ClipReady requires an Apple Silicon Mac and macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Intel Macs are not supported.

1.0.4 — September 10, 2026

The AVCHD release. On the Mac App Store and as a direct download; every fix from the unreleased 1.0.3 is included, so updating from 1.0.2 gets all of it.

Interlaced AVCHD that stops juddering

Some tools rewrap interlaced AVCHD by storing each field as its own sample. Final Cut then reads 25 frames a second as 50 half-frames, and the picture judders even though every pixel is intact. ClipReady now pairs those fields back into complete frames, without re-encoding the video. This covers MP4 files that were already rewrapped this way, not only fresh camera clips.
Known H.264 field order is preserved, so Final Cut and other Apple apps read the footage the way it was shot. Native 23.976p stays progressive, and footage recorded inside 60i keeps its original cadence.
A per-file Field Dominance setting: As detected, Progressive, Upper First, or Lower First. It appears only when ClipReady positively detects uniformly interlaced video, and progressive, mixed-cadence, or uncertain sources cannot be overridden. It changes how the fields are declared, never the picture: it does not deinterlace, perform inverse telecine, or alter frame timing. When to use it.
Film DVDs that ClipReady verifies as soft telecine are restored from 29.97 to 23.976 and labeled Progressive automatically, so there is nothing to set. Hard telecine and mixed cadence are left exactly as detected.
Timecode and previews now follow the picture rate for these sources.

AVCHD that scrubs in Final Cut

Long-GOP AVCHD could make Final Cut crawl: scrubbing stalled and stepping backward a frame took seconds, because the editor had to decode forward from the start of the clip. ClipReady now keeps every H.264 and HEVC recovery point indexed, so Final Cut starts nearby instead. The picture is untouched.

AVCHD audio that plays

MOV files prepared from AVCHD clips could be silent. The audio was present, but an incorrect format tag stopped QuickTime and other Apple apps from playing it. ClipReady now writes the correct tag, with no re-encoding. To repair an affected file, add it to ClipReady again.
AVCHD previews no longer fail after the start of a clip, and trim positions are correct for sources whose timestamps do not start at zero.

Checked before it is saved

Every H.264 output is checked for complete frame samples, every detected recovery point for its index entry, and every audio track for whether Apple can decode it. Apple must read the planned field count and field order, and validation reads the frame rate the way Apple stores it, including for field-paired footage. A file that fails any of these is not accepted.

Also

Text subtitles in films longer than 36 minutes keep a standard 32-bit track header, so older QuickTime-based tools read them reliably.
The Stereo mix style setting is gone; it no longer did anything. Faithful and Night mode are chosen on each output row.

1.0.2 — September 7, 2026

First public release. Available now as a direct download; the Mac App Store version is in review.

Clean frames in Final Cut

Blu-ray and UHD sources lean on open GOPs, where a picture can look like a keyframe and still need the one before it. A file that offers those as safe places to begin invites Final Cut to start decoding at one, and a single frame comes back as colored blocks, at the same timecode every time, in playback and in the browser preview. ClipReady marks them as partial entry points instead, which is a distinction the QuickTime format has always carried. Scrubbing stays as quick as before, and the picture is untouched.
Measured on a Blu-ray H.264 remux: 606 advertised entry points, of which 200 were genuinely independent. Both files were then decoded frame by frame and compared, and 10,729 of 10,729 hashes were identical. The full account.
Every file is checked before it is saved: if any entry point is not one a decoder could really start at, the job does not pass.

The plan, before anything runs

Every track is labeled Preserve, Convert, or Incompatible, with the reason. The label and the command that runs are built from the same resolved plan, so they cannot disagree.
Video is carried across as-is. H.264, HEVC, MPEG-2, and ProRes bitstreams are copied, never re-encoded, because there is no encoder on the default path.
VC-1 and AV1 are declined rather than re-encoded behind your back, and the row names the stream that stopped it.

Timing

MKV’s millisecond timebase is snapped back onto the exact frame grid, so 23.976 reads as 23.976 rather than 23.81.
Soft-telecined NTSC DVDs are restored to their true 23.976 film rate, with no inverse telecine, no re-encode, and no dropped frames. Hard telecine is called out rather than faked.
A timecode track is written at the output rate, and chapters ride along.

Audio: what the file holds

Source audio lists every track in the file with its format, layout, sample rate, and bitrate, and what will happen to it. None of it is a control. Where a track cannot be carried, the reason is printed under it rather than hidden behind a tooltip.

DTS-HD Master Audio and TrueHD are converted to 24-bit PCM. Tracks Apple’s stack already plays are copied as they are.
Channel layouts are verified against CoreAudio’s own decoder, the one Final Cut and QuickTime use, instead of being assumed from the source tags.

Audio: what the finished file gets

Output audio tracks is one row per track the output will contain, which keeps two questions apart: what the file holds, and what you want out of it.

A row’s source is a picker, so one source track can feed two outputs. Pick the same DTS track twice and take a 24-bit PCM copy to cut with and a compact one to hand off, out of a single pass.
The first row is the default track. QuickTime and most players take that one and a listener there cannot switch, so the order is a decision rather than a detail. Drag a row to set it, or use Move Up and Move Down.
Setting a row to None removes it, and the trailing None row is how you add one. There is no separate include checkbox that could disagree with the list.
Mixdown and bitrate are columns, at fixed widths so they line up down the table. Gain, dynamics, and the track name are in the row menu, and each row’s second line says what those add up to, so nothing they change is silent.
Optional loudness-corrected stereo downmix, with a night-mode variant.

Ranges

Set In and Out on the source preview, or pick a chapter span, and get that stretch as a clean MOV with timecode stamped for the in point. It lands on the nearest earlier keyframe and says so. One range per file.

After the job

Every finished file is loaded back through AVFoundation and VideoToolbox before it is reported as done: playable, decodable, right track counts, right duration, right timecode, right channel layout. If a check fails, nothing is saved.

Privacy

Sandboxed, with no network entitlement. The bundled ffmpeg and ffprobe helpers are built with network support compiled out and inherit the sandbox.
No account, no analytics, no crash reporting.

Known limitations

Blu-ray .m2ts disc rips and AVI camera variants are untested and unsupported. AVCHD .MTS and .m2t camera files are verified.
Bitmap subtitles (PGS on Blu-ray, VobSub on DVD) stay in the original file. MOV and MP4 have nowhere to put a picture-based subtitle.
One job runs at a time. A single file already saturates the disk.
Spanned camera cards and variable-frame-rate screen recordings are out of scope.