B-Roller Studio | Sounds & Colors

A note from the developer

B-Roller was for the shoot side. Watch the card, mark the good stuff, hand a folder of selects to whoever's putting the cut together. That part worked.

But it left a gap. The producer or social media person on the other end of that handoff doesn't open Premiere. They want to read along with an interview and find the moment that way. They want footage cropped for vertical without leaving the app. And if I shot in S-Log3, the footage shows up washed out on their machine and they have no idea what to do about it.

Studio is the part that comes after.

Same building principles as B-Roller. Free. Local. No subscription. Nothing leaves your machine. Just an app that does the work.

This is the first public release, so things may shift around as I learn how it holds up across different workflows. If something doesn't work the way you'd expect, email me at …. Still listening.

What it does

You've got the interview. The soundbite is in there somewhere. Maybe minute 11, maybe 23. You could scrub for it.

Or you could read.

Studio transcribes the clip on your machine. You highlight the words you want. The subclip is made from the actual word timings, with a little padding on each side so nothing gets cut off mid-word. Tweak the in and out if you need to.

Then crop it for Reels or Shorts. Color-correct the log footage to something normal. Export it. Move on to the next.

Four steps. Then you're done.

Open a project

Start fresh, or open a B-Roller project (yours or one handed off to you). Selects, ratings, flags, notes, and subclips come over intact.

Pick by transcript

Hit Transcribe on a clip. Read the transcript. Highlight the words. The subclip is made from the word timings, padded so nothing clips off. If two people are talking, Studio labels who's speaking when, so you can find a specific person's answer fast.

Reframe and color

Crop to 9:16, 1:1, 4:5, or 16:9. Drag the crop where you want. Pan across the frame for clips where the subject moves. Five sliders for exposure, contrast, saturation, temperature, and tint. Built-in presets. Import your own .cube LUTs. If you shot Sony S-Log3 or S-Log2, Studio detects it and offers to normalize with one click.

Export

Pick Original for a byte-for-byte copy of the source. Pick Processed for a re-encoded MP4 with your reframe and color baked in. Hit go.

Features

Pick soundbites by reading

Highlight the words you want. Studio makes the subclip from the underlying word timings. Transcription runs on your machine via WhisperKit. Audio never leaves the laptop.

Speaker labeling

When more than one person is talking, Studio identifies who's speaking when. Find a specific person's answer in a long interview without scrubbing through it.

Reframe for social

9:16 for TikTok and Reels. 1:1 for Instagram square. 4:5 for portrait. 16:9 for traditional. Plus a 16:9 crop-in for when you want to punch in on a wider frame. Drag the crop, pan across the timeline, see the safe areas for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts.

Color mode

Exposure, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint. Built-in presets like B&W, Warm, Cool, and Punchy. Import your own .cube LUTs. Sony S-Log3 and S-Log2 normalization implemented from the actual transfer curve formulas, not approximated with a generic LUT.

Log format detection

Studio reads the metadata at import. If your footage was shot in S-Log3 or S-Log2, the Color page offers to normalize it with one click. No more handing flat-looking footage to a producer who doesn't know what they're looking at.

Manual rotation

Sometimes a phone records sideways and the file doesn't get tagged for it. Click to rotate 90, 180, or 270.

Originals are never modified

Color and reframe are metadata. The processed export is a new file. Your originals on disk are byte-identical before and after you've worked on them in Studio.

B-Roller handoff

Open a .broller file from B-Roller and Studio imports it as a new .brstudio project. The original .broller stays untouched. Selects, ratings, flags, notes, and subclips all come through.

Crash-safe project files

Same as B-Roller. Atomic writes everywhere. Pre-operation backups before destructive steps. The .brstudio 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. Transcription runs locally via WhisperKit. Speaker labeling runs locally via SpeakerKit. Color and reframe rendering happens through Apple's own AVFoundation and Core Image. Nothing phones home.

The only things that touch the internet: the auto-update check on launch, and the WhisperKit and SpeakerKit model downloads on first run. After those models are on disk, the app works fully offline.

What it costs

Free.

The app, the transcription model, the speaker labeling model, the LUT import, the export. All free, all local, no subscription. No API keys to manage, no per-clip charges, nothing to renew.

The only thing it costs is the time you would have spent doing this work in an NLE.