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.
Apple Silicon · macOS 13+ · free while in beta
Install
With Homebrew:
brew install --cask fortunto2/tap/life2film-studioOr 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 — there is nothing to install first.
What it does
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.
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.
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 — 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 and nothing is uploaded — but do not make it the only copy of anything.
Found something broken? [email protected]