The RAD Converter turns almost any kind of video, image or sound file into almost any other. It reads Bink and Smacker files, MP4, MOV and AVI (anything Media Foundation can decode, plus ProRes), WAV and other sound files, and still images including PNG, TGA, BMP, JPEG, TIFF and OpenEXR - single images or numbered sequences. It writes MP4, AVI and WAV, and image sequences in any of those formats. It runs the same frame rate conversion and filter pipeline as the compressors, so it is also the tool for cutting a section out of a movie, cropping, scaling, denoising, pulling the frames out of a video as images, turning a render's image sequence into a video, or extracting a sound track. Think of it as a Swiss Army knife for your media files.

To use the converter, highlight the file to change and click the "Convert a file" button; this window opens. Click on a section of the screenshot for help on it, or use the links below.

Jump to: Output file | Video | Frame control and filters | Audio | Buttons

Output file settings:

Output file info: Enter the filename to convert to in this field, or use the Browse button to pick a folder with your mouse. The extension sets the output format, so typing .png here is all it takes to get a PNG sequence. Check "Automatic overwrite?" when you don't want to be asked before an existing file is replaced.

Output type: Picks the output format from a menu and sets the filename's extension to match. "Default" is an MP4 when video is converted and a WAV when only audio is. Video can be written as an MP4 or AVI file, or as a series of BMP, JPEG, TGA, TIFF, EXR or PNG files - one file per frame, numbered. EXR keeps the full range of HDR video; the other image formats clip it to standard range.

Frame rate settings:

Convert Video: Check this to convert the video frames of the input. Uncheck it to convert just the sound - converting an MP4 with this unchecked gives you its sound track as a WAV file.

Set Alpha plane options: Opens a menu for the input's alpha (transparency) plane. By default it is dropped; choose "Include the alpha plane" to carry it through to an output format that holds one (PNG, TGA, TIFF, EXR). With the plane included you can also tell the converter that the input's color is already premultiplied by its alpha, ask for premultiplied color on the output, or turn off alpha weighting so the color under zero alpha is kept exactly as it is rather than filtered in premultiplied space.

• Override input frame rate: Relabels the output with this frame rate (fractional rates are fine) without adding or removing any frames, so the same frames play faster or slower. Enter a negative number to give the rate in milliseconds per frame instead. You need this when you compress still images, which default to 10 frames per second.

• Convert to output frame rate: Changes to this frame rate by duplicating or dropping frames, so the movie runs for the same length of time. A 15 fps animation converted to 30 fps has every frame processed twice; a 60 fps capture converted to 30 fps keeps every other frame. Frame lists in the filters below still count the input's original frames.

Frame control and filter settings:

The list in the middle of the window is a pipeline: every entry runs on each frame, in the order shown, top to bottom. Click Add... to pick an entry from the menu, Edit... to change the highlighted one, Up and Down to reorder, and Delete to remove. The order matters - crop before scale and you scale the cropped area, scale before crop and you crop the scaled frame. The one exception is Include frames: there is only ever one, it stays at the top of the list, and adding it again edits the existing entry.

Frames to affect: Most entries have a frame range at the bottom of their dialog (the flips and rotations have no dialog and always apply to the whole movie). Leave the range blank to affect the whole movie, or enter frames and ranges separated by spaces, like 1-4 8 100-e. s is the first frame and e the last; s10 is ten frames in from the start and e10 ten back from the end, so e9-e is the last ten frames. A range can also be in seconds: t5.5-t10 is the frames shown from 5.5 s up to 10 s, and te30-te the last thirty seconds. Frames are numbered as in the input file, before any Include frames entry and before any frame rate conversion. You can add the same filter several times with different ranges and settings - a gentle smooth on the whole movie and a stronger one over a noisy section, for example. Where two data rate entries overlap, the one lower in the list wins; filters all run.

Include frames: Reads only the listed frames from the input and skips the rest, sound included (this is the one entry that needs a frame list). Use it to compress a section of a movie, to cut out a slate or a tail, or just to try settings on a short piece before you commit to the whole file. The other entries still count frames as they were before this skipping.

Crop: Keeps the part of the frame starting at left, top and width by height pixels big. Any field can be left empty - an empty left or top starts at the frame's edge, an empty width or height keeps everything out to the right or bottom edge.

Pad: Centers the frame on a black frame of this size, letterboxing or pillarboxing it. A side left empty keeps its size; a size smaller than the frame crops the middle out instead.

Scale: Resizes the frame with a high quality resampling filter. Each side is a size in pixels, 0 to keep the aspect ratio from the other side, or a negative number for a multiple of the current size (-2 is twice, -0.5 is half). -1 means the movie's original size, before any filter. Set one side or both.

