Blue Compressor

Blue Compressor shrinks Nikon N-RAW (.NEV, from cameras like the Z8, Z9 and Z6III) and R3D NE (.R3D, Nikon ZR) clips by re-encoding the TICO RAW (JPEG XS) data inside them. The raw Bayer data stays raw, and the container, metadata, timecode and audio are untouched — the output is an ordinary clip that opens in the same software as the camera original. It can also convert Nikon ProRes RAW (.MOV) clips into N-RAW and R3D NE.

There is a desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux with drag and drop and a before/after quality previewer, plus a headless command-line tool, a C API for scripts and build servers, and a Docker/NAS build with a web UI. In the queue you can pause a running clip and resume it later, and it can generate optional 10-bit HEVC proxies alongside each clip.

The project has 32 stars on GitHub and is moving fast — 19 releases, the latest v0.3.6 beta landing 17 hours before this draft, with 90 commits. The README states plainly that it was built and is maintained by AI agents: the code, tests and docs are written by agents, and every change is reviewed by a veteran software engineer before it ships.

A few honest limits: it is beta software (v0.3.6) for a narrow job — Nikon raw video only, so if you don't shoot N-RAW or R3D NE it has nothing to do for you — and re-encoding, however careful, is still a re-encode, so keep your camera originals.