The Angles interface is pretty amazing, highly customizable to suit your preferred way of working with the multitude of files required to be open while working on performance data and video.

Files are opened and viewed in tabs set within panes that split up the window. The panes create the structure to easily rescale any file you are using while rescaling others that are open as well.

Angles supports:

• Multiple windows
• Display single file in full window
• Full screen windows
• Full screen video presentation on secondary monitor

Live vision capture and review is key to any real time analysis workflow. Angles supports DVR like features, allowing you to review vision while it is being captured live. Playback can be delayed up to 2 seconds behind the live source and the capturing file can be shared across a network for other computers to review in delay too.

Due to the technical nature of vision related hardware, we have done our best to simplify this aspect by recommending only a select few suppliers that we have tested. So, whether you need to capture from a camcorder or broadcast feed, we have a recommendation.

If capture is not part of your workflow, movie files can be easily imported. Angles supports H.264(AVC), H.265(HEVC) and ProRes MP4 and MOV movie files. If Quicktime Player 10 can play the file, then Angles can too.

USB 3

There are a lot of vision capture devices on the market, currently, we are supporting and recommending devices that fall under the USB video device class (also USB video class or UVC). These devices are commonly referred to as video grabbers and are very popular in the gaming markets to stream and record live play.

AJA Video Systems is one of our favourites. The U-TAP devices are solid devices that include video loop through on the SDI version, a very useful feature.

U-TAP SDI and U-TAP HDMI

Another leader in this area is Magewell. They offer a number of choices.

USB Capture Plus Family

Blackmagic Design offers a USB 3.0 device.

Intensity Shuttle

Thunderbolt

Blackmagic Design is arguably the leader in Thunderbolt supported video devices.

UltraStudio Mini Recorder

FireWire

IEEE-1394 aka FireWire has been around for a long time and is currently supported. However, we cannot guarantee how long we can support this aging technology.

HLS

IP cameras and SDI streams recorded by our Piston product can be used live or post event. Angles can localize these streams, saving the stream onto the computer. Services such as Wowza or Kaltura can also be configured to provide a HLS stream that can be localized.

The key to gaining powerful insight is capturing data that describes what is happening in the performance. We call this Mark Up. It is what describes the content in the vision and allows us to create clips for presentations and use powerful filtering tools to develop deeper understandings.

Graphical Inputs

Create stunning inputs that make data capture simple. Copy and images from any graphical editor, drag and drop images straight from your browser or use the native button shapes and styling options.

Button Types

Clip

Clip buttons mark events in a timeline with a start and end time. Properties include: name, color, time offsets, auto up timer and merging.

Timer

Timer clip buttons allow you to create an alternate time for the movie. For example, a timer clip can be used to display match time. They can count up or down, include offsets for different types of clock routines and can be cumulative to handle when a clock starts and stops. If a timer clip is used, clips will grab this time and include it in their data, so when events are marked the corresponding match time is included.

Qualifier

A qualifier button inserts a descriptor called a qualifier into a clip. A qualifier describes what is happening in a clip. It adds the capability to filter for certain events that occur in clips and marks the exact moment that the qualifier was inserted.

Attribute

An attribute adds description to a qualifier, like a qualifier adds description to a clip. They can be assigned to the next or previous qualifier button pushed down. Qualifier attributes add a new dimension of data.

None

A none button is simply a button that does nothing. It is useful to create backgrounds for groups of buttons, as an anchor for centering actions and can be pushed up or down to hold state for conditional action routines.

Actions

There are 15 different actions that can be assigned to a button and linked to another button to trigger an event. Buttons actions include up, down, centering, private, plus a few cool conditional actions.

Actions are a key feature to accelerate the data collection process. When buttons are linked up using actions, one button click can fire off several other buttons at the same time, doubling and tripling the amount of data that is marked in the timeline.

Shortcut Keys

Rip through marking up your timelines by assigning shortcut keys to buttons. Hundreds of different key combinations can be used along with peripheral devices.

A unique feature called Center Fire allows you to assign the same shortcut key to multiple buttons, the button that is closest to the center of the mark up view will be fired when the shortcut key is pressed. Used in conjunction with the centering button actions, inputting data has never been faster.

Cartesian

Qualifiers and Qualifier Attributes have an option called Cartesian. When this option is selected for a button, clicking on the button will record an X,Y coordinate for the qualifier or attribute. The top left corner of the button is 0,0, the bottom right is 1,1 and the center is 0.5,0.5.

Jumping

Create button actions that jump from markup to markup views, this allows prescribed data capture sequences.

Angles is called Angles because of the powerful features we have developed to allow you to control which angle you want to view and how you want to view it.

Size and Position

Movies are displayed in a collection that allows you to manipulate their size and position. With this control, you can choose which angle should be the dominant one for the timeline, timeline clips and composer clips.

Zooming

The killer feature of Angles is the ability to digitally zoom the movie. Tell the story within the story by setting key frames with zoom and pan location.

The movie composer is an insanely easy and powerful tool. In essence, it is a bucket where you can organise clips into logical topics for building a presentation or use it as data dump that you can filter and search through for the best clips.

