Contents

1. 02What it is
2. 04Before you start
3. 05The window
4. 06A run
5. 07The mark
6. 10Colour
7. 11Output
8. 12Lookup
9. 13The record
10. 14Not Onionskin
11. 15Keyboard
12. 16Limits
13. 17Housekeeping

What it needs

Your key

In your download email. Asked for once, at first launch, and checked on your Mac. Keep it: a new Mac asks again. One Film & Video key opens four apps. Lost keys: software@filmflamingo.com.

Requires

macOS 12 Monterey or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel.

Takes in

A video file and a list of recipients, typed or pasted.

Gives back

One marked copy per recipient, a manifest, and a lookup that answers in a sentence.

Two panes

Make Copies ⌘1 does the work. Look Up a Copy ⌘2 answers the question the marks exist for.

Where things are

1

Make copies, and Look up a copy. ⌘1 and ⌘2.

2

BEFORE IT STARTS. Machine time, disk, and the source checksum.

3

RECIPIENTS. One name a line.

4

What it read back, and every line it could not use.

5

THE MARK. Placement, size, opacity, colour.

6

Make copies, and mark one test copy first.

Making the copies

1. Drop the cutThe app probes it before anything expensive happens and says what it found.
2. Paste the recipientsOne per line. It copes with what you would paste out of an email.
3. Set the mark and look at itLive preview with a scrubber, so you see the mark on your own picture rather than on a sample.
4. Mark one test copy⌘T. One copy, start to finish, before you commit twenty.
5. Make copies⌘R. The queue can be paused, resumed and stopped.

Where the mark sits

The drift sweeps are 137 and 89 seconds, deliberately coprime, so the combined cycle runs about three hours and twenty minutes and the path does not repeat inside a feature.

The defaults

Size

8.5% of picture height. Turn it down and the mark is quieter on screen and harder to read back from a photograph of one.

Opacity

80%. It reads on a white cut and on a black one. Below about 45% the mark survives the screen but not a photograph of it.

Outline

On. A dark outline and shadow behind the glyphs, because a white mark on a bright sky disappears completely, and bright material is exactly when somebody is photographing the screen.

Where they came from

The mark was rendered, degraded the way a phone photographing a television degrades it, and put back through the app's own lookup until the code stopped being readable.

Bursts

Continuous

The default. The mark is always on screen.

Periodic

The mark appears in bursts: six seconds visible, every seven minutes, by default.

The trade

A burst is less intrusive to watch and gives a leaker more unmarked material to work with. The setting says so.

What comes out

Codec

H.264, HEVC or ProRes 422. Each says what it is for.

Container

QuickTime .mov or MPEG-4 .mp4.

Named by

A pattern taking {source}, {recipient}, {copyid} and {date}, within what a filesystem will actually take.

Verified

Every written copy is checked to be a whole copy before it is called done. A part-finished file is never left looking finished.

Looking up a copy

1. Open Look Up a Copy⌘2.
2. Type the code, or drop the frameA photograph of a screen works. Vision reads the code out of the picture.
3. Read the sentenceCopy 6JAS-FA went to Jane Roe on 14 March 2026, from THE LONG WEEKEND. An answer, not a table to interpret.

The record

Beside the output

A CSV manifest, with a JSON sidecar carrying the same data for lookup.

Each row holds

The recipient, the copy ID, the source and its hash, the output file, and a one-line summary of what the mark looked like, so the record says so without needing the app to interpret it.

Kept durably

In the app's own storage, so deleting an output folder does not delete the ability to answer.

Menus and keys

• ⌘OOpen Video
• ⇧⌘OOpen Recipient List
• ⌘TMark One Test Copy
• ⌘RMake Copies
• ⌘.Stop
• ⌘1 / ⌘2Make Copies / Look Up a Copy
• MenuFile › Show the Record in Finder

What it does not do

• Marking is a deterrent and a tracing aid. It does not stop a screener being copied, forwarded or filmed off a screen, and a determined person may be able to crop or obscure a mark.
• There is a distance beyond which a photograph of a screen cannot be read back. The app states it rather than engineering around it.
• A burst schedule leaves unmarked material by design. That is the trade you are making, and the setting says so.
• The lookup only knows about runs made on this Mac. There is no server holding a copy of your record, by design.
• Screener never connects to anything. No account, no network, no telemetry.

Where things live

Your copies

In the folder you chose. Kept as a bookmark, so the choice survives a quit.

The record

In the app's own storage, plus the manifest beside each run's output. File › Show the Record in Finder opens it.

Before a run

Preflight probes the destination, hashes the source, calibrates, and checks there is disk for what you asked for. A run that cannot finish does not start.