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For those who don’t know the tool: EditingTools.io is a collection of post-production utilities designed to fill gaps between editing systems, review platforms, file formats and production departments. Its browser tools, standalone apps, plug-ins, and API connect workflows around Adobe Premiere, Avid Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve, Apple Final Cut Pro, and Avid Pro Tools, with tools for marker conversion, timecode logging, cue sheets, subtitles, EDL/ALE processing, VFX lists, and production metadata.
EditingTools.io lives in the less glamorous but disproportionately important part of post-production: the space between applications. A marker has to move from editorial into review. A cue sheet has to survive an enthusiastically organised timeline. An EDL has to remain an EDL after somebody opens it in a text editor. A live production needs notes that can later become NLE markers. None of these jobs is likely to headline a software keynote, but all of them can stop a real production.
If you’re attending IBC2026 in Amsterdam, come and say hello at booth 3.C59b. Editingtools.io will be there together with friends from Freispace.com and would be delighted to meet you.
Rafael Maier and the toolbox
Rafael Maier is the founder of EditingTools.io and works from Cologne, Germany. EditingTools.io grew from the scripts, converters, and workflow helpers that accumulate around real post-production work: small utilities built because an editor, assistant, supervisor, or pipeline developer needs one particular problem solved now rather than in the next major NLE release. EditingTools.io also maintains channels on YouTube, Instagram, X, Threads, and LinkedIn.
Today the platform covers more than simple conversion. EditingTools.io includes browser-based generators, converters, live logging systems, Premiere Pro plug-ins, standalone applications and an API. The catalogue now ranges from familiar utilities such as Marker Tool & Converter, Subtitle Tool & Converter, EDL Tool & Converter, ALE Tool & Converter and Timecode Converter to larger workflow applications such as Live Timecode Notes, Music Cue Sheet Manager and Archive. Kitchen.
DP: We’ve seen tools such as Live Timecode Notes, Marker Converter, Cue Sheet Manager and Subtitle Converter quietly running in broadcast facilities, production studios and VFX vendor pipelines around the world. They are the kind of utilities everybody uses but rarely talks about. Who are the typical teams using EditingTools.io, and how do you even find out about them when the platform deliberately avoids tracking its users?
Rafael Maier: Honestly, we lost track of who uses it on purpose. With nearly 250,000 registered users and over half a million unique users per month (most of whom don’t have accounts), it’s impossible to keep track of everyone. Many people reach out to tell us what they do and how the tools have helped them, or to share useful feedback. That’s how we’ve connected with wonderful people working in this industry around the world. If you write a friendly message, you will get a friendly response. No AI bot nonsense!
It’s wonderful to see how many people we’re helping. This applies to both users and contributors. Over 15 developers from 10 countries work together on the platform’s tools and resources, along with other team members who handle support and legal matters.
DP: You’ve now released the Marker Converter as a standalone macOS and iOS app for enterprise customers and closed systems: what triggered that move beyond the browser?
Rafael Maier: This isn’t the first time we’ve built a standalone app. We’ve done it many times before for companies that requested certain features in a closed offline app. These apps aren’t available for purchase online; we build them exclusively for a customer.
We usually build standalone apps for public sale only when enough people request them and are willing to purchase licences to help cover some of the development costs. Even then, we try to keep prices low, or make the application free when possible. In fact, our prices are often too low for companies, but we also want to reach customers and production companies in developing countries, as well as students and arthouse projects. That represents a much broader global market.
For Marker Converter, we built it as a container for four individual converter applications: Marker Converter, Subtitle Converter, ALE Converter, and EDL Converter. They either have been or will be released as standalone applications for macOS and iOS. For everyone else, the browser version remains available.
DP: You’re preparing Live Timecode Notes Server for productions that work completely off-grid but still need collaborative logging. What is the idea behind the project, and why are local control and offline capability so important to those users?
Rafael Maier: Many companies work off-grid or have unstable connections, which forces them to use systems that were not really designed for offline operation. Enterprise customers also have stricter requirements and often prefer completely off-grid solutions. The need for a fully offline system was obvious from the beginning, but at the time none of the customers had the financial resources to fund its development. Now we have the means to finance it ourselves and, of course, hope for some sales.
History
DP: What was the original post-production problem that made you start developing your own tools?
Rafael Maier: I do not remember the first thing I built to improve our post-house editing workflows. I was always optimising things with scripts and plug-ins and collecting them in a desktop folder in case somebody might need them one day.
