow motion on the drop, or whipping fast between beats — is the single most recognizable move in music-driven editing. Resolve can do it beautifully. It just makes you work for it.
The manual way (any Resolve edition)
- Right-click the clip → Retime Controls (Ctrl/Cmd+R).
- Add speed points where the change should start and end — on the beat, which you find by ear or by scrubbing the waveform.
- Right-click → Retime Curve, then shape the transition so the speed eases in and out instead of snapping.
- Set Retime Process → Optical Flow (Clip Attributes or right-click menu). For slow motion below ~50%, push Motion Estimation to Enhanced Better or Speed Warp — otherwise slow-mo stutters.
It works, and for one hero shot it is fine. For a three-minute video with a ramp every few bars, it is an afternoon of repetitive curve-dragging — and every beat you misjudge by a few frames reads as sloppy.
The automatic way (Resolve Studio)
Pulse Studio already knows where every beat is — it detected them to cut your timeline. So it places the ramps for you: it reads the energy and mood of the song, picks the moments that deserve a ramp, and animates the speed change with a proper easing curve, not a linear jump. Slow-motion dives on heavy moments, speed-up whips on energetic ones.
Every generated ramp gets Optical Flow retiming applied automatically — with motion estimation stepped up for deep slow motion — so the frames it invents look like footage, not smearing. The ramps land as real retime data on the clips in your project: you can inspect them, adjust them, or delete any you disagree with.
Where this stands today
Speed ramps shipped with Pulse Studio on August 29, 2026 and are flagged beta in the app — the newest part of a workflow that is itself in beta testing. If a ramp looks wrong on your footage, write to support@pulseedit.com with the clip details; reports go straight to me.
Everything else — the full inside-Resolve auto-edit, beat markers, audio insertion — is included in the same generation. One license, €13/month, covers Pulse Studio, Pulse Edit (for Resolve Free) and Pulse Color.