Cloud – Edge Server management
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. To play out and publish video in a typical Faster Than Live production scenario, ingested proxy of your incoming material is made available instantaneously in real time by the cloud, to anywhere in the world.
To get your original video material into the Blackbird® Cloud, your material passes through an ingest stage, which accepts the high resolution original as you hand it over, and generates proxy directed at the cloud. This constitutes the ingest process (rather than merely copying incoming files on to a machine).
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. The Control Centre offers a wide range of management views of your Edge Servers.
Although the Blackbird® cloud is where the ingested material is directed to, the high res originals (or generated mezzanine) stay on an Edge Server, and are made available at the far end of the production process when the production results are “published”.
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
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 from which the Blackbird proxy is made, and will provide it back to the Blackbird cloud again when publishing is required.
One of the keys to slotting this useful ability into your workflow is the prior setting up of what are called “watch folders” on the Edge Server and corresponding “arrivals” folders on the Cloud.
Edge Server administration screen
Starting at the landing page, use the Edge Servers button in the Cloud section on the top, to arrive at the Edge servers selection page. If you have more than one Edge server, they will all be listed here. If you only have one Edge server, it will be shown here. In either case, there is also the opportunity to set up a new Edge server from this screen (the grey pane with a + symbol in a circle).
Select the Edge server you wish to administer (which may well be the only Edge server shown). These three tabs on the right of the screen offer status (by default); network (DNS, interface setup); or settings, of that particular Edge server.
From this screen, underneath the Edge server pane is a drop-down menu with the first entry being “Services”. This will take you to a selection screen with all of the services you have assigned. Services such as streams which come in, or publishing tasks, which go out.
Arrivals folder
From the above screen, actually selecting one of the sources will also show either of two tabs on the right hand side: “Settings” or “Status”.
From this screen, selecting “Arrivals folder” from the selected source drop-down menu will place you at the Arrivals folder screen, which has two right-hand side tabs, “Sources” and “Settings”.
The arrivals folder (you can make more than one if you require) is where incoming media ingested to Blackbird proxy resolution is to be found, on the Blackbird® Cloud.
The “Settings” tab shown above allows you to enter “Magic Expressions” which will magically name your incoming ingests in a desired format, automatically. (See the section on “Magic Expressions”). Also, the “Settings” tab offers folder renaming; sorting of listing; ingest format (resolution/rate); ingest decisions; and a group of “Advanced” options which rewrite clip name, reel name and disk label metadata (quite useful for organising media for finding / separation).
The “Sources” tab lists available sources such as streams, and indicates which one(s) has been assigned to the arrivals folder, to be worked on. In the case of streams, you can even set it to record manually by pressing a red round record button.
Edge setup – ingest queue
From the Arrivals folder screens, the drop-down under the selected folder name has two menu entries (“Ingest queue…” and “Monitor and control streams”) which show you a table view of the Arrivals folder’s ingest queue.
Specialised queue views
There are more specialised status views of queues available.
Going back one step to the screen where we selected the service(s) source:
If we select from the drop-down menu the entry “Arrivals folder Ingest queue…” we see a table which lists the scheduled plus the failed ingest jobs.
Similarly if we select the entry “Arrivals folder streams…” we see a table which lists the current plus the completed ingest jobs.
And in the same vein, if we select the entry arrivals folder unprocessed files” we see a table which lists unprocessed jobs.
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.
| Ingesting and publishing jobs will 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. |
|
Media from a shoot often resides on camera cards such as SDXC cards, XQD cards, SxS cards, etc. Alternatively, media may reside on a portable hard drive which was walked to the Mac 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.