Sync from audio
Four cameras and a sound bag, aligned to the sample. No slate needed.
Drop in the day's cards → get a synced timeline.
Clean audio, keep sync
Denoise, de-hum and voice cleanup. Each filter corrects its own delay.
Fix a noisy room without re-syncing afterwards.
Transcribe on device
Speech, speakers and timings. Nothing is uploaded.
Search a six-hour deposition for one sentence.
Burn in timecode
Timecode, date and camera name on the picture. Optional, per export.
Hand counsel a reference copy they can cite.
Proxies and exports
Cut-ready media for Premiere, Resolve and Final Cut. All audio tracks kept.
571 GB of rushes → 41 GB of proxies, fast.
Recover a card that stopped mid‑write
A recording cut off by a flat battery or a pulled card has no index, and nothing will open it. Throughline rebuilds one from a good clip off the same camera — and suggests which clip.
Panasonic .MDT is proven byte‑exact, and Canon Cinema EOS XF‑HEVC .DAT on a real battery‑pull card. Other .MOV, .MP4 and .M4V files are attempted, at a confidence it tells you. Which files it rebuilds.
Signed-off delivery
A manifest of every file, with checksums, and your sign-off recorded against it. Add an RFC-3161 timestamp if you want one.
Prove the file you delivered is the file you made.
Search every transcript
Find a phrase across the whole project, then jump to the clip at that moment.
Stop scrubbing to find the line you remember.
Who is speaking
Names worked out from what the transcript says, each with the line it relied on.
An exhibit that says “Ms. Reyes”, not “Speaker 2”.
Captions that stay put
Place them, time them, burn them in, or hand them to Final Cut as a real caption track.
One transcript behind all four, so they cannot disagree.
Certified page:line
Read the court reporter’s transcript and place its page:line against the recording.
Cite 14:3 and land on the moment it was said.
One path through the day's footage
Each stage gates the next.
- 01ImportCards and recorders into one project.
- 02SyncAngles aligned from audio, offsets you can check.
- 03TranscribeSpeech and speakers, on device.
- 04ReviewCheck sync, fix names, mark what matters.
- 05ExportCut-ready media, transcripts, checksummed manifest.
Recovering .MDT, .DAT and other files that will not open
A recording interrupted by a flat battery, a pulled card or a dead camera never got its index written — no moov atom — so nothing will open it, and most tools report it as empty. The picture and the sound are still on the card. Throughline rebuilds the index from a healthy clip shot on the same camera in the same mode, and writes the result beside the original, never over it.
- Panasonic .MDT
- The orphan a Panasonic body leaves when it cannot close the file. Rebuilt byte‑exact against a known‑good recovery — picture, and four channels of LPCM.
- Canon Cinema EOS .DAT
- The XF‑HEVC orphan a Cinema EOS body writes before the index exists. Proven on a real 39 GiB battery‑pull card: everything recovered except the last chunk the camera never finished writing.
- Sony .MP4
- XAVC S from an interrupted recording, video and audio recovered byte‑identical, with composition timing taken from the reference clip rather than guessed.
- Other .MOV, .MP4, .M4V
- Attempted by the same method, with the confidence stated before you commit and the result checked against the reference clip afterwards.
What it will not pretend to do. Consumer Canon EOS .MOV is a different format from the Cinema EOS .DAT above and this method does not work on it — Throughline says so rather than producing a file that half plays. Recovery needs one healthy clip from the same camera in the same mode; ten seconds is enough, and if the settings do not match, the reference is refused with the reason.
Who it's for
Built for two rooms. Useful anywhere several cameras and a separate recorder end up on the same drive.
Deposition & legal video
Every mic track kept. Frame rate never changed behind your back. Checksums you can re-verify years later.
Documentary & news
Sync the day's rushes on the drive home. Arrive with transcripts, speakers and a searchable transcript of who said what.
- Court reporting firms — video to pair with the stenographic record. Video for the record — searchable by what was said, timecoded to the frame, delivered under one checksummed manifest.
- Investigators — recorded interviews, searchable by what was said. Search hours of interview by phrase, jump to the timecode, export just that clip.
- Insurance & claims — recorded statements with a verifiable chain. Every statement checksummed on ingest, re-verifiable years later without the original drive.
- Oral history & research — long interviews, transcribed on device, nothing uploaded. Transcription and translation run on the machine. No recording ever leaves it.
- Corporate & training video — multi-camera studio days, cut-ready the same afternoon. Sync and proxy a studio day while the room is still being struck.
- Conference & AV capture — many rooms, many cameras, one pass each. Each room synced as its own session, each delivered under its own manifest.
- Video podcasts — three or four angles plus a sound bag, synced without a slate. Aligned from the audio alone — no slate, no timecode box, no matching clocks.
- Event & wedding film — long unbroken takes from cameras that never agreed on time. Hour-long takes from drifting clocks, aligned once and held through cleanup and grade.
- Freelance DIT & post — cards offloaded, verified and synced before the editor sees them. Hand off a project the editor can open — proxies, sync, and a manifest that proves what came off the card.
Why it's different
The edit is a chain of custody, whether or not anyone is writing it down.
Other tools forget what a filter did. Throughline records it — what it touched, what it preserved, what it invalidated. If a step can't promise your timing survived, the sync is marked stale rather than assumed good.
Coming soon
Throughline is not on sale yet.
It is being tested against real deposition and documentary footage. Leave an address and you get one email when it ships — nothing else, ever.