CTD Ingest Studio Footage In. Cards Back. Zero Stress.

CTD Ingest Studio is a DIT and media offload app for macOS built for live-event videographers and photographers. It copies footage off memory cards, verifies every file with SHA-256 checksums, tags clips with shooter and camera metadata, and files everything where the editor expects it. Your footage is only ever read — nothing on a card is erased, formatted, or rewritten.

Cards are auto-detected on insert and deep-scanned for media wherever the camera stores it — Sony (PRIVATE/M4ROOT), Canon (DCIM/CONTENTS), Panasonic, AVCHD, GoPro, DJI, and Blackmagic layouts, plus a full-volume fallback scan. SD, microSD, CFexpress, and any card your Mac can mount works, and you can also ingest from folders already on a disk.

Every file is SHA-256 hashed as it streams off the card, then the copied file is read back from the destination drive and re-hashed. The two hashes must match for every single file before a card is marked fully verified. Your footage is only ever read — nothing on a card is erased, formatted, or rewritten — so your media is never at risk.

Yes — it’s made for multi-camera shooting whether that’s a live-event crew or a multi-cam vlog, podcast, or event recap. Drop in every camera’s card and each angle lands on its own timeline lane, lined up by capture time, so your multicam is synced before you open the edit. A-cam, B-cam, gimbal, and action cam — mixed brands and formats ingest and sync together.

Yes — all three. One click exports a synced timeline with each videographer on their own lane and clips positioned by capture time: a .fcpxml that imports into DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro, and an FCP7 XML (xmeml) for Adobe Premiere Pro. You also get a ResolveMetadata.csv tagging every clip and editor notes listing each camera’s color settings (for example S-Log3 → s709 LUT).

CTD Ingest Studio catches it. When a drop-off’s capture time is off — a camera whose clock was never set, or set to the wrong day — it’s flagged before it can throw off your multicam, and one step (“Fix the Sync”) corrects the whole drop-off’s capture time at once so every angle still lines up on the timeline. If the times were actually fine, you can dismiss the warning instead. On Sony, this usually never comes up: capture time is read from the camera’s own XML sidecar, not the file dates.

Sony cameras write a per-clip XML sidecar (NonRealTimeMeta) next to every clip, and CTD Ingest Studio reads it automatically — across the whole Sony line, Alpha and FX bodies as well as the cinema line like VENICE 2, MXF in XDROOT/Clip and MP4 in PRIVATE/M4ROOT/CLIP. Capture time comes from the camera’s own clock rather than the file system, so the timeline is correct even when file dates have been mangled by a card reader, a copy, or a hand-off. The sidecar’s camera model, color science, and lens flow into the editor handoff too and auto-fill ResolveMetadata.csv.

Yes — add that folder in place. It’s indexed where it already sits: nothing is re-copied, nothing is duplicated, and your project destination is left untouched. Those clips still join the project and land on the editor timeline at their original paths, alongside everything you ingested through the station.

Nothing is lost. If the app crashes, the Mac sleeps, or you relaunch mid-ingest, an interrupted offload resumes right where it left off instead of starting over. You can also ingest a single loose file — a downloaded stream or one stray clip — straight into a project with Add File….

That’s the whole point. Add your team once, assign shooters per project, and when a card is inserted the station asks who’s dropping off with big tap targets. Multiple cards ingest at the same time, each with its own progress bar, with no filename or manifest collisions.

Any Mac running macOS 13 Ventura or later, Intel or Apple Silicon. It’s a native SwiftUI app that’s happy on a cheap MacBook at the back of the club.

No. CTD Ingest Studio is local-only: no accounts, no telemetry, no cloud. Your footage, projects, and ingest history stay on your Mac and the destination drives you choose.

Your media is only ever read — no clip is erased, formatted, or rewritten. The one thing the app ever puts on a card is a small hidden marker file at the root (.ctd_ingest_marker.json) listing what that project has already copied, which is what makes re-inserting a card copy only the new clips. Turn a project’s “copy only new files” setting off and the card is handed back byte-for-byte as it came in. Once every file is verified, you wipe the card in-camera yourself — the app never does it for you.

CTD Ingest Studio is available to download on the Mac App Store now. Get it on any Mac running macOS 13 or later. Questions? Email info@cinetech.digital or use the CTD support page.