Draw on your video and save drawings as comments

Amplify can now draw on your video. Pause on the moment that matters, mark it up with the same tools you know from Piston, and save the drawing as a comment that plays back for everyone, in timelines, clips and Composers.

Improved

• Click the drawing icon over the video player, or press D, to pause the video and open the drawing toolbar. Press D again to close it
• Includes the same drawing tools as the Piston app: freehand, eraser, lines, arrows, squares, circles, ovals, angles, light beams and text boxes
• Drawings stay on the video until you press play or drag the playhead away, then they clear automatically. Closing the toolbar does not clear them, but Clear All does
• Text boxes:
• Type directly into the text box on the video
• Move, resize and fill it with a translucent grey background, as in Piston
• Wrap text within the box
• Press Shift + Return for a new line
• Choose alignment, font, size and colour from the font menu
• Angle tool:
• Draw angles larger than 180°
• The direction follows the way you move the mouse, clockwise or anti-clockwise, from the first line
• Double-click a drawing object to select it and switch to select mode
• Press Delete or Backspace to delete the selected drawing
• An Undo button in the toolbar steps back through your drawing
• Pin the toolbar to the left or right edge of the video, or keep it floating in either a vertical or horizontal layout
• Drag the drawing button to either edge of the video. The button and toolbar position are remembered across sessions and videos
• Detailed View:
• Labels every tool so it's clear what each does
• Splits the toolbar across both edges of the video and dims everything around it
• Stays open when you press play, and keeps your selected tool active, so you can draw live as you present
• Press Save Comment in the toolbar to save the drawing. The comments sidebar opens with the cursor in the comment box:
• Press Return or Escape to save the drawing without a comment, then add one later by editing it
• Press Space to resume playback and submit your comment
• A saved drawing appears in the video comments sidebar even without comment text, and you can reply to it
• When the playhead reaches a saved drawing, the video pauses and the drawing appears, whether or not the comments sidebar is open
• If a clip is selected when you save, the drawing is saved as a timestamped comment on that clip and travels with the clip to a Composer
• Drawings on different angles appear on their own angle at the same timestamp. If two drawings share a timestamp, the angle you are watching stays in view
• Choose how drawings play with a new preference, Show Video Drawings when playing Clips. When on, both Clip Comment and Video Comment drawings pause and appear, even when a clip is selected. By default, selected clips show only Clip Comment drawings and, with no clips selected, only Video Comment drawings
• Clips played through from the Favourites sidebar show their drawings, even if they aren't selected in the timeline
• A drawing indicator shows inside a clip where the drawing sits. Indicators also appear on clips in the Favourites and Selected Clips sidebars
• Video Comments with drawings show a purple indicator on the timeline ruler. Clip Comment drawings show a blue indicator on the clip
• Video Comments without drawings now show an indicator on the timeline ruler too
• Click an indicator, or the comments button in the toolbar, to open the right comments section. The sidebar scrolls to that drawing and flashes purple
• A filter toggle in the comments sidebar shows only comments with drawings, or hides them
• Any video comment, with or without a drawing, can be sent to a Composer from its actions menu using Create Clip and send to Composer
• Choose the in and out points around the comment timestamp. The clip is created in a topic called Video Comment in the Composer you select
• Drawings on the comment come with it
• This does not add a clip to the timeline
• Hold Shift and hover over a clip to show its drag handles so you can grab and adjust it quickly
• The filter submit button now reads Apply Filter
• The search drop-down is less cluttered: variable headers are gone, each variable type has an icon and categories with no results are hidden
• Applying a filter selects all filtered-in clips in the timeline
• When a file and its folder are shared separately, group and individual permissions set at folder level take priority over Shared to All at file level. Only specific file-level group or individual permissions override them
• All Users now appears in the shared-to tooltip on the Share icon and in the Folder level access list in the file sharing modal
• The re-notification bell in the share modal shows more clearly whether people will be re-notified, with an explanatory tooltip
• Clip Comments now use the same heading colour as Video Comments and look active when pressed
• The comments sidebar loads faster
• On large monitors, the Other Files list in the video player's left sidebar now fills the available space instead of showing one file at a time

Fixed

• Fixed Video Comments being ordered by when they were added instead of timeline order
• Fixed the playhead position being remembered when moving between files, which made some videos start part-way through or at the end
• Fixed the playback speed resetting to 1x whenever the angle changed
• Fixed notifications about uploading and processing files reloading the video player and pausing playback unexpectedly
• Fixed clicking the timeline ruler to move the playhead nudging the video player up and off the screen
• Fixed clicking a Video Comment without a drawing not always updating the preview to the right moment until the video played
• Fixed selecting several clips, dragging the playhead between clips and pressing play not jumping to the nearest clip
• Fixed selecting a row and adding a second clip placing it in the top row instead of the selected row
• Fixed clicking a Clip Comment heading sometimes showing comments from the previously selected clip
• Fixed users with View & Comment permission seeing two greyed-out send to composer icons they could not use. No icons now show
• Fixed editing a comment removing its line breaks
• Fixed the close button on the comment edit window sitting off screen, and disabled the comment actions menu while editing to stop it overlapping the text box
• Fixed custom folder icons and thumbnails not showing in Shared with Me
• Fixed uploaded Composers showing their Global Search path as Online Composers > Subfolder instead of My Folders > Subfolder