Blackbird (formerly named FORscene) is an integrated internet video platform,

video editing software Video editing software or a video editor is software used for performing the post-production video editing of digital video sequences on a non-linear editing system (NLE). It has replaced traditional flatbed celluloid film editing tools and analo ...

, covering

non-linear editing Non-linear editing (NLE) is a form of offline editing for audio, video, and image editing. In offline editing, the original content is not modified in the course of editing. In non-linear editing, edits are specified and modified by speciali ...

and publishing for broadcast, web and mobile. Designed by Blackbird plc to allow

collaborative editing Collaborative editing is the process of multiple people editing the same document simultaneously. This technique may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially improve the quality of documents and increase deals. Good choices i ...

of video at resolutions of up to 540p and up to 60 frames per second on bandwidths as low as 2

MBit/s In telecommunications, data transfer rate is the average number of bits (bitrate), characters or symbols (baudrate), or data blocks per unit time passing through a communication link in a data-transmission system. Common data rate units are multi ...

, it is capable of

video logging In archives, the term "audiovisual" is frequently used generically to denote materials other than written documents. Films, videos, audio recordings, pictures, and other audio and visual media are collected in audiovisual archives. A vast amount ...

, reviewing, publishing and hosting through HD and 4K to UHD quality from original sources. The system is implemented as a

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a smartphone, phone, tablet computer, tablet, or smartwatch, watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop appli ...

for Android and

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

devices, a

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

applet and a pure

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

as part of its

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

. The latter runs on platforms without application installation, codec installation, or machine configuration and has

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture, and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, a ...

features. Blackbird won the

Royal Television Society The Royal Television Society (RTS) is a British-based educational charity for the discussion, and analysis of television in all its forms, past, present, and future. It is the oldest television society in the world. It currently has fourteen r ...

's award for Technology in the

post-production Post-production, also known simply as post, is part of the process of filmmaking, video production, audio production, and photography. Post-production includes all stages of production occurring after principal photography or recording indivi ...

process in December 2005.

Usage

The Blackbird platform's functionality makes it suitable for multiple uses in the

video editing Video editing is the post-production and arrangement of video shots. To showcase excellent video editing to the public, video editors must be reasonable and ensure they have a thorough understanding of film, television, and other sorts of videog ...

workflow. For editors and producers wanting to produce broadcast-quality output, Blackbird provides an environment for the early stages of post-production to happen remotely and cheaply (

logging Logging is the process of cutting, processing, and moving trees to a location for transport. It may include skidder, skidding, on-site processing, and loading of trees or trunk (botany), logs onto logging truck, trucksreview A review is an evaluation of a publication, product, service, or company or a critical take on current affairs in literature, politics or culture. In addition to a critical evaluation, the review's author may assign the work a content rating, ...

ing,

rough cut In filmmaking, the rough cut (also known as the first cut or editor's cut) is the second of three stages of offline editing. The term originates from the early days of filmmaking when film stock was physically cut and reassembled, but is still ...

ting and

offline editing Offline editing is the creative storytelling stage of film and television production where the structure, mood, pacing and story of the final show are defined. Many versions and revisions are presented and considered at this stage until the edit g ...

, for example) and more recently fine cut editing. Blackbird then outputs instructions in standard formats which can be applied to the high-quality master-footage for detailed and high-quality editing prior to broadcast. Other users want to prepare footage for publishing to lower-quality media - the small screens of

mobile phone A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This rad ...

s and video iPods, and to the web where bandwidth restricts the quality of video it is currently practical to output. For these users, all editing can be carried out in Blackbird, before publishing to

social media Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...

and

online video Internet video (also known as online video) is digital video that is distributed over the internet. Internet video exists in several formats, the most notable being MPEG-4i AVC, AVCHD, FLV, and MP4. There are several online video hosting se ...

channels, OTT or commercial cloud storage. Video can also be saved in

MPEG The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) is an alliance of working groups established jointly by International Organization for Standardization, ISO and International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC that sets standards for media coding, includ ...

Ogg Ogg is a digital multimedia container format designed to provide for efficient streaming and manipulation of digital multimedia. It is maintained by the Xiph.Org Foundation and is free and open, unrestricted by software patents. Its name is ...

, HTML video, podcasting formats as well as Blackbird's proprietary player. The platform was reported in July 2012 as being used by NBC in connection with the

2012 Summer Olympics The 2012 Summer Olympics, officially the Games of the XXX Olympiad and also known as London 2012, were an international multi-sport event held from 27 July to 12 August 2012 in London, England, United Kingdom. The first event, the ...

involving integration of the service with

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

and continues to be used to deliver coverage for sport events such as

Formula One Formula One (F1) is the highest class of worldwide racing for open-wheel single-seater formula Auto racing, racing cars sanctioned by the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA). The FIA Formula One World Championship has been one ...