Titles and Animations

Use popular tools like Keynote, Pixelmator, Final Cut and Motion to create professional titles and animations. Drag and drop straight into the composition.

Star Ratings

As you are viewing clips, the plus and minus key can be pressed to star rate the clip being played. Up to 5 stars can be applied to a clip. Once the clips are rated, the topic can be sorted by the star rating, putting the best clips at the beginning.

The Render Engine

An incredibly capable render engine sits behind the composer allowing you to export your composition to a single file for sharing across other platforms and movie players.

Notes is one the most interesting features in Angles. This feature supports native macOS text styling options and shortcuts. So, you can have bold and italic text or use your favourite font. The notes feature also supports emojis!

Note Types

You can create different note types, so you can have your own type and your colleagues can have their own type. A type of note can be disabled when presenting, so they can be kept private.

Up Note and Down Note

Clip buttons in the MarkUp can trigger a note editor to appear when the clip button is pressed down or up. Excellent for prompting the input of your notes.

Export Notes

Notes can rendered on top of your movie exports using one of the many movie export options in the Composer.

Like many modern applications, Angles manages files for you, so you don't need to worry about them. All your files can be conveniently found in the Files sidebar.

Quick Filtering

Files can be filtered using simple title matching and boolean operations.

Moving Things Around

Files can be copied or moved across folders, especially handy when using network share points in your organisation.

Filtering is a quick and easy way to find clips in a timeline or composer. The cool aspect to filtering, aside from it being very visual, is that it allows you to view the clip in the context of the timeline or composer, so it is easy to see before and after the clip.

Filter Patterns

Boolean operators "AND" "OR" "NOT" can be used to make complex filters, so you can target precisely what you are seeking. Since, these filters get pretty long and tricky, they can be saved as a pattern and used to run against other timelines or composers.

Patterns are stored in the timeline and composer file internally, so when other users open the file, the patterns are automagically copied, so the pattern is available in their drop downs. Makes sharing them a lot easier.

Show or Hide Rows

When a filter is applied to a timeline, an option to hide rows where no clips are found can be switched on. This instantly changes the appearance of the timeline, showing only the rows where matching clips exist. In essence, this can quickly make many timelines out of one.

Exports Respect Filters

Any clips that are filtered out are automatically excluded from exports. So, you can quickly apply a filter pattern and export the filtered data, eliminating all content that has been filtered out. This is true for both movie and text data based exports.

Archives allow you to create collections of clips from multiple timelines. You can continually add clips to an archive, building up a set of clips that are portable and specific to a topic.

Archiving takes only the selected clip and movie data, so it reduces movie storage requirements by cutting out unwanted movie data.

Getting data out of your editor is critical and Angles provides options that are useful in spreadsheet apps like Excel or Numbers or online business intelligence tools like Tableau or Power BI.

XML

Our native format for all our files is XML, specifically Apple's property list. We structure everything as a dictionary, so parsing the data is pretty simple. We do our best to be as open as possible, we want your data to be usable. The following data is included:

• Timeline UUID and Description
• Rows - Name and Color
• Clips - Name, Color, Time, Alternate Time, Notes and UUID
• Qualifiers - Name, Color, Time, Cartesian and UUID
• Qualifier Attributes - Name, Color, Time and Cartesian

SportsCode XML format is exportable using our legacy XML export, this works with all online platforms that support this as a file format import.

JSON

A popular and well supported format in programming is JSON. Angles exports live timeline JSON data that can be used to drive powerful data visualization workflows. Like our XML structure, it is a dictionary that describes all the timeline data in a simple to read way.

{
  "str" : 41.483260790000003,
  "end" : 49.484205719999999,
  "red" : 0.84999999999999998,
  "UUID" : "126835185239884352",
  "grn" : 0.60496552000000003,
  "blu" : 0.20399999999999999,
  "qualifiers" : {
    "qualifiers array" : [
      {
        "action" : "Pass",
        "time" : 45.483260790000003,
        "name" : "Pass",
        "colB" : 0.82499999000000002,
        "colR" : 0.14849999999999999,
        "colG" : 0.33512101,
        "UUID" : "126835185239889584",
        "qualifier attributes" : [
          {
            "category" : "Player",
            "time" : 45.634254290000001,
            "name" : "Bob"
          },
          {
            "x" : 0.39538583999999999,
            "name" : "Pitch",
            "category" : "Location",
            "y" : 0.55715305999999998,
            "time" : 48.016681239999997
          }
        ],
        "category" : "Event"
      }

CSV

The most straight forward format to use are our CSV exports. CSV import is supported by all spreadsheet programs and imports as simple table, so it is easy to get started doing some analysis and reporting. Matrices, clip playlists and qualifier lists can be exported from a timeline or composer. Using the composer, these are exports are a killer way of quickly gathering and filtering data to export and use the backend table data for your spreadsheet reporting.

SportsCode Classic XML

Export timeline content to other desktop editors or online platforms such as My Team Performance, Hudl, Coach Logic or Just Play.

One of the overarching principles at Fulcrum is that we want your data workflow to go smoothly. If we can transform your data to something sensible in Angles and it helps you, we will do it. Imports are easy!

