Culling video

Video culling lives in its own tab beside the photos. Everything you know already applies: the same flags, the same stars, the same queue, the same commit.

Supported today: MP4, MOV and M4V.

Poster frames

A grid of video needs a picture per clip, and Cullant has no video decoder of its own. It borrows one:

• On a desktop it calls ffmpeg. You need version 7.0 or later on the PATH.
• On Android it uses the phone’s own frame extractor, so there is nothing to install.

ffmpeg is optional. Without it, Cullant skips the poster frames and everything else still works. The clips are catalogued, filtered, rated, played and committed as normal. Install ffmpeg later and the next scan fills the blanks in.

A clip that is genuinely broken is marked as such and not retried. A clip that is only missing a decoder is not, which is why installing one later works.

Playing a clip

Cullant tries three things in order:

1. The browser’s own video element, which handles most files with no help at all.
2. An in-app repackage. The clip is rewritten into a container the player accepts without re-encoding a single frame, so it is fast and the quality is untouched.
3. Handing the clip to whatever application you normally open it in.

The middle step is what makes most .MOV files from a camera play on a phone, where the native player refuses them.

What is not there

This is culling, not editing. There is no trimming, no scrubbing by frame and no audio waveform. Mark a clip with a trim task tag and do the work in your editor.