, PGA European Tour and the

Premier League The Premier League is a professional association football league in England and the highest level of the English football league system. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with the English Football Lea ...

. §

Services

The video platform is referred to broadly as Blackbird and marketed as three distinct B2B products: * Edge * Ascent * Forte All exploit the

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles, suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

for delivery. Integrations to third parties provide additional services (for example

graphics Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of the data, as in design and manufa ...

, CC, transcription) and workflow (such as to other NLE systems).

Blackbird Ascent and Blackbird Forte

Ascent and Forte enable functionality including:

, frame accurate

(and

multicam MultiCam is a Military camouflage, camouflage pattern designed for use in a wide range of environments and conditions which was developed and is produced by American company Crye Precision. The pattern has found extensive adoption globally. Var ...

support for up to 18 cameras),

review A review is an evaluation of a publication, product, service, or company or a critical take on current affairs in literature, politics or culture. In addition to a critical evaluation, the review's author may assign the work a content rating, ...

ing,

publishing Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...

storyboard A storyboard is a graphic organizer that consists of simple illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence. The storyboarding proce ...

ing and clipping. Ascent is designed for workflows that require a subset of Forte's features.

Blackbird Edge server

The Blackbird Edge server is a gateway between content and the Blackbird platform. Clients may elect to use a single physical Edge server per fixed or remote location to scale up operations and improve overall performance (e.g. the time taken to retrieve video for review). Features may vary based on workflow / infrastructure requirement but include: *Live and non-live Content ingest *Local caching of video downloads *Immediate access of video over a Local Area Network (LAN) during upload *Seamless transfer of video as required between a Blackbird Edge Server and the Blackbird Infrastructure The product exploits high speed LAN access whilst preserving the principle of access from anywhere. Deployment may be on-premise, on-location, or to public / private cloud.

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

supported. Logging, editing and reviewing of uploaded material can start as soon as the upload process starts. Files containing video, audio and still may also be picked and uploaded using a web browser for ingest.

Blackbird Player

The Blackbird Player supports; renderless publishing, multiple layers, own branding,Digital-Lifestyles.info
IBC TV News uses Forscene and Formobile clipping and

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

sharing, ability to revoke access and a patented navigation bar. The Blackbird decoder is packaged in libraries for native mobile apps, applets and a pure JavaScript player.

Components

The Blackbird platform is made up of various components, discussed here.

Platform servers

The server infrastructure on the Blackbird backbone network (referred to as the

) dedicated to Blackbird's customers are distributed over numerous locations and handle around 10,000 hours of new video content each week. These act as one system, increasing both effective capacity and redundancy. As the front end does most of the work during editing, and the upload software does the compression work, the server is lightly loaded and can support many users at the same time. Sites may also attach a server to their own network ( Edge) for improved performance/scalability (local ingest and caching to multiply the numbers of users on existing internet connections).

Codecs

Blackbird has its own

codec A codec is a computer hardware or software component that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder o ...

s for both video and audio. These use a form of adaptive coding to allow local variations in the type of data to be encoded efficiently.

Osprey

Osprey supports loss-free video compression. Blackbird users can see broadcast quality video during editing (as well as proxy quality as has been the case with Blackbird's other codecs) and broadcasters can use the video output from Blackbird directly for transmission.

Blackbird

The current Blackbird video codec is called '' Blackbird 9''. It is designed for both editing and video streaming over variable speed

broadband In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...

Internet connections. By varying the frame rate, it can provide consistent picture quality even on slow connections. Like its predecessor ''Firebird'' (used in the FORlive system), the Blackbird codec allows real time compression and playback of video. This is important for handling the quantity of video in modern productions, as well as the reviewing, logging, editing and publishing features of Blackbird. The Blackbird codec (formerly "Firebird") is a proprietary

video codec A video codec is software or Computer hardware, hardware that data compression, compresses and Uncompressed video, decompresses digital video. In the context of video compression, ''codec'' is a portmanteau of ''encoder'' and ''decoder'', while ...

developed by Forbidden Technologies and used by their flagship product, Blackbird (formerly "Forscene"). Blackbird is designed for both

editing Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written language, written, Image editing, visual, Audio engineer, audible, or Film editing, cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing p ...

and video streaming over variable speed

internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

connections. Blackbird can provide consistent picture quality on slow connections by varying the

frame rate Frame rate, most commonly expressed in frame/s, or FPS, is typically the frequency (rate) at which consecutive images (Film frame, frames) are captured or displayed. This definition applies to film and video cameras, computer animation, and moti ...

through the use of tokens. The tokens represent each source image which are scaled versions of each source image. The Blackbird video codec facilitates a content-aware dynamic framerate. The codec can create a lightweight proxy, which can be used to deliver a live stream from an event. Stephen Streater is the principle

progenitor In genealogy, a progenitor (rarer: primogenitor; or ''Ahnherr'') is the founder (sometimes one that is legendary) of a family, line of descent, gens, clan, tribe, noble house, or ethnic group.. Ebenda''Ahnherr:''"Stammvater eines Geschlec ...

of the Blackbird

, which was released in 2004. On 22 January 2017, Forbidden Technologies released the Blackbird 9 codec. On 6 March 2018, MSG Networks received a New York chapter Emmy nomination for "Technical Achievement" as follows "MSG Networks Digital Video Editing & Digital Distribution via Blackbird Technology".