Point sampled scale: The same sizes, but pixels are duplicated or dropped rather than resampled. Use it for pixel art and for exact integer scales where you want hard pixel edges rather than a smooth resize.

Flip horizontally / Flip vertically: Mirrors the frame left to right, or top to bottom. These have no settings, so they are added straight to the list.

Rotate left / Rotate right: Turns the whole movie a quarter turn, swapping its width and height.

Smooth: Blurs the frame by a percentage. 1% is enough to remove the invisible high frequency detail that costs bits for nothing, which makes the video compress much better - a slightly smoothed video is a much smaller file at the same quality. 100% is extremely blurry.

Bilateral denoise: Averages each pixel with the neighbors that look like it, so grain, noise and dither smooth out while edges stay sharp - usually a much smaller file with no visible change. Strength is how different a neighbor may be and still count (0.02 gentle, 0.05 typical, 0.1 strong); radius is the reach in pixels, 1 to 8 (2 typical). Leave a field empty for the typical value. This is the first filter to reach for on camera footage.

Temporal denoise: Blends each pixel toward the same pixel of the previous frame when it barely changed, so noise that flickers from frame to frame averages away and the video compresses much better. Anything that moved is left alone. For grainy camera footage - on clean, noise-free renders it has nothing to remove and can make the file bigger. Strength is how much a pixel may change and still count as noise (0.01 gentle, 0.03 typical, 0.06 strong).

Deinterlace: Keeps one field - the even or the odd lines - and fills in the other from it, so interlaced video loses its comb teeth. Blending averages the two fields instead of taking one.

Contrast: Boosts the contrast - the darks get darker and the brights brighter, stretching about the middle. 0 changes nothing, 0.03 is a mild boost, 0.1 is strong, 0.25 very strong (0.5 is the most). A mild boost pushes almost-black pixels to black, which compresses better and usually looks better too.

Black clamp: Everything at or below this level (0 = black, 1 = white) becomes black. 0 changes nothing; 0.1 kills the noise in the darkest tenth, which helps compression. Good for dark scenes and captured titles where the black isn't quite black.

Brightness: Multiplies the brightness: 1.0 changes nothing, 0.5 is half as bright, 2.0 twice as bright (anything over white clips). Give an end multiplier too for a fade: each frame range runs from the start value to the end value, so 0 to 1 over s-s29 fades the first thirty frames in from black, and 1 to 0 over e29-e fades the last thirty out.

Gamma: Bends the brightness curve between black and white, which stay put: above 1.0 lifts the midtones (1.2 is gentle, 2.0 strong), below 1.0 pushes them down (0.8 gentle, 0.5 strong). 1.0 changes nothing.

Saturation: Scales how far every color is from gray: 1.0 changes nothing, 0 is black and white, 0.8 is a little muted (which also compresses a little better), 1.3 is vivid.

Audio settings:

Convert Audio: Check this to convert the sound from the input file. Converting only audio gives a WAV file; converting video and audio gives a video file with the sound in it (MP4 by default). Image sequences have no sound, so this is ignored when writing one.

Input from track: Which of the input file's audio tracks to read (0, the first, by default).

Convert to rate: Resamples the sound to this rate (48000, 44100, etc.). Start from a high quality recording - resampling can't add anything that wasn't recorded.

Extra switches: Anything you type here is passed to the converter as command line switches - the "..." button shows the complete list. Among them: /AudioStartOffset# shifts the sound by milliseconds (positive drops that much from the start, negative adds silence in front); /NormalizePeak# normalizes the loudest peak to that many dB below full scale; /NormalizeLoudness# normalizes to a loudness that many LUFS below zero, never into clipping (/NormalizeLoudness16 is -16 LUFS, a common streaming target; 23 is the broadcast standard); /InputForceType#, /InputForceRate# and /InputSkip# read a headerless raw sample file by telling the converter its format, rate and how many bytes of header to skip; /CPUs# limits the number of threads.

Buttons:

Convert: Starts the conversion. You can stop at any point and keep what has been written so far.

Batch: Adds this conversion, with all of its settings, to the RAD Batch Editor instead of running it now.

Defaults: Puts every setting on the window back to its default.

Help and FAQs open this page and the FAQ in your browser.

Converter recipes:

• Frames out of a video: highlight the video, set the output type to PNG (or EXR for HDR), and convert. Add an Include frames entry to pull out just a range - t10-t12 for the two seconds from ten seconds in, or 500 for one frame.
• A video out of a render: highlight the first image of a numbered sequence; the converter picks up the rest of the sequence. Image sequences default to 10 frames per second, so set "Override input frame rate" to the rate the frames were rendered at. Convert to MP4 to check it, or go straight to the Bink compressor, which reads the sequence the same way.
• The sound track alone: uncheck "Convert Video" and convert; you get a WAV.
• Several files into one: make a list file of them and convert the list.