B-Roller
Cull a card dump in the time it takes to watch it.
Free. No subscription. Your footage stays yours.
Loading latest version…You shot a lot of footage. Now you have to figure out what's actually usable.
The interview ran an hour and the good stuff is scattered across maybe six minutes of it. The b-roll card has 200 clips and you need 30 of them. You haven't even opened your NLE yet and you're already an hour deep in importing and organizing.
That part. Before the cut even starts. That's what this does.
Four steps. Then you're done.
Create a project
Name it. Pick a location. The app makes a folder with everything in one place.
Import your footage
Point at a card or a folder. B-Roller pulls metadata, generates thumbnails, and gets you a list of clips ready to review. Copy them in or reference them in place. Your call.
Cull with the keyboard
JKL transport. i and o for in and out. 1 through 5 for ratings. s to flag for export. Watch a clip, decide on it, move to the next. Mark subclips inside the longer ones for the moments that actually matter.
Export the selects
Hit Export, pick fast-copy or accurate-transcode, choose a folder. You get your selects plus a manifest JSON describing exactly what came from where. Drag the folder into your editor and start cutting.
Features
Keyboard-first culling
JKL transport like Premiere or Avid. Frame-step with comma and period. Rate, flag, mark in and out, all without touching the mouse. Once it's in your fingers you can cull a card in roughly the time it takes to watch it through.
Subclips
Mark the good moments inside longer clips. Each subclip has its own label, its own rating, its own selected-for-export flag. The 20-minute interview becomes three 30-second moments your editor actually wants.
Cumulative filters for round-based culling
Rate everything 1 star on a first pass. Filter to 1+. Promote the better ones to 2 stars. Filter to 2+. Repeat. The filter system stacks (Favorites + 4★+ + Subclips), so you can slice the list however you need to.
Bulk add to selects
Filter the list down to your final picks, hit Add to Selects, and everything visible gets flagged at once. No need to press s on each one.
Two export modes
Fast copy for byte-for-byte exports of whole clips and stream-copied subclips. Accurate transcode through libx264 for frame-accurate trims when you need them. Pick per export.
Manifest sidecar
Every export drops a JSON manifest next to the files describing exactly what was exported, where it came from, and which subclip in/out points produced each output. Useful for handoffs and for your own audit trail.
Crash-safe project files
Atomic writes everywhere. Pre-operation backups before destructive steps. Disk-comparison guards on every save. The .broller file is plain JSON you can open in a text editor if you ever need to.
Privacy & Trust
No account. No subscription. No data leaving your machine.
Project files live on your Mac. The bundled ffmpeg and ffprobe handle all the video work locally. Nothing phones home. No cloud, no server, no telemetry.
An app on your computer that processes your footage. That's the whole thing.
What It Costs
The app is free.
There's no subscription, no API keys to manage, no per-clip charges. The bundled ffmpeg does all the work, your project files stay local, and the only thing that touches the internet is the auto-update check on launch.
macOS 11 or later. Apple Silicon only (M1, M2, M3, M4). The bundled ffmpeg is arm64.
DMG installer. Code signed and notarized by Apple.