On set, we were missing a tool.

At the end of a shooting day, hours of work sit on a few memory cards, some barely bigger than a postage stamp. Before any of them is wiped, its contents have to be safely somewhere else: ideally twice, on different drives, and demonstrably complete. It is the least spectacular job in any production. And the one where a mistake costs the most.

The programs available for it didn’t quite fit the way we work. So we wrote one ourselves. That is how most of our apps come about: from a problem we had ourselves, on set or in the office.

It is called tuu, and it does what a careful assistant would do, only without getting tired. Insert a card and tuu recognises the camera and, by its serial number, who was shooting. It copies to the target and backup drive at the same time, then reads every copy back and compares checksums. The card only turns green once every copy is confirmed. At the end there is a report for the client as a PDF, Excel or CSV file, plus a verification manifest in the industry format ASC MHL.

We use tuu on our own productions. It is now available to anyone who works with memory cards. tuuapp.de

Our second piece of software is called tesserio and organises press events. More on tesserio