Public beta

Studio

The desktop half of Life2Film. Point it at an archive of raw footage and it scores every frame, finds where the scenes actually change, and assembles a montage from the segments worth keeping. Built for the case the phone struggles with: hundreds of clips at once.

Download for Mac All releases

Apple Silicon · macOS 13+ · free while in beta

Per-frame feature scores on the right, segment timeline and audio energy below the preview.
Per-frame feature scores on the right, segment timeline and audio energy below the preview.

Install

With Homebrew:

brew install --cask fortunto2/tap/life2film-studio

Or download the DMG and drag the app into Applications. It is signed with a Developer ID and notarised by Apple, so it opens without Gatekeeper warnings, and ffmpeg is linked statically, so there is nothing to install first.

What it does

01

Scores every frame

Thirty measurements per frame, from sharpness and stability to face quality and aesthetic score. Each becomes a signal you can see and sort by.

02

Finds the segments

An ensemble of detectors decides where a scene genuinely changes, instead of cutting whenever the camera moves. Shots are classified by scale, close-up through wide.

03

Assembles the montage

Segments are ranked, trimmed and laid out to a target duration. Audio energy and beat positions shape where the cuts land.

Straight from Apple Photos

No exporting to a folder first. Studio reads your macOS Photos library directly, in two ways: a picker with the Photos sidebar when you want to choose visually, and a PhotoKit export when you want to pull a whole batch. The library stays untouched: files are copied out for analysis, never modified in place.

What it measures

Every number below is computed locally, per frame, and exposed in the interface.

Is the shot usable

  • sharpness
  • stability
  • noise
  • exposure_balance
  • contrast_balance
  • brightness
  • white_balance

Shaky handoffs, out-of-focus starts and blown-out frames are scored down before anything else is considered.

Who and what is in it

  • face_presence
  • face_area_ratio
  • face_quality
  • body_area_ratio
  • animal_presence
  • text_likelihood

Faces are detected with a YOLO model; quality combines detector confidence, landmark visibility and how much of the frame the face occupies, so a sharp face filling the shot outranks a distant one.

Is it composed well

  • composition
  • symmetry
  • asymmetry
  • horizon_level
  • attention_saliency
  • bokeh
  • aesthetic_score

Framing, subject placement and depth separation, so a deliberate shot wins over an accidental one.

How it looks

  • colorfulness
  • saturation
  • hue
  • color_harmony
  • color_temperature
  • dominant_color_variety
  • entropy
  • texture_energy
  • edge_direction_entropy
  • uniformity
  • std_dev

Colour and texture signatures also tell the segmenter when the scene has actually changed rather than the camera merely moving.

Built for big archives

A phone is fine for a day or a trip. Studio is for the folder that has been accumulating for years: it runs the analysis in a native engine, keeps the scores so a re-cut does not re-analyse anything, and lets you work through hundreds of files in one pass rather than one clip at a time.

Still a beta

The analysis engine is the mature part; the interface around it is not. Expect rough edges, missing polish and the occasional dead end. It does not touch your originals: nothing is overwritten, nothing is uploaded. Even so, do not make it the only copy of anything.

Found something broken? [email protected]