The instrument, in detail
Four gestures: watch, examine, measure, rescue. And one rule running through everything: the app only shows what it knows.
IWatch
- Instant playback — open from the Finder, drag and drop, recent files; on iPhone and iPad, a video received through Messages, Mail, AirDrop or Files opens directly in Loupe.
- Exact frame-by-frame — ← and → arrow keys, positioning accurate to the frame, automatic pause on the target frame.
- Speeds from 0.25× to 4×, eight notches, persisting across pauses and resumes; a scrubbable timeline aligned to the frame grid.
- Photos too, on the Mac: PNG, JPEG, HEIC, TIFF, GIF — with the same crisp zoom as on a video, orientation respected.
IIExamine
- Crisp ×16 zoom during playback — photographic-quality magnification rendering, via trackpad, scroll wheel or keyboard; pan with a finger or the mouse while zoomed in. The full zoom is built into the app: it is not something to be haggled over.
- Free-angle rotation and stackable flips — footage from a phone held askew straightens to the exact degree.
- Capture of what you see — zoom, rotation and drawings included: what you save is, pixel for pixel, what the screen shows.
- Excerpts — in and out markers (I and O keys), then export of the segment; HD exports of stills and clips through an upscaling model, with the warning that matters: it reconstructs — it does not reveal — for evidence, trust the zoom, which displays only the pixels actually recorded.
IIIMeasure — the movement workbench
- The slate — arrows, lines, shapes, freehand, text: each drawing is anchored to the frame it is placed on, in source-image coordinates. It follows zoom, panning and rotation without drifting — the annotation stays on the ankle when you zoom to ×16.
- The angle, laid down in a single gesture, recalculated on display — invariant under zoom and rotation.
- Calibrated distance — draw a reference on an object of known size, enter its value: distances are displayed in metres. Without a reference, nothing is displayed — least of all pixels.
- The truthful stopwatch — it reads the true timestamp of each frame in the file. On a phone slow-motion clip with an irregular frame rate, tools that divide “frames ÷ frame rate” can be off by a factor of two without a word; Loupe refuses to measure when the file provides no reliable timestamp — and says so.
- Two-video comparison — side by side or as a ghost overlay, with transport linked to the exact frame — and point tracking that suggests and stops, naming the frame where it loses its target, complete the workbench; the analysis can be exported and shared between colleagues.
IVRescue
- Badly assembled files — some files pair their timestamps with the wrong frames: they stutter in QuickTime, iMovie, Final Cut or Premiere, yet seem smooth in VLC (which masks the symptom without curing the file). Loupe makes the diagnosis on opening and offers a repaired copy: the same frames, bit-for-bit — only the container's timing tables are rewritten, with no re-encoding, and the copy is re-verified before being delivered. Readable everywhere, forever.
- Rejected wrappers — MKV, AVI, FLV, raw H.264 streams: most of the time, it is the container your device rejects, not the picture. Loupe rewraps into MP4 without re-encoding; the original is never modified. When it is genuinely impossible (certain old or open-source codecs), the app names the cause instead of a mute black screen.
On every device
Mac (Apple Silicon): the complete instrument, menus and shortcuts. iPhone and iPad: the same engine, with display modes that keep the screen breathable — from pared-down playback to the full workbench. Apple Vision Pro: playback, including spatial videos in depth, pinch-to-zoom with both hands. Universal purchase: buy the app once, and it installs on Mac, iPhone and iPad.