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Components

Shotwork uses three pieces of software it does not carry itself. It downloads them the first time it needs them, with your say-so. Settings › Components… shows what it found, and lets you supply a copy yourself instead.

Pick a component on the left and its detail fills the right-hand side.

You will not normally need this window. It is here for three situations:

  • You already have FFmpeg on this computer and would rather Shotwork used that one than downloaded another.
  • This computer has no internet, or is on a work network that blocks the sites the downloads come from.
  • A download failed and you want to see what is missing.

What each one is

Component What you lose without it
Video playback Everything. Shotwork cannot open a video at all, so it will not start.
Exporting and thumbnails Exporting clips, rendering a reel, and the small pictures beside each shot. Marking and describing shots still work.
Downbeat detection Only downbeats. Ordinary beat detection is built in and unaffected. See Downbeat engine for what it is and how long it takes.

A tick beside a name means Shotwork has it. Its panel says where it came from, which is how you tell a copy you supplied apart from one Shotwork downloaded.

Downbeat detection sits in the same list but installs differently: it builds an environment of its own rather than being a file, so its panel has Download, Verify and Remove instead, and there is nothing to hand it.

Download it

Choose Download on the row. This is the same download the first-launch window offers, and it is all you need when the computer is online.

Use a file you already have

Choose Use a File I Already Have… on the row, then pick the file. Shotwork accepts either of two things:

  • The program itself, such as ffmpeg.exe. Shotwork uses it where it is and does not copy it, so an FFmpeg your studio keeps up to date stays the one copy.
  • The download it came in, a .zip, .7z or .tar.gz, exactly as it arrived.

Do not unzip it first

Hand Shotwork the file the way it downloaded. It opens the archive for you, which matters for video playback on Windows: that download is a .7z, which Windows cannot open on its own, and Shotwork carries a 7-Zip of its own for exactly this. If you have already unzipped it, that is fine too. Pick the program file that came out instead.

If you pick the wrong file, Shotwork says so and changes nothing.

Getting the files on a computer with no internet

Each panel names the page to download from and which file to take. Open that page on your phone or on another computer, download the file, copy it across on a USB stick, then use Use a File I Already Have… and pick it. Do not unzip it on the way.

Take the file the row names and not another one on the same page. The video player's page also carries the mpv media player, whose files look similar and are not what Shotwork needs. The row spells out which one to take.

Setting up several computers

Once one computer is working, the files are in its app data folder, in ffmpeg and libmpv. Copying those two folders to the same place on another computer works, and saves downloading them again.