I used to edit family videos in Kdenlive without a problem — it handled footage from all our devices without complaining. But then I switched to DaVinci Resolve, things got difficult. My Sony Alpha 7C, my Galaxy S24, and my wife’s iPhone all produced files that Resolve couldn’t handle without transcoding.

Every time I wanted to edit, I had to hunt down the right ffmpeg settings and manually run them on each video — a frustrating and repetitive task.

My typical workflow is simple: I create one folder per event on an external HDD and drop in videos from all our cameras. A script renames the files based on the date and time so I can easily sort them. But for Resolve, everything has to be transcoded to DNxHD — which only supports resolutions like 1920×1080 and 1280×720.

That also meant vertical videos couldn’t work. So now, I rotate them during transcoding to preserve resolution and rotate them back in Resolve during editing.

I built Recoder to automate this annoying step — so I could spend more time editing memories and less time fiddling with command-line tools.