What's New
Every feature and improvement added to the program itself, straight from development.
B&W Auto-Recommend: Let the App Read Your Footage
The Black & White engine has eight real film stock emulations — Kodak Double-X, Tri-X, T-MAX, ORWO UN54, ORWO N74, Ilford HP5+, Pan F Plus 50, Delta 3200 — and until now, picking the right one meant knowing your film stocks or clicking through all eight and eyeballing it.
There's now an AUTO-RECOMMEND button in the B&W Preview Controls window. Click it and the app takes a stratified random sample across the entire length of your video — not just the first few seconds, which could easily be a title card or one unrepresentative scene — reads the actual brightness of each sample, and matches it against the real ISO speed each stock was built for. Darker footage gets pointed toward faster, grainier stocks like Delta 3200; well-lit footage gets pointed toward finer-grained, lower-ISO stocks like Pan F Plus 50. That's the same logic a photographer uses picking film stock for available light, just automated.
It shows you the top 3 matches, not just one, each with a one-sentence reason grounded in what it actually measured — and an Apply button that drops you straight into that preset, sliders and all.
- Stratified random sampling across the full video, not just the opening seconds
- Brightness read directly from the footage and matched to each stock's real-world ISO speed
- Top 3 recommendations, each with a plain-language reason — not a black box
- One click to Apply — routes through the same preset system as the regular buttons, so every slider updates and the live preview restarts automatically
As always, working on additional improvements all the time. Cheers!
iPhone Import: Steadier on Older Phones
A customer running an iPhone 8 hit a problem importing his library — the app would close on him during the preview-thumbnail stage. His crash reports are what made this findable, so thank you.
Two things came out of it. First, a real bug: on some phones the app misread one of Apple's internal folders while working out where previews are kept. That's fixed.
Second, and more useful long term — the step that talks to the phone now runs in a separate helper process. If it ever fails on a phone or iOS version I haven't seen, the helper stops and the app keeps running instead of closing. Your videos still import in full quality; at worst the preview pictures are missing.
- Fixed a folder-detection bug that could stop the app during iPhone import
- Preview lookup now runs isolated, so a failure there can't take the app down
- If previews can't be read, the app remembers and quietly skips that step next time
- Sideways iPhone clips now play the right way up in the Director's Chair Player
Worth knowing: on some older iPhone and iOS combinations the preview thumbnails may not be available at all. Videos still transfer at full original quality either way — and once they are on your Mac, Finder's Gallery view (Cmd+4) shows previews regardless.
As always, working on additional improvements all the time. Cheers!
Crash Reporting & Crash History
Software crashes sometimes — it happens. What used to happen next was a confused back-and-forth trying to figure out what went wrong on your machine. Not anymore.
There's now a Crash History button right next to Exit. It sits quietly out of the way in gray until something actually goes wrong — if the app didn't close cleanly last time, it turns red and flashes so it's impossible to miss.
Click it and you get a real diagnostic report: what the app was doing, your system info, and the actual error — plus a running history of your last 20 crashes, so nothing gets lost if you're not around when it happens. Select any entry, hit Copy to Clipboard, and paste it straight into a support email. That one paste tells me exactly what broke, which means an actual fix instead of guesswork.
- Only tracks issues inside FFmpeg Commander itself — nothing about your system or other apps
- Keeps your last 20 crashes, so a history survives even if you update to a newer version
- A Clear History button if you'd rather not keep it around
Rolling out on Mac first, with Windows and Linux right behind it.
As always, working on additional improvements all the time. Cheers!
Director Workbench: Text Overlay Timeline
Text Overlay in the Director Workbench now has its own dedicated, color-coded swim lane right in the Player's timeline. Drop as many text overlays as you want directly onto the timeline visually, exactly where you want each one to start and end.
Each overlay is fully customizable:
- Custom colors and fonts, including your own system fonts
- Pick a Frame — click exactly where in the frame you want the text to appear, instead of guessing at coordinates
As always, working on additional improvements all the time. Cheers!