When cuts land on the beat of the music, the same footage feels more energetic. The trick is to mark where the beats are beforehand. You can do that by hand or automatically.
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If you enlarge the waveform, drum hits show up as sharp peaks; you can adjust a marker to the peak.
After placing markers, arrange and select your clips in the Project panel in the order you want, then open Automate to Sequence. Set Placement to At Unnumbered Markers; Premiere places each clip at the next marker. For fast montages this gives you a rough cut in seconds.
Instead of catching beats by ear, Sylba analyzes the music and places sequence markers on the beats.
For a thirty-second edit the M key is enough. In a fast montage with many clips, place markers and get the rough cut with Automate to Sequence. On a long track, or when the beat is hard to pick by ear, automatic markers speed things up.
Cutting on every beat gets tiring fast; in most videos cutting every second or fourth beat flows better. You can land motion on the beat, not just cuts: putting the fastest moment of a zoom or a transition on the marker often feels stronger than a cut.
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