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Getting Started

Transduce is a throughput tool, not a persistent editing project: import a batch of clips, normalize/grade them, export a conformed set of files, move on. It isn't an editor — no timeline, no cuts, no transitions. The output is material ready for editing, not the edit itself.

The basic workflow

  1. Import clips. Drag files into the Input Panel, or use File → Add Clips… (Ctrl+I). Each imported clip appears in the Input Panel's clip bin.
  2. Select a clip. Clicking a clip in the Input Panel loads it into the Viewer and the Colour Panel. Multi-select (Ctrl/Shift-click) to work with several clips at once.
  3. Grade. Use the Colour Panel's scrubby controls (Lift, Gamma, Gain, Offset, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Hue, Shadow Lift, Highlight Rolloff) to correct and grade the clip. Add correction layers via the Layer Stack if you need more than one pass. Qualifiers (HSL, RGB, Skin, Luminance) let you target a correction at a specific colour range instead of the whole frame — see Masking & Qualifiers.
  4. Check your work. The Colour Panel's own Waveform/Vectorscope scope display gives you standard grading scopes; the Viewer's Source / Active Layer / Active Mask / Final Output modes let you compare the original, the stack built up through your current layer, a qualifier's selection, and the full composite. See Viewer.
  5. Export. Open the Output Panel (or File → Export…, Ctrl+E) to choose an output format, destination, and naming, then check the clip ready in the Input Panel and click Render — in the Output Panel, the toolbar, or the Input Panel itself; all three trigger the same render. Live progress and a Cancel button appear in the Output Panel's own bottom bar while it runs. See Export Formats for what each format and option actually does.

Example workflows

Conforming AI-generated footage

The most common starting point: a folder of clips out of several AI platforms (Runway, Kling, Sora, Midjourney, Pika, etc.), each with its own colour space, resolution, and frame rate — none of it consistent from clip to clip, let alone platform to platform.

  1. Drag the whole batch into the Input Panel. Transduce detects each clip's source colour space automatically; if a platform can't be detected from container metadata, it falls back to sRGB 8-bit and flags the clip so you know to check it.
  2. Select clips (multi-select to work through several at once) and grade in the Colour Panel — this is where lifted blacks and compressed midtones common to AI output get corrected. Use qualifiers (Masking & Qualifiers) if a correction needs to target a specific colour range rather than the whole frame.
  3. If several clips need to match each other, open the Color Match Panel (Ctrl+Alt+C), mark the best-looking clip as the reference, select the rest as targets, and press Match to bring them toward it automatically. Treat the result as a starting point: each layer's opacity control (in the Layer Stack) lets you dial back an overcorrecting match, and individual touch-ups after the match are the normal workflow, not a sign something went wrong.
  4. Export to whatever the edit needs next — CineForm or Uncompressed for dropping straight into an NLE, or OpenEXR/DPX if the batch is headed into a VFX or compositing pass. See Export Formats.

Conforming a professional plate/VFX batch

The same pipeline applies to source that didn't come from an AI platform at all — camera-original plates, scanned footage, or any batch that needs a consistent colour space and bit depth before handoff.

  1. Import the batch; override the detected colour space per clip if the source uses a specific camera log the auto-detection didn't catch (Project Settings' Production Reference Analyzer can read a reference frame to set this automatically).
  2. Grade and/or pass through with minimal correction if the batch just needs technical conformance, not a creative grade.
  3. Export to OpenEXR or DPX (see OpenEXR / DPX Sequence) for compositor handoff, matching whatever colour space and bit depth the recipient has specified.

Data model

Transduce organizes work into two levels — organizational only, no editorial relationship implied:

  • Project — the global output spec: resolution, target aspect ratio, codec, colour space, frame rate, naming conventions. Managed via Project Settings… (Ctrl+Shift+,), with live quick-access to the resize fields on the toolbar Resize bar.
  • Clip — a single source file: its detected (or overridden) colour space and source platform, its own colour correction layers, crop offset, effects, and export status.

Colour pipeline

Everything Transduce does internally happens in a single, consistent working space: ACEScg (a wide-gamut, scene-linear colour space). Source footage is converted into it on import; every export format converts back out of it according to that format's own rules (see Export Formats). Nothing is baked in or clipped until the moment of export.

Module Manager

Some encoder/decoder formats ship as individually toggleable modules rather than being permanently built in — see Module Manager for how to enable, disable, or remove them.