Video in Backlight

Ferg · 2017-07-22 14:59:42

I'm evaluating Backlight as a replacement for my current online gallery package. Video is an important media type for me. Lightroom treats video as a first class media type, right alongside still photo images. But the only mention I see in the (very limited) Backlight documentation is in the Theater add-on which, as best I can tell, simply provides an additional Album Template type. This injects some confusion between an album type and a media type! Does a theater album support all the same functionality -- like the different grid layouts -- as the other album types? Or does including video content somehow reduce the options for an album?

Matthew · 2017-07-22 17:45:02

Video is complicated by two factors. First, while Lightroom's Library module may in most ways treat video as first-class media, Lightroom's Publish Services does not. Second, video is an entirely different thing on the web than it is in any other place.

Theater allows you to setup a page for playing video, as seen here:
http://theturninggate.net/galleries/02- … deo-vimeo/

When creating an "album" in Lightroom's publish services -- and here we use the term "album" quite loosely -- you can provide the ID for your video in the album info. We then use that ID to embed the video into the page.

That ID can be either the file name of a locally hosting set of web video files that you've manually uploaded, or it can be the ID of your video on YouTube or Vimeo. Due to bandwidth requirements, and the technical hurdles of hosting video on one's own website, most users are best off posting their video to YouTube or Vimeo.

You should create an album for each single video you wish to publish. To create a gallery of videos, you'd create an album set, then populate it with video pages. So if you back out one step in the link above, you'd land here:
http://theturninggate.net/galleries/02- … strations/

The bottom three items on that page go to video pages. So this, in effect, becomes a gallery of videos.

That's how Backlight handles video. And yes, it's a bit of a workaround, because Lightroom otherwise doesn't publish video to Web at all.

Ferg · 2017-07-23 02:32:16

Thanks for the response!

Yes, I saw the example, but could not determine how it was constructed. So the "Theater Demonstrations" page is actually an 'Album Set' and not an 'Album'? And each item on that page links to an 'Album' with a single media item? That's worse than I thought.

You might consider the following user scenario/feature:
The user publishes the video from Lightroom. H.264 is a suitable (indeed desirable) format. If not, it can be converted/resized on the server, e.g. with tools like FFmpeg. The preview image could be published as a separate item or extracted from the video. Videos then sit as equals with images as part of an album. They certainly land in different HTML when clicked upon, but you're already handling that.

Your current architecture or methodology may make this difficult. But it is conceptually straight-forward and commonly done this way.

Daniel Leu · 2017-07-23 02:59:19

Ferg wrote:

You might consider the following user scenario/feature:
The user publishes the video from Lightroom. H.264 is a suitable (indeed desirable) format. If not, it can be converted/resized on the server, e.g. with tools like FFmpeg. The preview image could be published as a separate item or extracted from the video. Videos then sit as equals with images as part of an album. They certainly land in different HTML when clicked upon, but you're already handling that.
Your current architecture or methodology may make this difficult. But it is conceptually straight-forward and commonly done this way.

As Matt pointed out, Lightroom Publisher doesn't support publishing of videos. That's the the limitation Backlight has to scope with.

Ferg · 2017-07-23 07:13:48

Daniel Leu wrote:

As Matt pointed out, Lightroom Publisher doesn't support publishing of videos. That's the the limitation Backlight has to scope with.

Interesting...
Lightroom can Publish videos to Facebook! Perhaps Backlight's LR plugin type has different restrictions? It's been a while since I wrote a LR plugin, so I don't recall the issues. Regardless of how videos get published/exported, providing a mechanism to include them in the same album as images seems like a reasonable feature to aspire to in the future!

Thanks for listening!

rod barbee · 2017-07-23 08:25:01

I believe Lightroom can Export videos, but that's not the same as Lightroom's Publish service publishing video.
This topic of videos in an album has come up several times in the past, if Lightroom allowed it, Matt and Ben would have implimented it long ago.

Ferg · 2017-07-23 11:39:34

rod barbee wrote:

I believe Lightroom can Export videos, but that's not the same as Lightroom's Publish service publishing video.
This topic of videos in an album has come up several times in the past, if Lightroom allowed it, Matt and Ben would have implimented it long ago.

Well, as I said, I did use LR 'Publish Services' to 'Publish' a video to Facebook. How is that different?!

Matthew · 2017-07-23 17:25:28

I'm tired and getting my APIs mixed up. Lightroom's Web module API does not support video export; Publish Services API can do it apparently, but we're not supporting it with Backlight. In part because video is not a project priority, in part because Backlight is built to run on the shared hosting services used by the vast majority of our users, which are generally not built or bought to be video delivery systems, in part because Backlight is built primarily for still photographers, and for various other reasons. Most of our users are better served by hosting their videos on Vimeo or YouTube, and embedding those videos into their websites.

Not to worry, though. Backlight 1.3 will be practically indistinguishable from Facebook.

Community @ The Turning Gate

#1 2017-07-22 14:59:42

Video in Backlight

#2 2017-07-22 17:45:02

Re: Video in Backlight

#3 2017-07-23 02:32:16

Re: Video in Backlight

#4 2017-07-23 02:59:19

Re: Video in Backlight

#5 2017-07-23 07:13:48

Re: Video in Backlight

#6 2017-07-23 08:25:01

Re: Video in Backlight

#7 2017-07-23 11:39:34

Re: Video in Backlight

#8 2017-07-23 17:25:28

Re: Video in Backlight

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