A few years ago, I was sitting in a video production suite watching render queues. Not the most glamorous moment, I'll admit. We had teams across three locations, hundreds of video files that needed to be transcoded, and deadlines that wouldn't move.
The encoders were running. The software was fine. But something felt wrong.
We'd be processing five files sequentially when the Mac in front of me had eight separate hardware media engines just sitting there unused. Apple Silicon could encode multiple files simultaneously, the hardware was built for it. But every transcoding tool we tried processed files one at a time. We were leaving performance on the table, and every hour of wasted encoding time meant budget overruns and stressed teams.
So I built one.
Parallel Media Encoder is a macOS app that does one thing: let you encode multiple video files at the same time using Apple Silicon's dedicated hardware. It's about 39% faster than sequential encoding for batch jobs. Supports H.264, H.265, ProRes, DNxHR, and RAW formats. There's a free version and a $39 one-time purchase for the Pro version.
It's not going to change the world. But it solves a problem that existed because the industry standardized on a workflow that didn't match the actual hardware capabilities.
This isn't a post about selling you an encoder. (Though if you transcode video on a Mac, you should try it. Link)
This is about what that project taught me about how businesses actually work — and how we think about operations at Case Study Consulting.
When you're in production, whether it's film, TV, commercial content, or anything involving large file libraries and tight deadlines — you learn to think about time differently. A five-minute rendering bottleneck doesn't sound like much until it's been five minutes every single day across ten workstations. That's not an inconvenience. That's money leaving your business in the form of idle equipment and delayed schedules.
You learn to look at workflows and ask: where is the system wrong, not where is the person wrong?
Most of the time, you solve these problems by finding better software. Sometimes you integrate two tools that weren't designed to talk to each other. Sometimes you build a spreadsheet system that's actually pretty clever, even if it makes the IT person nervous.
But sometimes, and this is the part I want to tell you about, the answer isn't in the software catalog. Sometimes it's in building something small and specific that does exactly what your business needs, nothing more.
I've been in consulting rooms where we've recommended the expensive platform, the well-known SaaS tool, the industry standard. And often that's exactly right. There are reasons those tools exist and why they're popular.
But I've also been in rooms where we all knew that tool wasn't quite right — where we knew there was a gap between what the software could do and what the business actually needed — but we recommended it anyway because that's what you do. That's the standard playbook.
At Case Study Consulting, we've decided to have a different option available. If during our Discovery work we find a workflow bottleneck that no existing tool solves cleanly, we can build something custom. Not a massive system. Not a venture-backed app. A small, focused tool that bridges the gap.
This might look like:
These aren't sexy projects. They don't get written up in trade publications. They don't come with customer support hotlines. But they solve the actual problem your business has — not the problem some software company thinks you have.
If you're running a growing business with 10 to 100 people, you probably have at least one workflow that doesn't quite work. It's probably not terrible. It probably involves some combination of the tools you're already paying for — maybe a spreadsheet, maybe some manual work that someone spends a couple of hours on each week when everything goes perfectly.
You've looked at solutions. You've demoed software. Either nothing quite fits, the tool that fits costs way more than the problem is worth, or it requires three integrations and a configuration project that would take months.
That's the gap we're built to fill.
We do the Discovery work. We understand your business processes the way they actually work — not how they're supposed to work in theory. We look at where you're losing time, where teams are doing work twice, where a bottleneck is quietly costing you.
If the answer is a platform we can recommend and implement, we do that. We've built practices around Platform Migrations, Workflow Design, AI Enablement, and Media Asset Management.
But if the answer is something we need to build, we can do that too.
Parallel Media Encoder exists because one specific problem was unsolved. I doubt it will ever make serious money. But it proves something we believe at Case Study Consulting: the people doing the work see problems that generalist software vendors don't. The solution often requires someone willing to actually build something.
If you're interested in exploring whether Case Study Consulting could help your business work better — whether that's finding the right platform, designing better workflows, or building something custom to bridge a gap — we put together a quick diagnostic called the 3-Point Efficiency Report. It's designed to show you where your operations are leaking time and money.
Request it and we'll walk through it together. No pitch. No assumptions. Just an honest look at how your business currently moves.
And in the meantime, if you encode video on a Mac — try the app.
Do you only build custom tools if we work with you on a larger engagement?Not necessarily. We can explore custom tooling as its own project. Sometimes the solution to a workflow problem is a small, focused build that doesn't require a month-long consulting engagement.
What kind of custom tools can you actually build?Anything that lives in the workflow layer: dashboards, data transformation scripts, automated connectors between tools, lightweight approval systems, reporting utilities, internal applications that solve a specific business process. We typically avoid building things that compete with existing commercial software or that require extensive ongoing maintenance.
How long do these projects take?That depends entirely on scope. Some things can be built in a week. Some take a few weeks. We scope it clearly before we start and stick to that.
This sounds expensive. Can a small team actually afford custom tooling?Often yes. Small, focused tools cost less than you'd think — especially compared to the cost of the bottleneck they're solving. A two-week build that saves one person five hours per week pays for itself in a couple of months.
Learn what digital operations means for growing SMBs, why it matters, and how to optimize your software stack and workflows for efficiency.
How a founder's side project revealed a bigger principle: sometimes the best solution isn't buying software, it's building it.
Learn what digital operations means for growing SMBs, why it matters, and how to optimize your software stack and workflows for efficiency.
