TunaCut Recorder

The promise it is built around

Everything below follows from one rule: a crash of any single component must never destroy any recording.

• The encoders are not the app's children in the way that kills them. They are deliberately outside a kill-on-close job object, so closing, crashing or force-quitting the recorder leaves every ffmpeg process still writing.
• The manifest is written before the take starts. It records each source's process id, output file and true start time — so a relaunched recorder finds the encoders it never started and offers to reattach or stop them cleanly.
• Matroska, flushed packet by packet. Never MP4, never MOV, never WAV: those need a clean close to be readable at all. A killed .mkv writer leaves a playable file up to the last flush.
• Takes are numbered, never overwritten. Record again into the same session and you get take 2 beside take 1. The editor plays a source's takes as one continuous input, so nothing has to be merged, copied or verified before you can cut.

Sources

Four kinds of thing you can point at it

• Video + audio — a capture card or HDMI device, optionally with the audio embedded in the same input so the two can never drift apart.
• Audio only — a microphone or line input, written as .mka at 24-bit. Audio-only tiles are half height and pair up, so six microphones do not push your cameras off screen.
• Desktop view — a screen region, not just a monitor: four insets from the edges with a red box you can drag. Two capture backends, and Windows' own sound captured in-process rather than through a virtual cable.
• GoPro over USB — records to its own card at full quality, shows a live preview tile while it does, and pulls the clips into the session folder when you stop.

While it runs

Everything that matters, on one bar

• Per-source state — starting, stalled, failed or missing, called out on the tile itself, with a loud notice when frames start dropping.
• Two mark buttons — red and green, stamped to the wall clock during the take and placed on the editor's timeline when you open the session.
• A disk guard that refuses to start below a floor you set, warns as it gets close, and stops everything at an emergency threshold rather than writing a truncated take.
• Live audio meters with peak hold on every tile, read from the encoder itself.
• A floating panel — stop, both marks, and a live thumbnail per source — that stays on top when the recorder is minimised, and can hide itself from a screen recording.

Setup

Profiles, so a rig is set up once

• Per-source encoder control — hardware H.264/HEVC or software x264, constant quality or bitrate, chroma, keyframe interval, and the input format pinned explicitly rather than left to whatever the driver offers first.
• Named sessions. Press record with nothing open and it asks what you are recording; the answer becomes the folder name and every file name inside it.
• Segmented recording, if you would rather a long shoot arrived as a run of files.

It asks which session before it lets you record

The open session is a pointer that survives the app closing, so launching and pressing record used to append to whatever was last recorded — possibly days ago, on a different shoot. Naming the three real options at launch makes continuing an answer rather than a default.