Lightflow Studio — Native Windows

Video processing and workflow tools by Jeremy Running Photography.

Current version: 0.39.0

Lightflow Studio is a native C#/.NET 8 WPF desktop application for preparing, processing, inspecting, and recovering video media.

Features

• Filesystem-first Browser with familiar storage locations, stable Catalog identity, authoritative refresh, and Back/Forward/Up history
• Folder batch encoding with a collapsed per-file picker, allowing individual videos to be skipped before a batch begins
• Flexible batch destinations: source folders, named subfolders, or a specific output folder
• Asynchronous file details with resolution, frame rate, duration, size, codec/audio tooltips, and warning badges for media outliers
• Configurable .cube LUT library with a friendly selection dropdown
• Dedicated Settings tab for default folders, FFmpeg, batch preferences, and advanced encoding controls
• Built-in encoding readiness check for FFmpeg, FFprobe, and NVIDIA H.264/HEVC support
• Self-contained Windows installer and portable package with a verified, pinned FFmpeg build
• Named encoding presets with recommended-default restoration and custom overrides
• NVIDIA NVENC H.264/HEVC with quality, bitrate, tuning, multipass, AQ, 8/10-bit, frame-rate, deinterlace, audio, and container controls
• Branded dark-studio interface with card-based workflows and a multi-size Windows application icon
• 480p, 720p, 1080p, 1440p, 4K UHD, or source-resolution output
• High-quality NVIDIA NVENC H.264 (p7, full-resolution multipass, adaptive quantization)
• Normal, salvage, and video-only recovery modes
• Per-file progress, overall progress, and estimated time remaining
• Collapsible Activity Log that stays out of the way until needed
• Remembers the most recently selected LUT and records batch lifecycle summaries
• Protects active encodes with finish-current, close-now, and keep-running close options
• Optional recursive processing and resume/skip support
• FFprobe metadata inspection
• Full decode verification with a CSV report
• Lossless MP4 rewrapping, 1080p editing proxies, and contact sheets
• Experimental Premiere Pro V1 timeline clip exporter
• Accepts a folder path on the command line for future Explorer integration

Requirements

• Windows 10/11, 64-bit
• NVIDIA GPU and current NVIDIA driver for NVENC encoding
• .NET 8 SDK only when building from source

The installer and portable release include FFmpeg and FFprobe. Users do not need to install .NET, the .NET SDK, or FFmpeg separately.

For development builds, the app searches for FFmpeg in this order:

1. A location selected in Settings
2. ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe beside the published application
3. Windows PATH

Build from source

Install the .NET 8 SDK:

winget install Microsoft.DotNet.SDK.8

Open PowerShell in this folder, then run:

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\build.ps1

Run the unit test suite with:

dotnet test .\LightflowStudio.Tests\LightflowStudio.Tests.csproj

Versioning releases

Lightflow Studio follows semantic versioning: patch releases contain fixes and polish, minor releases add backward-compatible features, and major releases mark breaking changes or major stable milestones.

Change the product version from the repository root before preparing a release:

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\set-version.ps1 -Version 0.4.0

This updates the authoritative build version and every source-controlled place where the current version is displayed. Automated tests fail if those values drift apart.

For the complete Windows installer, portable ZIP, and SHA-256 checksums, install Inno Setup 6 and run:

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\scripts\Build-Release.ps1

Release artifacts are placed in dist. The build script downloads the exact FFmpeg package pinned in dependencies\ffmpeg.json, verifies its SHA-256, and includes its license, source, and build records in both distributions.

The Windows installer is a per-machine package: it requests normal UAC elevation and installs to {Program Files}\Lightflow Studio by default. Application binaries and bundled dependencies live there; Catalogs, Previews, settings, history, logs, and other mutable data remain in Lightflow's separately managed user-data locations. The portable ZIP remains independent of installer registration.

Pull requests and pushes to main run the complete test suite before the packaging job can begin. A semantic version tag such as vX.Y.Z publishes the validated installer, portable ZIP, and checksums to a GitHub release.

Encoding presets and advanced options

Lightflow Studio ships with four named starting points:

• Recommended: H.264 NVENC, P7, constant quality 18, full-resolution multipass, spatial/temporal AQ, and source audio copy.
• Maximum Quality: 10-bit HEVC, constant quality 16, full-resolution multipass, and high-bitrate AAC.
• Fast Preview: H.264 P4, constant quality 25, quarter-resolution multipass, and lightweight AAC.
• Efficient HEVC: HEVC P6, constant quality 21, full-resolution multipass, and AAC.

Settings can customize the codec, container, NVENC preset, tuning, rate-control mode, quality or bitrates, multipass, adaptive quantization, pixel format, frame rate, deinterlacing, audio encoding, sample rate, channels, and fast-start behavior. Invalid combinations are rejected before settings are saved or encoding begins.

The internal settings model reserves CPU, AMD AMF, and Intel Quick Sync backends for future releases. Only NVIDIA NVENC is enabled in this version.

FFmpeg setup for source builds

Install through Windows Package Manager:

winget install Gyan.FFmpeg

Open a new PowerShell window and verify:

ffmpeg -version
ffmpeg -hide_banner -encoders | Select-String "h264_nvenc|hevc_nvenc"

Alternatively, place ffmpeg.exe and ffprobe.exe under:

LightflowStudio.exe
ffmpeg\
  bin\
    ffmpeg.exe
    ffprobe.exe

Recovery modes

• Normal: retains all audio streams with stream copy.
• Salvage audio + video: discards corrupt packets where possible, rebuilds timestamps, uses the first optional audio stream, and re-encodes it to AAC with async resampling.
• Video only: processes the primary video stream and produces no audio.

FFmpeg cannot reconstruct absent media data. Salvage output may contain frozen, duplicated, skipped, silent, or visibly corrupted sections.

Premiere helper

See PremiereHelper\README.txt. Adobe has changed Premiere scripting support over time, so treat this helper as experimental and test it on a duplicate project. An Adobe Media Encoder .epr preset is required.

Notes

• Batch output can remain beside each source with a customizable filename suffix, go into a named subfolder, or use a specific destination. Source-relative folders are preserved.
• Active encodes are written beside their destination as filename.ext.lightflow. The normal media filename is created or replaced only after FFmpeg succeeds and Lightflow validates the completed partial output. Interrupted artifacts remain visibly incomplete and are safely cleaned when that exact output is retried.
• The LUT dropdown defaults to J:\Photography\LUTs. Choose another LUT folder in Settings, or use Refresh after adding LUT files to the current folder.
• Application defaults are saved in settings.json, while the most recently used batch choices are remembered separately in state.json under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Jeremy Running Photography\Lightflow Studio.
• An always-on activity log is written to activity.log in the same folder — every batch and Tools-tab FFmpeg/FFprobe invocation, its full output, application errors, and unhandled exceptions are recorded there regardless of the in-app Activity Log panel or the Show encoding details setting, which only control what is mirrored live in the UI. The log rotates at 5 MB and keeps 3 prior files (activity.log.1–.3).
• 4K output is 3840×2160 with aspect-preserving scale and letterbox/pillarbox padding when required.
• Contact sheets sample one frame every ten seconds and use the first 16 samples.
• Release packages include the exact verified LGPL FFmpeg build documented in dependencies\ffmpeg.json and THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.