ffcine

GPU video finishing in Rust. ffcine decodes camera footage, grades it (HDR tone mapping, camera LUTs, crop/scale, 3D LUTs, denoise, stabilization, user shaders) and encodes it with the frames kept in VRAM end to end: libav* (ffmpeg) for demux/decode/encode/mux on NVDEC/NVENC, libplacebo on Vulkan for the processing. Around that it renders whole timelines (OTIO, imported from DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, Kdenlive/Shotcut, CapCut or EDL) with a content-keyed segment cache, mixes audio to EBU R128, and handles the jobs before and after the edit: card offload, clip catalog, triage with transcripts, chapters and stills.

It is a set of library crates (ffcine is the facade) with the ffcine CLI on top. Design: docs/design.md.

Requirements

Linux with an NVIDIA GPU and driver: CUDA, NVDEC/NVENC, Vulkan, and optical flow (NVOFA, Turing or newer) for stabilization and temporal denoise.
ffmpeg 9 (libav*) built with CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC and Vulkan, and libplacebo >= 7.365 (API 375).
Nix with flakes is the supported way to get all of the above: the flake pins libplacebo and builds a matching ffmpeg.

Ingest and catalog need no GPU and build on macOS too (cargo install ffcine-cli --no-default-features).

Install

nix build github:macalinao/ffcine      # ./result/bin/ffcine
nix run github:macalinao/ffcine -- doctor

Or with the system libraries above installed: cargo install ffcine-cli.

ffcine doctor checks the GPU path (CUDA, Vulkan, NVENC, NVDEC, NVOF, the linked libav and libplacebo) and exits non-zero if anything is missing.

Quickstart

ffcine probe MVI_2884.MP4                                  # Canon EOS R10
ffcine grade MVI_2884.MP4 out.mkv                          # Rec.709 from the probe
ffcine grade --lut show.cube --sharpen 0.6 DJI_0001_D.MP4 out.mkv   # Osmo Pocket 4, a baked LUT

ffcine import project.otio -o timeline.otio     # from Resolve, FCPXML, Kdenlive, ...
ffcine render --profile master -o master.mp4 timeline.otio

grade defaults: bt.2390 tone mapping, perceptual gamut mapping, lanczos scaling in gamma light, 10-bit HEVC NVENC (p6, hq, qp=12, main10, p010le, GOP 24). --preview switches to 8-bit libx264; --hdr pq (or hlg) makes a BT.2020 HDR10 / HLG master instead.

Commands


`probe`, `doctor`	inspect a clip; check the GPU path
`grade`, `batch`, `looks`	grade one shot, many shots on one warm pipeline, or compare looks
`stabilize`, `jitter`	optical-flow or gyro stabilization; measure residual jitter
`import`, `subs`, `title`	other editors' projects to an ffcine timeline; `.ass` subtitles as text clips; title sequences and end screens
`render`, `diff`	render a timeline to a master with a segment cache; what changed between renders
`audio`, `sync`, `beats`	the timeline's audio mix (R128, buses, ducking); line up recorder WAVs; a song's tempo and beats
`ingest`, `catalog`, `fetch-luts`, `bake`	verified card offload; clip catalog with picture profiles; camera LUTs; camera LUT + LUT + look baked to one `.cube`
`triage`, `search`, `snap`	index a card (strips, scene cuts, transcripts); find words; snap cuts to words
`breakdown`	shot list of a reference video: cuts, keyframes, camera motion, beat, colour, speech, contact sheet
`chapters`, `tag`, `credits`, `still`, `publish`	YouTube chapters, chapters and cover art in the MP4, music credits, stills, upload to Immich

ffcine <command> --help has every flag with its default, examples and the docs page to read next (-h is the brief form); docs/ has one page per area. skills/ has agent skills: shot-breakdown turns a TikTok, reel or YouTube link into a shot list to recreate it.

Development

nix develop            # or direnv; installs the git hooks
cargo build && cargo test
cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings
nix fmt

Tests that need a GPU skip themselves when there is none, so cargo test passes on CI runners.

License

ffcine is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.

No binaries are distributed; build from source. A built ffcine links ffmpeg, so its licence terms follow the ffmpeg you link: the flake's ffmpeg is configured with --enable-gpl --enable-version3 (GPL-3.0). If you build ffmpeg with --enable-nonfree (e.g. for libnpp or libfdk-aac), the result can't be redistributed at all. NVENC/NVDEC, CUDA and optical flow come from the proprietary NVIDIA driver at run time and are not part of ffcine.