Batch video conversion · for macOS
A thousand files. One setting.
Point Proxy at a folder, choose the format once, and it works through the lot on its own. It never touches your originals, and it remembers what it has already done — which turns out to be the harder half of the problem.
Why this exists
Converting by hand means opening a file, choosing a preset, waiting, saving, and doing it again. Four hundred times. Nobody finishes.
The good copies are too heavy to open on a laptop, too heavy to send, too heavy to show anyone. So they sit on a disk and nobody ever watches them.
Three weeks in, you have two folders that no longer match and no idea which files were already converted. So you start again from the top.
Converting video is not the hard part — every machine can do it. Knowing what has already been converted, and being able to prove it, is the part nothing does well.
What it does
- It never touches the original. The light copy is written beside it, and the master is left exactly as it was.
- A folder, a rule, and it runs — hundreds of files without supervision
- Watches a folder: convert whatever lands in it, from now on
- Scriptable — put your own steps around a conversion
- Two kinds of copy: H.264 to watch and send, ProRes to edit with
- Steps aside on its own while a tape is being digitised, and picks up after
- The catalogue is read off the disk, not from a database that can drift
A word on the catalogue: it is honest about where it comes from. Proxy does not keep a private database that slowly stops matching reality — it looks at the disk and reports what is actually there. Delete a file in the Finder and the line goes amber. That is the intended behaviour.
The catalogue survives unplugging
“Do I have it, and which disk is it on?”
You ask that question precisely when the disk is not plugged in. Proxy keeps a register on your Mac: one line per item, the disk that carries it — by name and by identifier, so renaming it changes nothing — the path, the size, the date, the state of the chain. Unplug the drive and the line stays:
Nothing is ever removed from the register. A disk you have not connected in three years is still listed, and still answers.
A .tapedeckpro file at the root of the archive carries the whole index. Double-click it and Proxy opens the archive already knowing everything. Plugged into another Mac, the disk explains itself.
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. Nothing is overwritten — a name already taken is set down beside it, numbered — and Undo puts everything back exactly where it was.
Reads the date inside every master again and flags the folders whose name no longer matches their contents.
Brings in files that never came off a tape — SD card, shoot drive, an email. The date is read from the file, a copy is filed under it, the light version is made. The original is never moved.
Who it is for
Anyone sitting on more video than they can watch. Editors making viewing copies for a director. Teachers cutting a term of recordings down to something a laptop can play. Archivists, documentary makers, anyone who has inherited a hard drive and has to make sense of it.
Proxy grew out of Capturedigitises, which digitises MiniDV and HDV tapes — that is why its catalogue speaks of cassettes and record sheets. Used on its own it does not care where the video came from. If tapes are your problem too, the suite of three costs less than two apps bought separately.
Get Proxy
- Capture digitises as many tapes as you like, ten minutes of each. Enough to watch it read the date off the tape, split the shots and file them.
- Proxy converts as many files as you like, two minutes of each. Queue four hundred and watch it work through the lot.
- Mirror is not limited at all. A mirror is never finished — one week simply shows you whether it holds.
- The catalogue reads your whole archive and shows it to you. It just does not keep it: close the application and it forgets.
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.
On its own. A perpetual licence, one person, two Macs.
Nothing is on sale yet: leave your address and you will hear on the day.
Capture, Mirror and Proxy together. Capture is only sold this way.
A perpetual licence. What you buy is yours for good.
- Every update is free for one year — not one at a time, all of them
- After that year the application keeps working exactly as it did. Nothing expires.
- Once bought: activated once, then offline for good — never contacts a server again.
FAQ
Can I try it before paying?
Does the application connect to the internet?
What formats can it read?
Will it re-encode files it has already done?
Can it delete my originals to save space?
The app won’t open — macOS says it can’t be verified
Do my files stay with me?
The other two