SportsCode Classic XML

The most popular import is the SportsCode Classic XML import. Most data providers and online platforms support this format. The import is a simple drag and drop of the XML file on to a timeline.

Synergy Sports

🏀 customers, we import Synergy Sports edits. The import creates a timeline and movie from an edit you created using the Synergy Sports Editor on your Mac. Like most of our imports, it is as simple as dragging and dropping.

Angles has a bunch of different movie exports and they are really fast. We do our best to provide many options for specific movie export workflows.

• Cut Clips - Select and cut to a folder using any or all options below:
  • Single movie for a row
  • Individual movies for each clip
  • Separate angles
  • Sequence angles
  These options can be preset and fired off using a simple shortcut.
• Single Angle - Select and render the dominant angle to a folder. Rendering allows you to set movie size, overlay options:
  • Notes
  • Composer Topic with Clip Number

VLC Mobile App

Our favourite movie export is to the VLC Mobile app. It is a great way to wirelessly export clips during live capture to iOS or Android devices. All of the above options can be used to export to the VLC mobile app.

Fixed bullet and PTZ network cameras offer incredible views and cost effective ways of capturing vision from many different angles covering a large space. Here are few 4K sample videos captured using Piston.

Single 4K fixed camera, edited and rendered out to Full HD using Angles

We can help with camera placement and system design using 3D modelling to insure that the best possible outcome can be acheived. 7 camera system demonstrated below using actual field of view settings for the fixed camera array.

Network Cameras

Network cameras are commonly referred to as IP (Internet Protocol) cameras because they are accessed across ethernet or WiFi networks. There are a lot of network camera technologies available on the market that we support. If you have existing cameras, it is very likely that we can plug right in and use those. However, to best utilise Piston, we strongly recommend cameras that are fit for purpose and we are most interested in the latest 4K technologies.

A leader in the network camera world is Axis Communications. We been working with Axis cameras for many years and find their design and quality to be at the top of the table. We tend to recommend Axis because of our faith in their products, but there are others to be considered, hit the links below to learn more.

Axis Communications

Sony

Bosch

Panasonic

Dallmeier

Dahua

Hikvision

SDI and HDMI

Due to the flexibility of the Piston system, we have developed a few options to capture using Blackmagic DeckLink capture cards and the H.264 Pro Recorder. This is especially handy in our portable systems when you need 4 SDI source capture.

DeckLink

H.264 Pro Recorder

If there is an idea or other product that you want to use, please let us know. We are keen to investigate and see what is possible.

Piston supports multi-camera capture and review while keeping everything in sync.

Live Review with Zoom

Each angle can be zoomed and panned by pinching and dragging using two fingers. This allows you to see the vision in greater detail.

Clip Cutting

Clips from multiple angles can be cut and downloaded onto your iOS device during the capture session. When the clips are downloaded, they can be shared via text, email or other online sharing platform.

Session Scheduler

Schedule capture sessions in advance, so they kick off at the exact time you want. The specific cameras to be used for the session can be chosen including the mark up button scheme and angle streaming export options.

Single File Download

Download synchronised single MP4 files for use in Angles or other desktop editors and online video solutions.

HD-SDI and HDMI Options

There are hardware options to support HD-SDI and HDMI inputs. This is an interesting option in our portable solutions.

The key to gaining powerful insight is capturing data that describes key moments during a capture session. We call this mark up. Piston uses qualifiers to mark when the data points occur in the video using buttons. By simply tapping on the qualifier buttons, events can be easily marked and reviewed.

Multipeer Mark Up

The mark up buttons for each custom scheme are created on Piston Server, then available to all users in a capture session. Users can switch mark up schemes on the fly during a session. As each user marks up events in the video, the events appear in all users timelines.

Time Adjustments

Positive and negative values can be set to adjust the point at which a qualifier is marked.

Colors and Ordering

Button colors can be chosen to make identifying them easier and the order in which the buttons display can be ordered.

XML and JSON Export

As mark up data is being collected it can be exported to XML and JSON files for use in Angles or other desktop editors and online video platforms.

Pause the angle you want to draw on, draw on the video and save the image for later viewing or sharing.

A few more comments on drawing...

While a session is capturing, a secondary export process can be kicked off that will export and upload selected angles for streaming. This works great for live streaming your performances to bigger audiences. Coupled with Amazon Web Services S3 and CloudFront this can offer a global content distribution platform.

A cool way to use this feature is to open the live stream in Angles and mark it up remotely. A user can be across the globe marking up the vision, then export the data and send it out. The live stream is the same as the local capture, so the mark up data will sync right up with the local high quality vision.

Export presets can be customised to suit your needs:

• S3 Bucket Details
• Bitrate
• Frame Height

Example Stream

We have developed a bridging service called Opta.io that catches and processes Opta live data feeds. With a subscription to Opta's live feeds and our Opta.io bridge, live game data can be imported directly in Piston during your game.

As the Opta data is importing and populating the timeline, all your custom mark up and annotation can be added too. Once the game is over, all the captured can be exported to XML or JSON for use in Angles or other desktop editors and online video platforms.