Product updates: 29th September 2020

Posted: 07/10/2020

The latest upgrade to the Blackbird platform was released on September 29th 2020. This includes some notable features that extend the Blackbird workflows.

New effects controls (including Pan/Zoom)

To ease the user experience of creating content involving pan and/or zoom of media within an edit such as Picture in Picture edits – a new user interface design has been implemented. This intuitive design provides a fast user experience to manipulate media within a sequence as well as being able to preview the results in real time whilst performing the edit.

Blur

The ability to blur a section of an edit can be particularly useful to make images less identifiable. This has now been implemented within both the Blackbird editor and also the Blackbird publishing infrastructure. Combined with the new effects controls to manage keyframes for position, size and shape makes for a fast and precise feature that enables new workflow possibilities.

Publishing

Publishing to destinations from Blackbird of video, stills and metadata has recently been enhanced with a visual workflow configuration. This increases the flexibility of customer configuration and permits for more advanced delivery options. Examples of this can be for delivering media to both social and cloud storage, multiple social platforms, broadcast and VOD or any combination of these. This increases productivity and speed of the workflow by avoiding the need for duplicated effort by users and exposes even more of the power of Blackbird to our existing customers. The workflow builder is available to all customers. Please contact support if you would like to explore the possibilities it brings.

RTMP Push – Scheduled, 24/7 and manual control

In addition to the ad hoc on demand RTMP capture, Blackbird Edge now also supports:

• scheduled/manual/24×7 control
• time of day, UTC timecode from Edge
• sectioned 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 hour blocks (24/7 capture mode)
• automatic content expiry option for (24/7 capture mode)

Zixi TS Pull – Scheduled, 24/7 and manual control

Blackbird Edge now includes the ability to pull Zixi transport streams along with the same control capabilities as cloud controlled SDI and HLS capture including:

• scheduled/Manual/24×7 control
• time of day, UTC timecode from Edge
• sectioned 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 hour blocks (24/7 capture mode)
• automatic content expiry option for (24/7 capture mode)

Blackbird Edge Speed Test

To validate infrastructure and connectivity between our customers’ ecosystem and the Blackbird platform, our Edge software now includes an automated speed test utility to assist in diagnosing any speed and latency issues that may impact end user performance. This can be executed remotely and results shown to an administrator to validate connectivity and performance.

Arabic support

The Blackbird platform has been enhanced to support Arabic including right to left within the editor. This eases adoption and integration into the workflow of anyone requiring access to this functionality.

Our support team is gradually rolling out these updates so please get in touch with them with any questions you may have – support@blackbird.video