We already had to learn assembler and Java in high school. I didn’t like Java much because it never seemed compatible with every system I needed, so I did my homework in Python or PHP. I guess that followed me through life.
DP: You describe EditingTools.io as a collection of “small helpers” rather than one large platform. How do you decide when a problem deserves its own tool, and when it should really become a feature request for an NLE or DCC vendor?
Rafael Maier: I guess we stopped asking the big NLE companies for features after sending around 20 requests. I am not sure whether any of them were ever implemented. But if people needed a solution at that moment and it was feasible for us to build one, we built it.
First, we check whether the function can be added to an existing tool or we build one. Then we decide whether it should be a plug-in, a standalone application, or a web tool.
Often, several small tools work better than one large application because people are searching for one specific solution. If you present it that way, they adopt it more quickly. If the same function is only one of many features, it’s easy to overlook. Since many of our users find us through Google or ChatGPT, a tool can be recommended precisely because it fulfils that specific use case.
DP: Many of your tools run in the browser, which traditionally has not been associated with professional post-production. What is the technical and philosophical reasoning behind pushing so much of the platform onto the web?
Rafael Maier: If a company already uses Google Sheets, then it is clear that it can use web tools. The industry has moved significantly toward the web over the last ten years, so browsers let us work across different systems and push updates in seconds. It is also much cheaper to develop. Since the platform was donation-based at first, there was no room for expensive development. The donations did not even cover the server costs.
DP: What are the main technical hurdles when making professional post-production tools browser-native, particularly around large files, metadata integrity and processing load?
Rafael Maier: As most of our online tools handle only metadata, we usually work with files smaller than 100 MB, which are easy to handle. We only recently started processing larger files with tools like Archive.Kitchen.
However, during the development process and in consultation with customers such as HBO, we decided to allow users to store their large files in their own S3 buckets. This gives them full control over their data and allows them to choose their own provider. There are many providers of S3 buckets, including not only Amazon, but also IONOS in Germany. Render tasks are carried out on NVIDIA cards on our GPU servers from Hetzner.
DP: Do you have a favourite interchange format to work with, whether EDL, XML, ALE, FCPXML or OTIO, or one that you find particularly elegant or particularly frustrating to parse?
Rafael Maier: If I want to feel really depressed, I go and read some AAF files. Honestly, I do not know where to begin. Even within XML, there are so many different ways to store sequences. Everyone develops another format without thinking far enough ahead. OTIO still misses important things for some of our use cases. For example, it lacks attributes we need when working with markers. We provided input to the consortium through Adobe to improve that, but who knows whether they will ever consider it?
For Resolve 18 and later, EditingTools.io supplies an Export Project script that creates its RCP project format. Resolve Collect can separate video, audio, mattes, and offline material into different destination directories and can trim image sequences so a DPX, EXR, or TIFF source doesn’t have to be copied in its entirety when only a portion appears in the cut. It also supports symbolic links for tape-oriented backup workflows.
This is a particularly good illustration of why apparently boring metadata matters. The project file knows which media the edit wants. Resolve Collect turns that knowledge into an actual set of files that can be conformed, transferred or archived.
Tools & Workflows
DP: Marker Converter bridges Premiere, Resolve, Frame.io, SubRip, CSV and Pro Tools PTX workflows. Which real-world edge cases still cause the most trouble?
Rafael Maier: Emojis are one example. It is difficult to explain to some younger users that emojis do not work in many professional editing applications. That is not a limitation of our tools, but of the NLE they want to use. Even more disturbing are the users who type ChatGPT prompts into our support messages.
DP: The Music Cue Sheet and Cue Sheet Manager both collapse layered tracks and remove invisible cuts. The fuck, how?
Rafael Maier: It gets even more fun when editors use stems, and it all comes together in one file at the end in our tool after matching the metadata. And it all works without AI. That’s satisfaction.
DP: On the Cue Sheet Uploader plug-in for Premiere Pro: when should editors prep cue metadata inside the NLE versus pushing a rough to the web tool and cleaning it there?
Rafael Maier: Good preparation and organisation of the sequence saves time later, and cleanup is much easier inside the plug-in because you can click a clip, jump directly to its position and listen to determine whether it is actually music or a sound effect. It is generally a good idea to preview the sequence in the Premiere Pro plug-in before sending it to Cue Sheet Manager. That lets you detect incorrect clips earlier and prevents chaos later.
DP: Your EDL Converter round-trips CSV and EDL and also handles XML/FCPXML workflows. Where do you draw the line between strict specification compliance and pragmatic tolerance for the variations produced by modern NLEs?
