Production tasks in the Control Centre
It is possible to use the Control Centre to play video and audio media assets. The player is presented in such cases within the page of the Control Centre. The player does more than merely play media, however. It also affords the possibility of clipping in and out points, therefore providing pre-clipped edl content to your team. Additionally, it allows management tasks such as renaming, placing within different reel or disk labels, or even deleting through the “recycle bin” system. Further, a media clip can be “published” to a destination, in various forms.
Media might also be in the form of a continuously incoming stream such as HLS, or as a file that has been ingested through an Edge Server.
The media management area of the Control Centre within your production shows a heirarchy of:
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Files (default)
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Libraries
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publishing
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Recycle bin
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Sources
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Transfer Endpoints
Within Files (and Recycle bin) you will see:
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Folders
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Sources
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Sequences
From any of the visible sources or sequences, in any particular folder level, if you double-click on one of them it will play directly in a built-in video player area within the media management screen itself.
Performing tasks with the player
Now that you know the layout and functionality of the Blackbird Player, some of the common tasks shall be described. As mentioned above, clipping is an additional feature which the Blackbird Player comes with for free. Clipping is extremely useful in the broadcast and film industry for decision making and production, and also in any media industry which acts as a conduit to social media. Many video industries spend a considerable proportion of their time on clipping, to their advantage. It therefore is helpful that the Blackbird Control Centre not only offers a fully featured player, but that the player additionally offers professional clipping built in.
To perform clipping, one simply decides where an “in” point is, to indicate the beginning of the section of interest, and an equivalent “out” point indicating the end of the section of interest. This can be performed “on-the-fly” as it were, without stopping. Just play the video and hit the in point button where you intend to come “in“ to the clip, and similarly at the appropriate time hit the “out” point button when the section of interest is over. Alternatively, the video may be paused if necessary and stepped forwards or backwards, enabling frame-accurate positioning of cut points.
Playing, clipping, publishing from the player
To see your media on the cloud, for a particular production, enter through the “Cog” menu in that production (if you have such permissions set in your role). Select the “Media” menu entry from your production’s Cog menu. (Or alternatively, select “Configuration” which is the top default entry of the Cog menu, then from the left side toolbar, select the Media button).
Clicking on any individual source clip or production sequence will open a video player.
From this position, as well as merely playing source media or production sequences, you are able to perform clipping (which specifies a new start and/or stop point within the existing duration, used in “topping and tailing” for example). This will give you a selection clip, which you may publish.
Familiarity with Blackbird® Player
The Blackbird® Player is a media player for presenting a window upon which the video image is displayed. Like many familiar media players in the industry, Blackbird Player will start and stop video by clicking or tapping on the video window area itself. Unlike many industry video players, Blackbird offers far more functionality in the same space.
As well as playing the video, it is possible to quickly shunt to the beginning or end of a clip in one action. If the clip is actually a production edit with perhaps several cuts in place, this action will jump through that particular clip’s edit points within the production.
To aid navigation within the media, a novel tool called the “Blackbird Video Waveform” is presented underneath the video area.
The Video Waveform is freely zoomable from the entire duration of the video clip or edit fitting into the area, all the way in to seeing individual frames.
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green areas of the bar represent available Blackbird proxy media – this starts filling immediately either side of the cursor, followed by rapidly filling the remainder
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orange areas are currently fetching proxy media – these become populated by green in a short space of time
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… //change callout numbering to skip this!
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video waveform preview – if you zoom in, you will see a representational shaving from each frame, zoomed out presents a holistic view of the entire clip, enabling you to ascertain movement, events or scene shifting
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the “here and now” – a static cursor representing the position within the video source you are viewing in the player
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an edit or cut (this illustration shows the recorder, whereas the player would normally show unedited source clips – however, if any of those source clips are actually captures of an already edited or cut piece, you will see any jump cuts in a similar fashion).
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audio is represented similarly by energy (the lighter the higher the sound level, the darker the closer to silence) – this makes it particularly easy to visually aim for gaps in dialogue, for example
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zoom button (the mousewheel also performs zoom in/out, if you have one on a connected mouse)
The idea of the Video Waveform is that successively narrower slices of the video frames are packed together in varying density according to zoom view. When the Video Waveform is zoomed all the way out, you see strata formed from colours present within an aggregate of each frame.
This presents an impressionistic view of the nature of what is occurring dynamically in the video itself. Soporific and static shots would all look more or less the same for a significant duration. When action occurs, or something changes, or even the scene shifts, this will “paint” a noticeably different pattern – the dynamics represented visually will correlate to alterations in the visual content. The result is that navigation is eased considerably while retaining great accuracy (compared with most other NLE software on the market).
Below this is the current time or timecode display. Below that are “in” and “out” time points, defined by clicking appropriate buttons Set In point and Set Out point .
“rewind” navigation |
time and positions |
“forward” navigation |
1: go to the start of the video 2: go back to the previous edit point 3: step back one frame |
4: set “in” point 5: timecode (current position in time) 6: duration of selection (between “in” and “out” points) 7: set “out” point |
8: step ahead one frame 9: go ahead to the next edit point 10: go to the end of the video |
The top bar of the Player has two buttons on the right hand for publish (share) and viewing resolution.
Keyboard short cuts
A very useful feature is the ability to set up keyboard short cuts for the Forte editor to use, across a site or for a specific project.
This is valuable if you have staff who might be used to another editing system – the keyboard shortcuts for most actions can be set to the same as the environment they are already used to, to speed up production.
To manage your keyboard short cuts, starting at the Landing page, use the Configuration button in the Cloud section at the top area of the screen.
This will place you at the configuration screen with the first option open already. This is the “Keyboard shortcuts” management area. From here you may set which keyboard shortcut set is active. Typically this might be the “Media Composer” set, for staff already used to using Media Composer.
Another way would be to follow the route of to arrive at the Site config screen, from where you may select Configuration.
The table of sites will contain your site as a row entry, click on your site name in the column “Name" to arrive at the Site config landing page. From there, open the “Keyboard shortcuts” menu disclosure triangle.
Logging metadata
It is possible to examine the metadata in a production which was added in the course of logging. The logging information is typically fairly small passages of text. The admin interface here allows editing and deletion of log entries.
The table of sites will contain your site as a row entry, click on your site name in the column “Name" to arrive at the Site config landing page. From there, open the “Logging metadata” menu disclosure triangle.
