Blackbird Ascent® Publishing

Similarly, the Ascent platform holds edits of a production, and the production process you are engaged in likely requires people to look at results, either intermediate or final. The means of getting results in front of people is to “publish” it using our cloud, accessible by anyone anywhere with the unique url the Blackbird system sends to them under your command. This is useful for a distributed work team, even internationally. A logger could log and clip an asset for review, elsewhere a reviewer could peruse the published clip in a browser, contributing their input immediately.

Blackbird ingests source material to proxies on the Blackbird cloud, which power the Blackbird players of various types (including the Ascent cloud video editor). This enables rapid navigation and selection within source clips, affording the opportunity to embed knowledge of the clip content (logging, review) and choose durations within a clip (clipping, editing). To make intermediate work available to others without a Blackbird account, the clip or edit which forms an asset of the production can be made to generate a conventional movie file viewable in any browser (hosted for speed on the Blackbird cloud worldwide).

By playing a media clip, or jumping to various points using the Video Waveform, or by scrubbing through the video waveform and then continuing to play, you can identify both “in” points and “out” points for saving out “named clips”. These named clips are not actually video clips themselves, but are actually a small EDL of a selected duration from the actual media clip. Several differently-timed named clips may be saved out from the same media clip, and will appear in the library at the bottom, underneath the Blackbird control centre video player. Any of these may be dropped onto a “publishing button” to swiftly publish the clip in a desired format.

This represents one of the simplest workflows possible, and yet does not even touch the Ascent cloud video editor at this stage! Using the control centre to “top ’n tail” clips after first logging is actually a rapid and effective way of reviewing content for approval, if followed by a simple publishing action (dropping the resulting named clip onto a publishing button).

Publishing buttons are mainly found in two places – the Ascent cloud video editor application itself, and also the Blackbird control centre. In the latter, the control centre, the publishing buttons are actually created as pre-sets according to the set-up information you specify. In the former, the cloud video editor, the publishing buttons are evident in the left-most tool panel, as a set of actions which will publish to destinations, according to the information you have pre-set.

There are other instances in which publishing buttons appear, and often these will be evident as specialised publishing options within the slim player apps – clipping and reviewing apps, for example.

As mentioned, the two places to see publishing buttons are the Blackbird control centre to set up the pre-set actions and place them into the editor on that account; and the Ascent cloud video editor where they are used within a production task such as editing, logging or reviewing of rushes / assemblies.

First, we shall see some example publishing buttons typically found in the cloud video editor, then we shall examine how such buttons are assigned and pre-set with relevant information for your particular usage.

Tasks may be created for yourself and other users of your account, depending on your role settings. The ability to set up tasks is itself an account-level dependent feature. Primarily, these tasks will be to allow reviewing or approving, of source clips or edited production sequences. A user wishing to set up tasks will themselves require the enabling of the feature, if it is not already set to allow task creation.

Shot selection is a significant usage of Ascent due to the exceedingly rapid turn-around of production decisions that our product makes possible. An incoming capture can be viewed in review or logging circumstances more or less as soon as it starts ingesting, which in turn is as soon as it lands on the Edge Server in a watch folder.

As a result, a major usage of Ascent in the early stages of a production is to arrive at an EDL – an Edit Decision List, which contains logging or review information (as metadata). Such an EDL can be easily read into other systems such as Avid, in a typical off-line or on-line editing suite.

To export a production or edit as an EDL, drop the work file onto the EDL button. A resulting file will then appear (as “published”) in the export folder – double click this file. A separate browser window will then appear (if you grant permissions for pop-ups to be enabled), showing a list detailing which file types are available to download.

From here it is a simple matter to Secondary-click the desired link; select “Save link”; select where you want it to download, and click Save.

Ascent is able to export to AAF, EDL, ALE, XML and HTML formats:

In Ascent the recipient (typically a reviewer) shall open the tasks window from the tasks button. Double-clicking the file will show a media playing window. Within this window comments may be added as part of the review process, as well as selection for either “approve” or “reject”.

The file will then appear in your tasks window.

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