Rafael Maier: I no longer expect user uploads to follow every rule. People open files, type something into them, generate something with ChatGPT and then get confused when an NLE can no longer read the result. We try to recover some of those files anyway. NLEs do not always follow every rule either. But I expect software-generated output to follow the specification.
Clips can be filtered using criteria such as clip name, file name, file path, description, comments,s or retime status. Listify can restrict searches to selected tracks, merge overlapping clips, expose individual columns and export CSV, PDF and Excel files. Thumbnails can be generated for the exported lists, and clicking a result inside the plug-in can jump the Premiere playhead back to the relevant clip.
DP: Timecode Converter supports list operations and bulk CSV transforms. What have you learned about user expectations around drop-frame maths and rounding at 29.97 or 59.94?
Rafael Maier: There seem to be two camps, and we have considered implementing both calculation “opinions” in the tool. Can anyone finally tell me which of the two “correct ways” is actually correct?
DP: Why build Letterbox Generator as a web tool when most NLEs can already create framing mattes? Is this about consistency across deliverables, or was there another production problem behind it?
Rafael Maier: Around six years ago, we were building a split-screen sequence in Premiere Pro with about 20 stacked video tracks and using random letterboxes and grids from the web and asset bundles as overlays. We ran into rendering problems, and it turned out the 20 video tracks weren’t the only issue. Some Premiere Pro grid effects and the PNG overlays we found in different asset bundles either performed poorly or were incorrect. We wrote a tool that generated pixel-perfect overlays with only the data we actually needed, and our render times improved immediately. Extreme situations often reveal bugs or performance problems that nobody noticed or took seriously before.
DP: Your guides document workflows such as OTIO to SRT or TTML through Marker Converter. Do you see OpenTimelineIO becoming a lingua franca for comments and markers, or will dedicated caption formats remain the safer hand-off?
Rafael Maier: OTIO still misses some important attributes for markers and subtitles. If they add those, it could become much more useful. But right now, I don’t really see OTIO as a replacement for subtitle formats. As web workflows become increasingly important, the ideal solution might be a word-by-word JSON structure that includes all useful attributes from every subtitle format. And, of course, emoji support.
DP: You also organise tools around host applications from Avid, Adobe, Blackmagic, Apple and Pomfort. Which hosts create the most compatibility problems in the wild, and what defensive coding practices have you adopted?
Rafael Maier: Adobe and Avid tend to change existing output formats, which can disrupt established workflows. We therefore modified our tools to handle different versions of formats that, in theory, should be identical.
DP: Live Timecode Notes enables collaborative logging during shoots. How do you keep timestamps useful when network latency, human reaction time and timecode mismatches all enter the equation?
Rafael Maier: When discussing timecode for Live Timecode Notes, we always have to account for human delay, which is much greater than network latency or clock drift. We are not really handling machine events here; we are handling human input.
In the macOS and iOS apps, for example, you can synchronise with a Tentacle device or use a time-zone reference. Because we use the device’s internal time as the reference, drift is not really the issue. If you are commenting on a stream, you can also set a manual offset in seconds.
When a user starts typing a comment, we pause the note timecode at the first character. That gives them time to formulate the comment without moving the timestamp forward while they type.
DP: The site includes a VFX Sheet Generator. Which columns and naming conventions do VFX supervisors actually use, and how do you keep the resulting export useful rather than turning it into a film-length spreadsheet?
Rafael Maier: There are multiple naming conventions and column rules in use across the industry. As an international platform, we encounter different requirements from different countries and try to make the tool flexible enough for every VFX supervisor to define the spreadsheet they need. Even with good rule sets, such as those used by Netflix, every production is a little different. And I think that is okay.
DP: There is also an iOS Marker Converter. Which professional jobs genuinely benefit from putting a phone or tablet into the workflow, and where does mobile still introduce too much friction?
Rafael Maier: Generation Z has started entering the workforce, and many of them no longer own a traditional computer. I think it is only logical to think beyond the computer mindset. Even I still prefer working on a computer rather than on a tablet or phone. Recently, I have seen many people editing videos in Resolve on an iPad for YouTube. The traditional workflow is changing.
For conforming, MediaDB can also import an EDL containing full reel names, match the references against the indexed media and identify which drives contain the required sources. It can then generate an RCP file for Resolve Collect, which performs the actual collection. Together, that combination makes the two applications much more interesting: MediaDB answers where the source lives; Resolve Collect gets it into one place.
