Creating reports

A crucial feature in Silverstack is the report creation. For this reason, Silverstack offers a flexible and powerful reporting center, offering users the opportunity to share clip information and thumbnails in a well-arranged and accessible PDF document. Reports can include all the metadata needed to document camera media traveling to different professionals involved in many stages across the production workflow.

This article requires knowledge about the clip library and the report wizard. Let’s summarize what this tutorial covers:

1. Creating and customizing reports
2. Adjusting the thumbnails for the reports
3. Including a report note with Markdown
4. Saving the adjustments within a preset for configuring a workflow

The following explanations assume that you already have some clips available in your Silverstack library. To have some footage to work with, you can use Silverstack’s sample project and footage. The workflows for shooting day, thumbnails, contact print and volume reports are not explained in detail in this tutorial since the settings are self-explanatory. The individual settings are explained in the article about the report wizard.

1. Customizing reports#

Open the “Report Wizard” by clicking the Report button in the top left of the toolbar.

Creating a custom layout for the clips report#

For the clips report you can use a predefined or custom layout. Let’s create a custom preset. Close the report wizard for now, head to the library’s table view and click the gear icon next to the table view’s layout dropdown menu. As a starting point, you can use one of the predefined layouts like “All”, “None” or “Digital Imaging Technician.” Use the checkboxes in the dropdown menu to enable or disable metadata columns as you like. You can also rearrange the columns within the table view using drag & drop. The option “Current Layout” switches to “Custom Layout” and by clicking the button Save… , you can store your adjustments within a new layout. For example, you could use the layout “None” to begin with, add three scene, shot, take columns and name the preset “Basic Clips Report.” You can now open the report wizard again and set the layout of the clips report to the custom layout called “Basic Clips Report.”

2. Adjusting the thumbnails#

If you would like to adjust the thumbnail positions and shift them more to the beginning, middle or end of the clips, that’s possible. Go to Settings > Media > Thumbnails and change the slider to the beginning, middle, or end. Close the settings, select the desired clips to change the thumbnails for and click Clip > Recreate Thumbnails to generate new thumbnails. In case this created an undesirable result for one of the clips, you can open the playback view, set the clips’ playhead to a specific frame and click Clip > Set Thumbnail Frame to set the thumbnail to that chosen frame.

3. Including a report note with Markdown#

Each report type allows you to add an individual report note that can be formatted using the markup language Markdown. For example, you can enable the Include Report Note checkbox within the clips report settings and click the pen icon to open the editor. You may use the following Markdown code to test the function:

Header#

Subheader#

• Bullet Point 1
• Bullet Point 2

If you enter the code above into the Markdown editor, it shows you a preview of the result.

4. Saving the report adjustments within a preset#

Saving the configured reports as preset helps you to provide consistent data management. On top of that, to automatically create reports as post steps using the workflow configuration window, you need to make a report preset first. You can do this by clicking Save as new preset… in the preset dropdown menu in the bottom bar of the report wizard. Apply a name to your preset and click OK . The preset stores the settings of the entire report configuration, including which report types are enabled or disabled.

5. Create the reports#

There are two ways to create reports from your assets:

• Manually using the report wizard
• Automatically while running a workflow (using post steps)

After having saved a report template, you can create reports after each activity within a workflow. Learn how to do this in our article about configuring workflows. To manually export reports (e.g. because you want to create a report of the entire library after you finished your entire work), select one or multiple bins in the library outline, open the report wizard and click Export Reports .