[Feature Request] - Custom Thumbnail when Transcoding

Flow Production Tracking
1

Can we please add project level functionality to have more choice of what thumbnail is used via normal site transcoding?

If it’s a video, the current hardcoded thumbnail of uploaded movie is the exact middle frame with zero ability to customize this. Why is this a problem? Well, because assets are often rendered as a 360 turntable. And the exact middle of that 360 render is the exact back of the asset, the side I’d like to see least. So, imagine any bookcase, sofa asset is being presented with the back showing. In games, often geo is not watertight and has no back, so what you are seeing is the invisible backside of the asset. It looks pretty terrible.

Now before you say, “just transcode it yourself”, that is a big “all or nothing solution”. Either, one lives with the current site transcoding, or one completely opts out of that for the site and then must handle all transcoding and uploading of those extra bonus assets (thumbnail and flipbook).

What I’m suggesting…nay…begging for, is the bare minimum option per project for what frame of a movie would be used. This would be “First Frame”, “Middle Frame” or “Last Frame”. At least that seems very doable and reasonable.

If you’d like to be somewhat fancy, you could have the above choice as a fallback and be able explicitly set the “thumbnail_movie” frame_number" to some value and if that frame doesn’t exist, it will use whatever the default setting is. This way you can get a nice 3/4 view on something.

Thanks,

Chris

I’ll add that this is related to this gentleman’s post which has previously gone unanswered.

1 Like
2

Kicking this thread to get support’s attention since I posted this right before the holidays.

3

I get your point, at the same time you can actually update Sg partially with your own transcodes.
You don’t have to disable transcoding altogether.

4

Hi Ricardo,

Thanks for your response. Please explain more. The problem is that if we are uploading a movie…and then that movie is transcoding… if a pipeline solution uploads a more desirable thumbnail before that movie had completed transcoding, then the first thumbnail will be overridden by that finishing transcoding process. But if you are saying there’s a way around that, then I’m all ears.

5

As Ricardo was mentioning, you can let SG do its stuff (transcoding) and only update the hidden field sg_uploaded_movie_image which will change the image displayed, but not the filmstrip nor the video itself.

6

Right…but do I have to wait for the SG transcoding to finish so it doesn’t stomp my explicitly uploaded thumbnail? because that’s our issue.

7

I’m not sure, but if that’s the case, you can simply make a plugin that ignores non human Event Log entries that reacts on the sg_uploaded_movie_image field being updated, do your image extraction there and upload your new image.

You could also wait in a thread for the value to change and act accordingly.

8

There is a hidden field on Versions called sg_uploaded_movie_transcoding_status which is updated when Sg finishes it’s transcoding.

You could either wait for that or react to it to update it.

As long as you don’t upload to the sg_uploaded_movie field SG’s transcoding will not be triggered.

9

During the pandemic I implemented some systems for clients that wanted to do higher quality Sg reviews.

We would generally leverage SG’s transcoding system but through an AMI supervisors could request a retranscode to a higher quality MP4 which would then overwrite the sg_uploaded_movie_mp4 field.