We’re a small group of people who shoot, edit, and occasionally disappear into Xcode when something in the workflow annoys us enough. Transcoder 2 is very much that kind of project. It wasn’t born from a product plan. It came out of the same conversations you probably have with your own friends — the “why is this still so painful?” kind.

For most of us the pain point was the same: shooting raw is brilliant, but the moment you dump the cards is where the fun dips. You just want to look at your clips properly, check exposure, tweak WB while the lighting is still fresh in your memory, and get on with the edit. Instead you end up waiting for conversions, fighting metadata, or pulling your hair out over Final Cut workflows that feel older than they should.

The Transcoder 2 workspace is accessible from FCP as a workflow extension

So we built a tool for ourselves. Something that lets us plug in a card, browse raw clips instantly, and sort out ISO, tint, temperature and all the usual mess before anything touches the timeline. The app reads proper camera metadata so we’re not guessing, and once things look right we can either send the clips straight into Final Cut or make ProRes files. Nothing clever: just the workflow we wanted to have years ago.

The unexpected bit came later. With the native raw workflows we added for FCP, we suddenly realised we were transcoding far less. Being able to cut BRAW, N-RAW and Canon’s CRM directly on the timeline, with all the raw parameters exposed, made editing feel smoother and closer to how we work with stills. No compound clips, no sidecars, no half-broken audio paths. Just one clip with everything inside it. The Canon Log handling for CRM was also one of those “this should’ve always been here” fixes.

Drag and drop raw media such as NRAW and BRAW directly into your FCP project

The standalone app is still the thing we rely on when batches come in or when someone dumps a timelapse’s worth of stills on us. It queues jobs, handles image sequences, and quietly does its job in the background. Not glamorous, but necessary.

Export stills sequences as videos, perfect for timelapses

We built Transcoder 2 because we needed it, and we keep improving it because we use it every day. If you’re the kind of person who shoots raw footage and also gets a weird satisfaction from understanding metadata structures or testing debayer settings at 1am… well, you’re basically who we’re talking to.

And we hope this makes your workflow a little less annoying too.