New Quantify App Lets You Rate Footage in Real-Time

Filmmakers Jake Schumacher and Jedidiah Hurt ran into a common challenge when shooting their doc App: The Human Story. They had way too much footage to keep track of.  Hurt explains, “Every time we did a shoot, we found ourselves repeatedly having the thought, ‘Oh, yeah. That was a beautiful moment. Pure gold.’ Then we would promptly forget when it happened.”  

In order to cut down on the amount of time spent reviewing the footage to track down those moments again, they took inspiration from the subject of their film and created—what else?—an app. Thus, Quantify was born. Freshly available in the Apple Store today, Quantify lets you discreetly timestamp and rate moments during a shoot, and then seamlessly import the data into Premiere Pro so that your best takes are already marked when you begin the edit.

Schumacher describes one of the main benefits of the app for filmmakers: “When we tried using other methods, say taking notes, we found we were not as present and it affected the interviewee. We built Quantify to effortlessly capture this data. It creates a heat map of the interview, while allowing us to stay present.”

The Quantify site offers tips from the creators’ own workflow: They use a 0 rating to indicate production talk, including questions; a 1 when the interviewee speaks; a 2 for points of interest; and a 3 for particularly “golden” moments. After ratings are made, the app exports audio and XML files that can be imported directly into Premiere Pro.

Quantify could be a real game-changer, particularly for doc-makers who shoot hours and hours of footage, sometimes over periods of years. The app is free, but the sliding-scale Pro subscription (from $1.99-$4.99/month) offers “premium support, unlimited events, and powerful data export options.”

Download Quantify for iOS free in the Apple Store.