DP: What is your API story for power users? Can teams automate jobs from CI systems or render-farm nodes, and what rate limits should pipeline developers design around?
Rafael Maier: Yes, you can automate a lot through our API. We apply rate limits for bot protection, and the exact numbers are documented in the API documentation. In normal enterprise use, those limits are generally high enough that customers do not hit them.
DP: Music Cue Sheet Manager can enrich metadata from partner libraries. How do you prevent false positives once filenames have been through production and become something like “track_final_final_v12.wav”?
Rafael Maier: We work with more than 20 music production libraries, all of which follow naming conventions. Depending on the country where the material is used, or how those conventions have changed over time, one track can sometimes have three or more naming variants. However, patterns usually make each track identifiable.
Even if a track moves from one library to another, it receives a new, unique name. Of course, this works best if the track is not renamed after downloading. We can still handle certain changes, such as a system automatically adding “(1)” when the same file is downloaded again, or removing special characters. In those cases, it can still match, but the system indicates it is not a 100 per cent match.
We also offer the option of building a personal metadata database, but then it becomes the user’s responsibility to keep that database organised. We only match names that are seven or more characters long.
“Track_final_final_v12.wav” sounds more like an export from an edit sequence than a music track.
DP: When a user sends you a strange file that “breaks everything”, what does the triage process look like? Do those specimens become parser fixes, regression tests or entirely new compatibility cases?
Rafael Maier: If a file is malformed, it may simply fail in a converter, or the resulting file may not become available for download. When someone sends a problematic file to support, we debug it and decide whether we can improve the tool to recover that malformed version, or whether we need to tell the user not to edit the structured file manually.
Over the years, we have learned that people will work against almost any “rule” you teach them for structured workflows. Stock-footage filenames can become too long for many NLEs because users put every search tag into the filename, which can break an EDL export. Files shared through other systems can also acquire illegal ASCII characters or emojis.
The Future
DP: Beyond the individual utilities, do you envision a common data layer or interchange format that could eventually connect everything, perhaps something analogous to a master interchange format?
Rafael Maier: I do not believe there will be one format. We may see more standardised formats, but with AI developing so quickly, I am not even sure whether future interchange formats will remain readable by humans.
DP: As more AI and ML functions appear on the site, including colourisation, stem splitting and loudness normalisation, how do you decide which technologies are mature enough for production use?
Rafael Maier: It is mainly driven by customer requests because we are not primarily an AI platform. We integrate AI and ML services that clients already use or have approved but need additional customisation for a particular workflow.
For Subtitle Translator, for example, we chose DeepL for the most common languages because, in our experience, it provides the best results together with useful privacy settings. We still make many adjustments based on what we think our customers need. When we use an external AI service, we also send data in an anonymised, randomised order so the material cannot easily be associated with a particular project or customer.
Some services, including colourisation, loudness normalisation and cut detection, run entirely on our own GPU servers in Germany, which are unfortunately not cheap to operate.
The AI market is evolving so quickly that we do not want to waste resources trying to compete in the AI race with the biggest players. We will continue to focus on niches. Some companies also dislike subscription models for AI services, so we offer pay-per-use options for tools with AI elements. For many clients,s that can be cheaper and requires less commitment.
DP: What is the roadmap for integrating EditingTools.io more deeply into larger production pipelines through APIs, webhooks and plug-ins, and how can studios or broadcasters get involved?
Rafael Maier: More than 500 companies use our API regularly. Some use it for automated file conversion, while others use it for subtitle translation, and there are many more use cases. For example, one company combines an external image-description service with Live Timecode Notes and uses our API to enrich comments with AI-generated notes. The API is very adaptable, and people are remarkably creative with it. It is always interesting to hear about the workflows they build.
Studios should test converters, logging systems, metadata transformations and interchange paths on production assets and target applications before deploying them into an active pipeline.
| Platform | EditingTools.io |
| Operator | Codebase Media UG (haftungsbeschränkt), Cologne |
| Core workflows | Metadata conversion, markers, live logging, cue sheets, subtitles, interchange and automation |
| Current new tools | Resolve Collect, DriveCompare and QuickSweep |
| Archive workflow | Archive.Kitchen |
| Premiere Pro tools | QuickSweep, Listify and other workflow plug-ins |
| Media collection | Resolve Collect |
| Drive verification | DriveCompare |
| Offline drive catalogue | MediaDB |
| Commercial model | Free and PRO access; Archive.Kitchen, paid plug-ins, standalone applications and AI credits are licensed separately as applicable |
| Website | editingtools.io |
