Is it possible to add movie files (sg_uploaded_movie) as a thumbnail for entities other than Version? I have a number of published video files but I don’t want to make a version for each just to have the playable video thumbnail
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The animated thumbnails are what we refer to as filmstrip thumbnails. You can see how we produce them in our own transcoding process in this documentation. If you want to make your own, you could follow that guide and then use the upload_filmstrip_thumbnail() method in the Python API.
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Okay I am able to use sg.upload_filmstrip_thumbnail(“Version”, 7145, filmstrip_thumbnail) to set the filmstrip for a “Version” or “MocapTake” entity but it doesn’t work as expected if I use it on a “PublishedFile” entity. It doesn’t report an error but instead it just sets the filmstrip as the thumbnail with no animation so it just appears as a thin line since it’s a very wide image.
So what I’m trying to do is to upload a bunch of reference video. I wanted to avoid creating a version entity for each video simply so that there could be an easy way to preview the video in the browser. The individual videos won’t ever be revised so no reason to track a version for them if not necessary. So I was hoping to add the scrubbable thumbnail to the “PublishedFile” entity for each video instead.
In case anybody is interested here’s the code to make a filmstrip from a movie rather than individual frames.
ffmpeg.exe -loglevel panic -y -i test.mov -frames 1 -q:v 1 -vf “select=not(mod(n,40)),scale=240:-1,tile=100x1” filmstrip.jpg
Thanks for the extra details, I see the problem now. There’s a bug where the Published File entity is missing the underlying filmstrip thumbnail field, so you physically can’t upload a filmstrip thumbnail to them right now. We can give you a heads up when a fix goes out.
In the meantime, your only options would be the static thumbnail, or a query thumbnail on the Published File entity that shows the thumbnails for any linked Versions.
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Oh well that’s too bad… I would like to know when that gets fixed… I just tried to get the Thumbnail Query to work but the default settings don’t produce a thumbnail and the other options don’t seem to work either.
For example… it says it will pick the thumbnail of the Version whose link is the current PublishedFile. But the link for the version is for MocapTake and I can’t seem to assign a publishedFile to the link in a Version
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Normally when you can’t link a Version to an entity, you have to enable Versions for that entity, but looking at the site prefs it looks like we don’t provide you with the option to enable Versions for Published Files (I’m not sure why).
If your MocapTake is linked to the PublishedFile, it may be possible to bubble through link fields for the query thumbnail filter: e.g. Link > MocapTake > someFieldLinkedToThePublishedFile > is Current Published File.
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Okay I was able to get it to work by using this “Mocap Takes <-> Published Versions > Published File <-> Link includes Current PublishedFile” but it gives me a warning about it being slow so this is not ideal but I guess will work for now.
I guess my other approach might be to create a custom entity for reference video and capture files that would allow the filmstrips directly.
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Hi @gmaskfx,
The thumbnail issue with Published Files has been fixed. Let us know if it’s working better for you now:
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