How to Cut a B-Roll Montage to Music in Premiere Pro (With Claude)

You shot an event. There are hundreds of clips of the room, the crowd and the band, and the client wants a 60-second highlight for social by tomorrow. The music is picked. What is left is the slow part: finding the beat, choosing a few seconds out of each long clip, and laying shot after shot on the cuts.

This guide covers how to cut a B-roll montage to music in Premiere Pro by hand, with beat markers, Automate to Sequence and the right scaling for 4K footage. Then it shows the version in the video above, where Max asks Claude, through Filmit MCP, to cut a 60-second highlight of a concert called Wall Street Rocks to a track on A1. It also covers how to connect Claude to Premiere Pro and After Effects.

How do you cut B-roll to music in Premiere Pro by hand?

Lay the music down first, mark the beats, then cut every shot so it starts on a marker. The music is the spine, and the pictures hang off it.

1. Put the music on A1. Create a sequence that matches your delivery size, drag the track to A1, and trim it to the length you need.
2. Make the waveform readable. Make the A1 track taller by dragging its top edge, or double-click the empty space in its header. The drum hits show up as peaks, and that is where most of your cuts want to land.
3. Tap in the beat markers. Click an empty spot on the timeline so no clip is selected, play the music, and press M on the beats you want to cut on. With nothing selected, M adds sequence markers, which is what you want. For 2 to 4 seconds a shot, mark every bar or every other bar, not every beat.
4. Clean up the markers. Your taps will be a frame or two early or late. Zoom in, and drag any marker that misses its peak.
5. Pick your shots. Open a clip in the Source Monitor, play it with J, K and L, and mark the part you want with I and O. Event clips run long, so look past the first frames.
6. Cut each shot onto a marker. Drag from the Source Monitor with the Drag Video Only icon, so camera audio stays out of the edit, and snap the head of the shot to a marker. With snapping on (S), the clip locks onto the marker.
7. Trim to the next beat. Drag the tail of each shot to the next marker, or overwrite it with the next shot.

The cost is time. A 60-second highlight at 2 to 4 seconds a shot is roughly 20 shots, and each one starts with scrubbing a long clip for the good few seconds.

How do you use Automate to Sequence to cut to beat markers?

Automate to Sequence drops a batch of clips onto your beat markers in one go. You still choose the shots, but Premiere does the placing.

1. Set In and Out on every shot first. Automate to Sequence uses those points, so each clip brings only the part you marked. Give each shot a little more length than the gap between your markers.
2. Put the shots in order. In the Project panel, arrange them in the order you want in Icon view, or click them one by one in that order.
3. Open the dialog. Select the shots and choose Clip, Automate to Sequence.
4. Choose the settings. Set Ordering to Sort Order or Selection Order, Placement to At Unnumbered Markers, and Method to Overwrite Edit. Tick Ignore Audio so the camera sound stays out.
5. Click OK and check the joins. Each clip starts at the next marker, and with Overwrite Edit the next shot covers the tail of the one before. Play it down and fix any shot that ends short of its marker.

You do not need Scene Edit Detection here: it splits one long file into shots, and your B-roll is already separate clips.

How do you scale 4K B-roll into an HD sequence?

Select the clips on the timeline, right-click and choose Set to Frame Size. The whole 4K frame then fits your HD frame, at a Scale of 50.

• Set to Frame Size changes the Scale value in Effect Controls and keeps the full resolution of the clip. You can push in later, up to a Scale of 100, with no loss.
• Scale to Frame Size also fits the frame, but it resamples the clip to the sequence size. Push in on it afterwards and it goes soft.
• To skip the step next time, look for Default Media Scaling in Preferences, under Media, and set it to Set to frame size. New clips then come in already fitted.

What do you need to have Claude cut the montage?

• Premiere Pro, with the project open and the music on A1 of the sequence.
• Organized B-roll. Bins by subject help a lot. In the video, Claude had sorted the concert footage into bins in an earlier session, by looking at a frame from each clip: venue and stage, sponsors, speeches, performers by instrument, the crowd at the mixer and the crowd at the show. How to connect Claude to Premiere Pro shows that organizing job, and how to organize a Premiere Pro project covers the manual way.
• Filmit Studio. The free desktop app for Mac and Windows installs the Filmit Studio panel into Premiere Pro and After Effects.
• A Filmit account. Filmit MCP is free with one.
• Claude. Your Claude plan is separate from Filmit.

How do you connect Claude to Premiere Pro and After Effects?

Turn on the MCP tab in the Filmit Studio panel, then add the Filmit.io connector in Claude and sign in.

1. Install Filmit Studio. Download it from the download page and sign in with a free Filmit account. It installs the panel into Premiere Pro and After Effects for you.
2. Open the panel. In Premiere Pro or After Effects, go to Window, Extensions, Filmit Studio.
3. Turn on MCP. Go to the MCP tab and click Connect. Do this in each app you want Claude to work in.
4. Add the connector in Claude. In Claude, open Settings, Connectors and click Browse connectors (Max calls it Discover). Search Filmit, pick Filmit.io and click Connect.
5. Sign in. Claude opens the Filmit sign-in page. Sign in with your Filmit account and you land back in Claude, connected.
6. Set the tool permissions. Click into the Filmit connector. Max sets every tool to Always allow so a long job runs without stopping. The careful setup in our setup guide is Always allow for the read-only tools and Ask for the ones that change your project.

If Filmit.io is not in the directory for you, click Add custom connector, name it Filmit and paste https://mcp.filmit.io/mcp. If Claude says your editor is not connected, check the MCP tab in the panel, and restart the app if it still does not show. That is all it takes to connect an MCP to Premiere Pro, and the same connector is the After Effects MCP and works in DaVinci Resolve Studio too.