Impala

The Blackbird audio codec is called ''Impala''. Datarate and quality can be varied depending on the use: 10 kbit/s for modem web video and mobile playback, 30 kbit/s for audio only modem playback or broadband playback with video, and 80 kbit/s per channel for editing.

User interfaces

Functionality to support production workflows, account management and media asset management is accessible from native mobile apps for Android and

, web and Java platforms. In 2017 a strategic migration to JavaScript was begun to deliver video playback and video editing capability to web browsers without additional programs or plugins.

Account management and MAM

Accounts and users are separate. Many individuals may use the same Blackbird account and each user is assigned a role (manager, commenter, reviewer, logger, editor, storyboard). Admin/operational and MAM features include; transfer, search and playback of material, ingest configuration, workflow, account and user settings and usage reports.

Security

Each standard user account has its own password-protected single sign-on web page. Once logged on, the users have access to their own videos, library material, and any functionality their account supports. Video is not stored on the local computer's hard disc, so when the user closes their web browser, their video is not accessible to subsequent users of the same computer.

Internet standards

The Blackbird interfaces operate through Internet standards such as

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

, JavaScript and Java, so can be used even in companies with severe firewalls. If web browsing works, then Blackbird almost always will too.

Publishing

The Blackbird editing platform supports publishing from original sources up to 4K, to destinations including: social media and online video channels (e.g.

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

), OTT and commercial cloud storage (e.g. S3, Azure). Video can be saved to a range of formats (e.g.

, XDCAM, EDL, HTML video, FCPX), still images (e.g.

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

) and the proprietary Blackbird Player.

Timecode export

Each frame of professionally shot video is tagged with a

timecode A timecode (alternatively, time code) is a sequence of numeric codes generated at regular intervals by a timing synchronization system. Timecode is used in video production, show control and other applications which require temporal coordinatio ...

which identifies it. Combining the timecode information of video handled within Blackbird at browse quality with the original broadcast quality video allows information in Blackbird to be transferred to a broadcast quality version. Videos logged or edited in Blackbird can be exported in the form of a simple EDL or more complex

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

for autoconform and

offline In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity, and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed as "on li ...

online In computer technology and telecommunications, online indicates a state of connectivity, and offline indicates a disconnected state. In modern terminology, this usually refers to an Internet connection, but (especially when expressed as "on lin ...

on an Avid or

Final Cut Pro Final Cut Pro (often abbreviated FCP or FCPX) is a professional non-linear video-editing application initially developed by Macromedia, and, since 1998, by Apple as part of its pro apps collection. Final Cut Pro allows users to import, edit, a ...

system.

Broadcast

Videos which have been edited within Blackbird can be conformed/rendered to multiple outputs automatically at anything up to 3840p - full Ultra High Definition ( UHD). At present 1080p HD accounts for the majority of production workflows. After editing Blackbird uploads the full quality frames used in the finished programme into the Cloud, or alternative eco-systems via Blackbird Edge. The special effects, captions, layers, graphics, cropping and stretching, colour correction and titles are combined at full resolution on a Blackbird Cloud for download, or Edge Server, ready for transmission. Material can be reviewed and edited from anywhere on the web, not just one local source.

Systems integration

Final programmes can be made, even in High-definition, and sent in broadcast quality efficiently to the broadcaster for transmission without using any third party editing systems. However Blackbird supports integration with third party systems, both in broadcast and elsewhere.

EDL/XML

Blackbird supports Edit decision list/

export to industry editing systems such as or Avid /

. For example, creation of rough cuts in Blackbird can then be reliably conformed on Avid, even when they include clips which the Avid would not normally be able to ingest because of time code breaks and gaps.

SDI

Serial sigital interface improves Blackbird's integration into the high end broadcast environment. SDI support allows Blackbird to ingest source material in both Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD) resolutions from any professional video source in real time. The SDI video input meets both Phase Alternating Line (

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a color encoding system for analog television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

) and National Television System Committee (

NTSC NTSC (from National Television System Committee) is the first American standard for analog television, published and adopted in 1941. In 1961, it was assigned the designation System M. It is also known as EIA standard 170. In 1953, a second ...

) standards.

Licensing

The software is provided as a service (SAAS) which is charged by usage.

History

Blackbird is a development from an editing system made by Eidos Interactive in the 1990s. This history starts from the first public showing of this product, at the International Broadcasting Convention in Europe in 1990.

References

External links

* *Third party review
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