Acquisition of media into Blackbird Ascent®
It goes without saying that in order to produce output, you need to get something in! Your production process will include the form of capture and shooting or stream handling suitable for your workflow, but how does it meet the Ascent® cloud? Typically (with a few exceptions), you will be using one of our purpose-designed appliances – a Blackbird® Edge Server, which connects your incoming media to our cloud (it in effect sits on the “edge” of our cloud). The high-resolution source stays on the Edge Server, the rapidly available Blackbird proxy permeates the cloud.
Typical means of acquisition of media include camera cards inserted into readers; directly connecting a camera or studio feed over SDI-HD into an SDI interface on an Edge Server; accepting live streams over SDI; and even accepting incoming HLS streams over IP. In all cases, the Blackbird Edge Server needs to be made aware of the existence of the incoming media, and be given information about it, in order to efficiently ingest it to the Blackbird cloud.
Arrivals folders
To get content into the Blackbird system you would generally ingest it at the point it comes into contact with the Blackbird cloud, rather than place original full-resolution material on the cloud.
In general, the way to ingest incoming source material is with a Blackbird Edge Server – an appliance specifically intended for ingest to the cloud. The Blackbird Edge Server holds the original full-resolution source material the Blackbird proxy is made from, and will provide it back to the Blackbird cloud again when publishing is required. One unique aspect of our ingest process is that it is virtually instantaneous. As soon as the aquisition begins, a fully-functional loggable, reviewable or editable proxy copy of the input can appear on a player – anywhere in the world! There is really no necessity to wait any length of time – even when the ingest has only just begun, workable proxy is available. One of the keys to slotting this useful ability into your workflow is the prior setting up of what are called “watch folders” or arrivals folders, on the Edge Server.
Considerations for removable media
An Edge server may be installed as an appliance in, for example, an edit suite. In this environment it may be assumed that it shall stay put and remain powered on. Our new macOS Edge Server app effectively turns any modern Mac into an Edge server for the duration that the app is running – including laptops such as MacBooks. This can present two areas which require attention in the way that you work.
| Firstly, ingesting and publishing jobs work best on a fully powered-up computer – if you sleep a MacBook which is running the Edge app (for example by shutting the lid) you will likely postpone the completion of the ingest or publish job, at least until you wake the MacBook again. |
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Secondly, and perhaps more crucially, it is often the case that media from a shoot resides on camera cards such as SD cards / SDXC cards. Or perhaps the media is residing on a hard drive, having been walked to the MacBook from nearby (“sneakernet”). In such cases, it is vital to ensure that the media on the drive remains available to the Edge server throughout the duration of your project. Publishing jobs toward the end of the production will still expect access to the original high resolution source. If you insert a card or drive and ingest straight from the card, you will get a workable ingest enabling logging and editing. However, if you then remove the drive or card you may have difficulty publishing or clipping until the media is put back in. The worst situation would be to ingest some media from a card, then remove the card and erase it ready for another shoot. A good suggestion is to adopt a habit of first copying the media from the card or drive to somewhere on your Mac Edge server (typically this would be an already set-up watchfolder), and then you may remove the card or drive to do with as you wish. The extra few minutes involved are certainly worth your peace of mind later in your production. |
The ingest result is merely a proxy copy — depending on the workflow chosen, the Edge Server may link back to the original resolution material on your Mac later in your production process.
HLS stream ingesting
An increasingly present technique for bringing source material into a Blackbird Edge Server is HLS (HTTP Live Streaming). This is a media format designed for internet streaming and works by having a specialised server segmenting video and audio into a series of equal length files (plus an index file). This would arrive at an Blackbird Edge Server to be ingested into proxy and then made available to the editor almost immediately. The arrivals folder is viewable from the Blackbird control centre, together with all the technical details about it which one might require.
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