Drop a video. In seconds, every scene cut is detected and turned into a storyboard panel. No upload, no account, no waiting — just results.
▶ Detect cuts now — freeStoryBoard Express uses a frame-differencing engine that runs entirely in your browser. It analyses pixel-level changes between frames and pinpoints every hard cut in your footage — typically in under 10 seconds for a 5-minute video. No cloud queue, no upload delay, no privacy risk: your footage never leaves your device.
A configurable sensitivity slider lets you catch soft dissolves, or focus only on hard cuts. A minimum-frames filter removes spurious detections caused by flashes or very short transitions.
Not all footage cuts the same way. Fast-paced content — action sequences, music videos, social edits — usually benefits from a higher sensitivity setting to catch quick cuts reliably. Slower, more observational footage — interviews, documentary B-roll, long static takes — works better with lower sensitivity, since a small lighting flicker or a subject shifting in frame shouldn't register as a cut. Soft transitions like dissolves and cross-fades are inherently harder to pinpoint than hard cuts, since the frame changes gradually rather than instantly — the sensitivity slider lets you decide whether to catch those gradual changes or only the instant, hard cuts.
A hard cut is an instant change from one shot to the next, with no blending between frames — the easiest and most reliable type of cut to detect automatically, since the pixel difference between the last frame of one shot and the first frame of the next is large and sudden. A soft transition — a dissolve, fade, or wipe — blends two shots gradually over several frames, which is why it's optional rather than always caught by default: catching every soft transition reliably means also risking false positives on shots with heavy motion or lighting changes. The minimum-frames filter exists specifically to filter out these ambiguous, very short transitions when you only want the clear, hard cuts.
Every detected cut automatically becomes a storyboard panel. Review the shots on the timeline, remove false positives or add missed cuts, then send the entire sequence to the storyboard canvas with one click. You're ready to export a PDF layout or animatic video in under a minute.
StoryBoard Express is completely free. There is no subscription tier, no credit system. Open the app, detect cuts, build your storyboard, export — all at zero cost. The app also works offline as a PWA after your first visit.
Don't have footage yet? StoryBoard Express also supports AI-generated storyboard panels. Describe a shot in text, generate a photorealistic or stylised frame with an AI image model, and add it directly to your board alongside real video captures. Mix AI-generated concept panels with actual production frames in the same project.