Customising Clip Reports

The Clips Report is the most customizable type of report. Silverstack offers a flexible and powerful reporting center, allowing users to customize Clips Reports made for production and post-production workflows. These reports include thumbnails and metadata in a well-arranged and accessible PDF document. Reports include all the metadata needed to document camera media traveling to different professionals involved in many stages across the production workflow.

 

Reporting Center – Customizing Clips Reports

 

Basic Options

  • Clip Table Layout
  • Table content: Clips only or clips and other files. Sidecar documents can be included in the report
    • Ignore Audio Clips
  • Number of Thumbnails: 1 or 3 (see section “Three Thumbnails per Clip”)

 

Advanced Options

Reporting Center – Clips Reports: Advanced menu

  • Thumbnail Quality in %: setting to adjust the compression ratio of the images with its resulting data reduction.
  • You can include the following summaries:
    • Project
      • Production Info
      • Clips Overview
      • Workflow

 

Clip Table Layout Customization: Metadata Columns

Users can apply their own Table View column layouts to customize the information needed in Clips Reports.

In order to create a Custom Layout for the Table View, users can select the small gear button and check/uncheck the metadata columns according to their workflow needs:

Clips Reports – Customizing the table view for a Clips Report

 

Once the layout contains the required columns and those are sorted correctly, it can be saved thorugh the ‘Save…’ menu:

Table View layout – Clips Reports customization

 

Finally, proceed to the report center to create a Clips Report and choose the ‘Custom Layout’ as the Clip Table Layout. The resulting Clips Report will contain that exact layout:

Reporting Center – Clips Reports: Basic

 

Thumbnails in Clips Reports

Users can customize the thumbnails shown in their reports to get a better preview of the footage. Silverstack by default creates one thumbnail for each ingested clip that is saved in the library. This thumbnail is used for referencing clips in the Clips, Thumbnails and Contact Print Reports. As shown in the previous screenshots, it’s possible to choose between 1 and 3 thumbnails for each clip in the report.

 

How To

When selecting the Clips or Thumbnails Report in the report wizard you can choose as “Number of Thumbnails:”:

  • 1
  • 3 (requires online media)

During the export process Silverstack creates two thumbnails for the first and the last frame of the clip in addition to the custom thumbnail. In contrast to a single thumbnail Clips Report that accesses the custom thumbnail, the three thumbnails Clips Report requires online media for the ad hoc creation of the additional thumbnails.

 

Position of Thumbnails

The position for the creation of the additional thumbnails can be influenced by setting in and out points for a clip. The position of the custom thumbnail can be set in the Preferences menu. Additionally, thumbnail creation on ingest can be deactivated in the Preferences. For more information on how to select thumbnails, please refer to the article Choosing custom thumbnail images.

 

‘Additional Thumbnails Failed to Create’ Warning

If the thumbnail creation process fails it can have different reasons. One common, simple reason is offline media. If the report fails the following alert will be shown:

Fig. 8: The alert when something went wrong with the creation of additional thumbnails.

The alert when something went wrong with the creation of additional thumbnails.

Please be aware that if no custom thumbnails have been created the custom thumbnail will show a placeholder icon in the reports. Always take a look at your report to ensure its content.

 

Hiding Thumbnails in Clips Reports

Alternatively, it’s possible to completely hide or skip thumbnails in Clips Reports. In order to accomplish that, just remove the ‘Preview’ column from the Table View custom layout:

Table View – Removing the ‘Preview’ column

 

Example of a Clips Report

 

Figure 6: example of a Clips Report - click to get a closer look

Example of a Clips Report – click to get a closer look

 

Fig. x: Example of a Clips report with three thumbnails

Example of a Clips report with three thumbnails

For more information about this topic, please check the article Creating Reports.