Review: video.Market7.com
Due to the fact that the annotated player is, at its heart, a Flash player with the XML/PHP interconnect to the comments database, the comments show up for other collaborators automatically, typically within 5–10 seconds. This level of rapid comment display is what we expected to see in the scripting tool, so perhaps Market7 will address the scripting deficiency soon.
Drawings on the screen are a part of the comment option, and they show up automatically; they include free-hand drawings with the pencil tool and variable-sized boxes with the box tool. The boxes are of interest because of the way XML for Final Cut handles overlays; we’ll discuss output options a bit later.
Replies can also be added to the comments. Subsequent replies added by other collaborators are also updated automatically. Any tags a replier adds to the available tag text box (or to the original commenter’s tag box) do not reflect in the overall updates to the comment.
Yet the added tags do appear in the tag filter list in the top-right corner. While the tag filter list defaults to All, choosing a collaborator’s tag (one he or she put in during a reply) will yield a filter search result of zero (no comments). The same is true if the original commenter goes back and edits his or her own tags—they will show up in the other collaborators’ tag filter lists, but they yield a filter search result of zero. Quirks like this make a seemingly easy process frustrating.
Speaking of which, the "edit" feature that is available to project owners (an administrative role) allows the project owner to make changes to his of her comments—or the comments of others—without any way to track those changes. Editing is not an option for other users to modify the administrative user’s comments, however, so this is a very "top down" hierarchy.
Despite those shortcomings, the annotated player is relatively intuitive; it speeds up the process of commenting for one simple reason: the ability to export these comments to a postproduction nonlinear editing system.
Export options abound, with the most robust one being the Final Cut Pro (FCP) XML export (see sidebar "Inside the Annotation"). Final Cut XML has both the comments and their specific times and an absolute location for the highlight box. which is re-created within FCP as a yellow box with 30% opacity. The system can also export Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere XML outputs for the respective nonlinear editors, although the XML for these two systems reflects time in only, not durations, while the Final Cut XML reflects durations. (You can learn more about the output file naming conventions in the sidebar, "What’s in a Name?")Other export options include HTML and PDF, both of which show the comments and replies but not the tags or the still image picon. Here’s an example of how the comments and replies read:
Project: Paul Test Video: SANY1002.mov
Comments from Annotative Player module of video.Market7.com
Comment: here the camera moves Name: Timothy Siglin Time: 0:01.6 Created At: Oct 31 5:36 AMReply: my Samsung takes better video Name: Paul Schmutzler Created At: Oct 31 5:44 AM
Comment: a box Name: Paul Schmutzler Time: 0:04.4 Created At: Oct 31 6:04 AM
Clicking on any comment jumps the video to that particular point. If a reply has also been added to an original comment, the timeline will reflect multiple, stacked comment icons. For comments that have been assigned a duration (the time-out clock box has been populated), there will also be a thin white bar for the length of the comment. It would be nice to be able to loop the video along the duration; currently, the video playback just continues, which doesn’t necessarily allow for fine-tuning in the timeline, which could save time heading into the nonlinear editing suite.
Once all the comments are completed and exported, the original video file can be downloaded and imported into a nonlinear editing system along with the comments. For downloaded files, the final name is changed from the original uploaded file—but not dramatically if the original file used the 8.3 filename and extension. For instance, the original name of the video file I commented on was SANY1002.mov. When I downloaded the file to put it into a Final Cut Pro timeline (to match it up against the comments I downloaded in the F.xml XML file), the name of the video file had been changed to 18526-original-sany1002.mov.
The new name reflects the asset number (18526) as well as the fact that the file is the original MOV HD file. This is kind of slick because transcoding to Flash standard def for the annotated player occurred in the background.
Finally, once the changes and comments are dealt with, comments can be deleted or tagged as "completed" in the annotated player. Additionally, if the time elements are the same as in the original video clip, a different video asset file can be assigned to replace the original video asset. If the new asset is a different length, the timeline triggers may have to be manually moved a bit, as the triggers are relative to a 0:00 start time (similar to the old days of pulse-code linear editing).
In closing, what Market7 has provided in terms of the annotated player is quite remarkable. The annotated player sets Market7 apart from other collaboration tools, some of which do a much better job with collaborative scripting and resource allocation. If the company can bring the rest of the modules up to the same level of quality and usefulness as the annotated player, this will be one of the few top-shelf video collaboration tools.
Inside the Annotation
To better understand the power of Market7’s annotation tool, here is the information that is generated for a single yellow-shaded box or rectangle (the default color and shape the Market7 annotated player creates) on a particular frame or a series of frames (if a duration longer than one frame is chosen):
TRUEComment Highlight 9607131146TRUEstraight Vector Shapegenerator videoShape Primitivevariable-31Shape Left0variable-516.510903426791277100 Shape Top0variable-612.351149266131264100Shape Right0variable-760.1246105919003100Shape Bottom0variable-869.9529216283578100Corner Size0variable-9050Corner Typevariable-101Fill On1variable-46TRUE8Fill Opacity0variable-47100100Fill Color1variable-48255249692558 Opacity0variable-5150100Border On1variable-13TRUE8Position1variable-1433Color1variable-152551572131308Width0variable-16220Opacity 0variable-17100100Border Begin0variable-180100 Border End0variable-19100100
Parsing the XML down shows that it’s a vector-based series of lines with particular corner types (square in our case), color, and fill.
What’s in a Name?
The naming conventions for these exported files are somewhat arcane, but here’s a quick overview of how to tell them apart. A file ending in P.xml will be an Adobe Premiere XML file, while a file ending in F.xml will be a Final Cut Pro XML file. Avid Media Composer files end in MC.txt.xml.
Timings are also different for each XML. For instance, using a comment listed on the annotated player that occurred at 1.6 seconds will appear as the following:
• Frame 48-1 for Adobe Premiere (the 48th frame on an assumptive 30 frame output). This could cause issues for drop versus nondrop (29.97fps versus 30fps) content.
• Frame 48-1 for Final Cut Pro. But with FCP there’s also a TRUE statement at the beginning that appears to note TRUE29.8537774167344, which appears to equate to an average frame rate with a non-Pentium floating point unit or m