Site – management of users and roles

The role settings are the crucial factor governing the actions and permissions available to a user. In fact, a user may even have two entirely different roles within two different productions (although this is not frequently the case – more commonly, a user with a role in one is typically also that role in another production).

As a matter of best practice, the naming of sites and productions are encouraged to follow these guidelines:

The syntax simply involves using your customer name, then underscore, then the site name or account name, ensuring all of this is in upper case.

Master configurations for sites actually cascade down to become the base configuration for the various associated productions. These may be changed, of course, to tailor the settings per production. For example, publishing ingest frame rates and logging metadata values may require bespoke setups.

There is a colour coding within the Control Centre, in which the left navigation buttons will have a certain colour filling the background of the active button. The colours are:

The administration of users may well be executed from within any of the above three areas. However, in any case you will be put back into the Cloud area (showing a Purple button background), but without the other cloud buttons. You will only see Home; Configuration; Edge Servers buttons on the left sidebar.

Within the Control Centre you will see a line of text underneath the “Blackbird” logotype near the top, which we call a “breadcrumb trail”. As with any application or site featuring a breadcrumb trail, the purpose of this is to find your way back from where you came. Ours differs from most breadcrumb trails in that it allows you to jump to other positions, also.

For example, if you are at a User page (cloud area – purple button), your breadcrumb trail will show the site the user is associate with (in orange), followed by the user you are administering (in grey). Clicking on the site part of the breadcrumb (in orange) will jump you to the site landing page (configuration section, in orange) rather than wherever you came into the user admin page from.

From the home page (the page you see immediately after login) you can add users either for a production (your “account”), or your whole site. To create a user (for example, you may have a new person on your team who requires setting up to perform work) we follow the following steps. The person following these steps for creating a user must be a (site or production) admin, or higher.

As discussed, users can be added at the site level (using the “Cloud” config buttons) and at the production level (using the “Cog” menu). It is suggested, however, that as a matter of practice users should where possible be added at site level. The advantage being that it will give you more control. Once the user exists at the site level, they are then available to be included in various productions, and have various roles assigned.

The creation of users at the production level (account level) is nevertheless a viable option, and will set a new user up whilst also including them within that production and with an assigned role. It also posts an invitation to the user for them to agree to the account creation (which, if they have received it, inherently verifies that the correct contact email address had been entered).

As a matter of manageability, it is suggested that users are named following the Blackbird syntax of alphanumeric first and second initial, followed by a number (e.g. hd91).

An Edge server is also classified as a user. In most ways the process of setting up an Edge server as a user resembles that of setting up a human user. The creation of Edge users depends upon connection to the Blackbird cloud, as the Edge requires authentication to the cloud.

From here you have control over the administration of the Edge server as a user, in the same way that it would be if it were a human user.

Clicking on the Edge servers button in the left sidebar menu will take you back to the choosing page for all of your Edge servers, if you have more than one.

Similar to human users, there is a recommended format to adopt for naming an Edge server with a user.

In addition to your Blackbird account, you will have an “access level” associated with a “role” (assigned by a holder of the account manager role). As an example, some frequently encountered roles are “Reviewer”; “Logger”; “Editor”. A visible effect of changing an access level is that certain features, buttons, controls will be present or absent in the user-interface layout. This can become evident when a user can access more than one Blackbird account or project and their roles differ in each (not a common occurrence but not impossible either in organisations with more than one output in production at a given time – usually a person would have the same role if they are in more than one account).

Blackbird has several pre-set user access levels, already defined for commonplace role types. This helps a “turnkey” setup get up to speed quickly. Further roles with custom access and feature visibility may be defined by the account manager.

The standard program operating settings of the interface (typical for most computers, in most situations) are in effect when you click the button for your chosen task. These settings pertain to whether a computer might have a lot or little memory, and how audio is handled (which becomes evident when voiceover is required). To help when using certain low-end computers, there are some customised variants of the program settings applied upon launch.

In the Blackbird control centre there are many tasks and destinations available. For a user with a manager status it is useful to be able to quickly browse available media. This is possible from within the Blackbird control centre (contingent upon the user’s role).

Each actual video file is represented by a thumbnail, name, proxy size, active tracks and duration. Double-clicking on a video file will open up a video player in the control centre itself.

Along with said player, more extensive detailed information about the particular video file playing is available on the panel to the right of the player. For media assets such as video clips, three tabs are visible:

Other media types will display different tabs, for example edits or selections will show a “Sequence” and “Sources” and “Previous versions” tab, as these media are actually types of EDL (edit decision list).

To add a list of users, visit your site’s “users” page and click the “Import from CSV” button.

Select a .csv file of the following structure: * The first row should contain the column headers “fullname”, “company”, “email”, with each following row containing a new user * A new user’s “fullname” should be formatted as “Firstname [optional middle names] Lastname” * “company” is optional but can be of any textual format * “email” should be in a standard email address format

CSV, or comma-separated values, are a very widespread lightweight format for containing data which may be structured in a tabular form (that is, laid out in a table).

All of us frequently lay out data in a spreadsheet, but the essential idea of tables and tabular columns remains. Hence, most spreadsheets allow exporting a table to a plain-text format which separates each column across the width of each line (that is, a “row”, in table terminology) with a comma. This makes comma-separated value files very easy to transport and export/import between any spreadsheet a person might be using, and even text editors will allow readability. Other applications make use of .csv format to import or export tabular data, too.

Next concept ⍈ Cloud – Edge Server management