How does Claude cut a B-roll montage to music?

You describe the structure and the rules in one message. Claude reads the music on A1, looks through the bins, picks shots and lays them on the timeline with a marker on each one.

This is the prompt from the video:

Cut a 60-second highlight video for Wall Street Rocks to the music on A1, using the B-roll bins. Open on the venue before doors, build through the crowd arriving, then the band, and end on the crowd at its loudest. Cut on the beat, 2 to 4 seconds per shot, and look at the clips before you pick them. Add a marker on every pick so I can review.

Each part of that prompt does a job:

• "To the music on A1" tells Claude which track sets the timing. The music in the video is a track called Balloon Planet, from Artlist.
• The four beats of the story (venue before doors, crowd arriving, band, loudest crowd) are the structure. Without them you get a shuffle of nice shots.
• "Look at the clips before you pick them" asks Claude to check frames, so it skips the dark and blurry ones instead of picking by file name.
• "A marker on every pick" turns your review into a walk from marker to marker.

What happens next, as it plays out in the video:

1. It works out the timing. Max explains it while it runs: Claude looks at the music on the timeline, works out the beat and cuts the B-roll to it.
2. It asks now and then. Max has to allow a few things along the way.
3. It builds the cut. In the video the 60-second cut lands on Sequence 2, cut to Balloon Planet, with a marker on every pick.

Then Max plays it. The first thing he notices is that the footage is 4K, so the shots need to fill the frame, and that is a right-click away. Past that, he calls it nothing crazy, but something he could go into quickly and work with. Claude got 60 seconds of footage onto the timeline, and the labels it had put on the shots earlier, crowd pointing and the like, make it easy to see what is where.

Pro Tip: Ask for a duplicate. Every action Claude takes in Premiere Pro is its own undo step, so Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on Mac) undoes the last step, not the whole montage. Add "work on a copy of the sequence" to the prompt and your original stays exactly as it was.

Is a Claude montage good enough to post?

Not as it comes out. Max is direct about it on camera: Claude is not as creative as a person. Its cut is a first pass to look at and judge, not a finished edit.

Where it helps is the first hour. Instead of scrubbing hundreds of clips, you start with a 60-second cut on the music, in the order you asked for, with every pick marked. Max calls it a first look, something you could hone in on and polish. The rest needs an editor: swapping weak shots, holding the hero moment a beat longer, finding the shot for the drop.

How do you review and polish the cut Claude made?

Walk the markers, fix the scaling, then make the taste calls. The order matters, because the technical fixes change how the shots look.

1. Fit the frame. Select all the clips on V1, right-click and choose Set to Frame Size if they do not fill the frame.
2. Step through the markers. Open Window, Markers to see every pick in a list, or press Shift+M to jump from one to the next. Each marker is a shot to keep or replace.
3. Swap the weak shots. Find a better moment in the same bin, mark it with I and O, and overwrite it onto the same marker so the cut point stays on the beat.
4. Nudge the cuts. Use the Rolling Edit tool (N) to move a cut a few frames without changing the length of the piece.
5. Run a QC pass. Check for gaps, flash frames and clips that run past the music. How to QC a Premiere Pro timeline walks through it, with Claude or by hand.

What other montage prompts can you try?

The same idea works for most music-driven B-roll edits. Change the structure, the length or the pace in the prompt.

• A shorter cut-down. "Duplicate the highlight and cut a 30-second version to the same music. Keep the opening and the ending, and drop the weakest picks in the middle."
• A string-out instead of a cut. "Make a new sequence with the five best shots from each crowd bin, in a row, with a marker naming each one." That is a selects reel to choose from, and how to make a B-roll selects reel covers it in detail.
• B-roll over a voice. If the edit has talking under it, the job is cutaways, not a montage. See how to cover jump cuts with B-roll.
• A rough cut from a script. For a narrated piece, how to make a rough cut with Claude builds the edit from the narration instead of the music.

Where does it stop?

• Taste is yours. Claude follows the structure you give it and can tell a dark frame from a good one. It does not know which moment of the night the client cares about.
• Long clips need good picks. Some of the band clips in this project run many minutes. Check that the picks come from the active part of a clip, not its first frames.
• It works on your real project. The changes land as normal undo steps, and Claude does not delete media from the project unless you tell it to. Save before a big job, or ask it to work on a copy.
• Free accounts have a daily limit. A montage takes many actions: reading, looking at frames, placing clips, adding markers. Free accounts get 50 actions a day, and Filmit Studio members get full MCP access. See pricing.

What should you look for in a free MCP for Premiere Pro and After Effects?

If you're looking for the best free MCP for Premiere Pro and After Effects, here's what to check before you trust one with a client project:

• It works inside the real app. The edits happen in Premiere Pro or After Effects, in the project you have open, not in an export you import back.
• Edits are normal undo steps. You can see each change on the timeline and undo it like your own.
• It can work on copies. It should duplicate a sequence when asked and leave your media alone.
• It covers your hosts. One connector for Premiere Pro and After Effects saves setting things up twice. DaVinci Resolve Studio is a bonus if you use it.
• It has a real free tier. You should be able to try it on a real job before you pay for anything.

Filmit MCP checks those boxes: it is the Claude connector for Premiere Pro, After Effects and DaVinci Resolve Studio, and it is free with a Filmit account. For Claude MCP for video editing in After Effects, with comps and layers instead of sequences, see how to use Claude in After Effects.

Getting started

Filmit MCP is free with a Filmit account, and your Claude plan is separate. Install Filmit Studio from the download page, connect Claude from the MCP tab, and try the prompt on a sequence with a music track on A1 and your B-roll in bins. The Filmit MCP page has more on what it can do, and how to use Claude in Premiere Pro is a good first edit if this is your first time.