Shorts

A short is cut out of a finished video, or shot for itself. In kilna it is the same kind of work either way — the difference is whether it has a donor, and if it does, which parts of it. It is a work, not a door on the song: since v0.74 a song ships only as an audio release, and a short ships through its own door, on its own card, with its own date.

Saying what it was cut from

Name the video on the short’s Links tab, or make the short from the video with Make a Short from this. Either way the short now has a donor, and a Cut tab appears beside its Scenes.

The Cut tab draws the donor as a track of its own length, with each stretch you have taken sitting where it actually falls in it. That is the point of a track rather than two boxes of numbers: deciding whether to take another twelve seconds is a question about where, relative to what you already took, and two numbers cannot be looked at that way.

Take from adds a stretch, starting where the last one of that video ended — taking three in a row is three clicks rather than three sums. Under the track each stretch shows its two ends as timecodes you can type into: 48, 0:48, 1:23.5 all read. The eye places a cut and the keyboard finishes it; nobody drags to exactly 48.0.

A short spliced from two different videos draws two tracks. Drag the rows to change the order they are spliced in — the order is the splice, and the number on the left is where each stretch lands in the finished thing.

The track needs the donor’s length to draw against. A video whose duration is not filled in yet says so instead of drawing: a track with no scale would place every cut at an arbitrary point and look exactly as convincing as a real one. Set the duration on the donor’s Overview tab.

The cut list

At the bottom of the tab is the cut list: the stretches in order, each beside the donor’s video file. It says one of three things.

• Nothing to cut yet — the splice is empty.
• A video this is cut from has no file attached yet — attach the rendered video to the donor on its Files tab.
• Every stretch has its file — and Save the cut list writes it out as JSON.

kilna does not cut the file. It keeps the boundaries and hands them out; the cutting is a plugin’s job, and until one is installed the saved list is a file you can point anything at. The plugin reads exactly the same list.

The cover’s prompt

A short is picked off a wall of thumbnails, so its cover is written and reworked the way the thing itself is. The Files tab of a kind whose profile names cover parts opens with them — in the shipped music profile a video and a short get three:

Part	What goes in it
Picture	What the thumbnail shows: subject, framing, light, mood.
Negative	What must not appear on it.
Typography	The words on the cover, and how they sit.

Each is copied on its own, because each goes into a different field of whatever draws it. The picture that comes back is attached below, on the same tab, as the work’s cover — writing the prompt and looking at the result are one activity and belong on one screen.

These are your craft’s words, not kilna’s: rename them, drop one, add a fourth in the profile document under cover_blocks. A kind that names none — a song whose cover is the album’s — draws nothing here.

The prompt is searched with the rest of the work, so the short you remember by its picture is findable by the words that made it.

On the calendar

Two shorts cut from one video never land on neighbouring days. However they are titled, to anyone watching they are the same video twice, so the layout treats them the way it already treats two releases of one work: it keeps them apart and fills the day between with something else.

A short shot for itself has no source to clash on and is free to take that day. There is no separate shorts queue and no shuffle — one rule, applied every time, on the video each short is actually made of.

What else a splice touches

• The donor’s card lists what has been taken out of it, at which moments.
• The history says A stretch of “Harbour lights” taken into “The hook”.
• Undo takes back a stretch, a moved end, or a reordered splice.
• The trash keeps stretches with the work it takes down, from either side: restore the short and its splice is back, restore the video and the marks the shorts made in it are back too.

See ADR 0029 for why the boundaries are a list rather than a pair of numbers.