The LUCIDA tools for recording and archiving · for macOS
Three macOS applications that turn a shelf of tapes and a stack of unlabelled drives back into something you can search. They digitise, they keep a second copy, they make versions you can actually watch — and they hold a catalogue that still answers when the disk is unplugged. Each one works on its own.
Made by Third Machine Studio, alongside LUCIDA, the stage-design research platform whose charter they wear.
A shelf of tapes, once it has been through
Capture digitises·Mirror mirrors·Proxy converts
One job each
Its one idea: every camcorder writes the shooting date into the tape, frame by frame. Capture reads it back, and files your video under that date — never under the day you got round to digitising it.
Its one idea: every other sync tool deletes in B when you delete in A — including the time it was a mistake. Mirror never does. What leaves the original is set aside on the copy, dated, and kept.
Its one idea: converting video is easy, remembering what has already been converted is not. Proxy reads the disk itself rather than trusting a database, so the count is always the truth.
The interface
Tapedeck speaks the language of the LUCIDA platform: flat dark surfaces that leave room for the pictures, IBM Plex throughout, and a single colour for whatever needs pointing at.
For the nostalgic
Anyone who has spent nights in front of a tape deck will know this face. Three skins take up the Sony HVR-M15E, down to the last detail:
You switch skins in the Appearance menu. Nothing else changes: same tools, same files, same archive.
Which one do I need
You have tapes, and a deck that still reads them. The clock is the problem: both are getting harder to replace every year.
You have files that exist in one place only, and an external drive you never quite trust yourself to use properly.
You have more video than you can watch, and the good copies are too heavy to open, send or show.
Two of the three know nothing about tapes. If folders and video files are your problem, Mirror and Proxy stand entirely on their own.
And whichever you use: the original is never touched, and nothing is deleted unless you decide it. That part is not a feature, it is the floor — but it is a floor a surprising amount of software does not stand on.
The one thing nobody else does
“Do I have it, and which disk is it on?”
That is the question you actually ask a video archive. And you ask it precisely when the disk is not plugged in — on the phone, in a meeting, standing in front of a shelf of identical drives.
Tapedeck Pro keeps a register on your Mac: one line per item, with the disk that carries it — by name and by identifier, so renaming the disk changes nothing — the path, the size, the shooting date, and where it stands in the chain. Unplug the drive and the line stays:
| State | Shooting date | Title | Disk | Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| complete | 2001-06-12 | ESSAIS_PLATEAU_001 | ARCHIVE 1 | 3,1 Go |
| complete | 2008-04-29 | HALLE_EST_001 | ARCHIVE 1 | 8,7 Go |
| offline | 2009-10-03 | LA_TRAVERSEE_001 | ARCHIVE 2 | 6,2 Go |
| sheet to write | 2011-03-18 | LE_BRUIT_DES_CHOSES_001 | ARCHIVE 1 | 11,4 Go |
| offline | 2014-05-22 | CHAMBRE_NOIRE_002 | ARCHIVE 2 | 9,8 Go |
Nothing is ever removed from the register. A disk you have not connected in three years is still listed, still findable, still answering the only question that matters.
Every disk carries its own identity card
A .tapedeckpro file sits at the root of the archive. It describes the folder structure, the splitting rules, the codecs — and carries the complete index. Double-click it and Proxy opens the archive already knowing everything, before it has listed a single folder. Plugged into someone else’s Mac, the disk explains itself.
The archive’s identifier never changes, so two disks mirrored by Mirror are recognised as two copies of one archive — not as two unrelated collections. Which is what lets the register tell you that yes, you do have it, twice, and here is where.
And you can still change your mind
A date misread, a title misspelt. One key moves the master, the light copy and the record sheet together, files and all. Nothing is ever overwritten: if the destination exists, the contents are merged and any name already taken is set down beside it, numbered. Undo puts everything back exactly where it was.
Reads the date burnt into every master again and flags the folders whose name no longer matches what is inside them. Useful after a year of work, when you no longer remember which ones you corrected by hand.
Not everything comes off a tape. Import brings in a file from an SD card, a shoot drive, or an email: the shooting date is read from the file, a copy is filed under it, the light version is made. The original is never moved — a card is never emptied.
Why they exist
I have kept more than a hundred tapes of performances since 2004. For years I put off digitising them, and when I finally started I understood why: the files came out in the wrong order. Everything dated the day I pressed record on the computer. Twenty years of work, flattened into one afternoon.
The dates had been there the whole time, written into the tape by the camera. I could not find a single piece of software that would read them back — so I wrote one. Then a second, because a single copy of irreplaceable material is not a copy. Then a third, because the masters were too heavy to ever watch.
They run on their own now, at night, while I do something else. Two of them turned out to be useful far beyond tapes, which is why they are sold separately.
Patrick Laffont de Lojo
Prices
This is not a crippled edition — it is the whole thing, minus the right to walk away with the result. Files made during the trial carry _ESSAI in their name so they never get mistaken for masters later, and a capture already running is never cut off mid-tape.
Capture is only available in the suite — it is the reason the other two exist. Nothing is on sale yet: leave your address and you will hear on the day.
Two folders kept identical, on any disks. Nothing is ever destroyed.
A converter, a batch queue and a catalogue. Tapes optional.
A perpetual licence. What you buy is yours for good.
That last point is not a detail. Your material will outlive this shop, and a tool that stops working when a company closes is not a tool you should trust an archive to. VAT is handled by the payment platform.
FAQ