Getting Started (Desktop)

Tin Man is an elegant video playback and export application, designed with a customizable interface featuring resizable and dockable windows. This flexibility allows you to tailor the workspace to best fit your post-production workflow.

Playback

To import media files for playback:

• Click the File Import icon in the File List window

• Or choose Import Files from the File menu

• Or simply drag and drop media files directly from your operating system into either the File List or Playback Viewer windows

Once imported, click on a file in the File List to load it into the Player Window, where you can use the playback controls to play, scrub, or seek to a specific frame. A thumbnail scrub bar beneath the player lets you visually scrub through clips for quicker navigation and review. To enable or disable it, right-click the standard scrub bar and select the option from the context menu.

Additional Playback Tools:

• Video Image window: Adjust video source properties, set the color space, and configure monitor settings.

• Metadata Windows:

  • NRT (Non-Real-Time): Displays static metadata that doesn’t change over time

  • RT (Real-Time): Displays timecode-based metadata that updates during playback

  • Inspect: Shows key metadata in a concise, easy-to-read format. Also allows editing of supported metadata fields.

• Audio Mapping window: Route individual audio channels to different speakers and adjust their volumes independently.

• Video Check window:

  • Enable gamut warnings

  • View individual RGB channels

  • Toggle action/safe title overlays

  • Use the pixel color picker to inspect precise values

• Video Scopes and Audio Meters: Monitor video signal and audio levels in real-time.

• Issues window: Displays any problems encountered during import, playback, or export.

Export

To add files to the export queue:

• Click the File Import icon in the Export window

• Or right-click a file in the File List or Player Controls and select Add to Export Queue

• Or drag and drop media files directly into the Export window

Note: Once a file is in the export queue, its source properties cannot be changed until it is removed from the queue.

Reports

Tin Man can generate detailed reports for your imported media in multiple formats:

• PDF and HTML: Styled, self-contained reports with support for dark and light modes. HTML reports embed all CSS and images in a single file for easy sharing.

• CSV and XLSX: Tabular reports for spreadsheet workflows.

• JSON (Pro, Server): Structured reports with embedded base64 thumbnails and summary data, viewable in the included Tin Man JSON Report Viewer.

Two report types are available:

• Clip/Camera Reports: Metadata summaries for imported media files.

• Marker Reports: Include marker metadata with optional thumbnails and annotations composited into the output.

Tips

• Use Reset Panels from the Main Application menu to restore all dockable windows to their default layout.

• Many controls have additional options available via right-click context menus.

• On Windows, the first launch (or first launch after an update with RAW support changes) may take longer due to compilation of OpenCL GPU programs.

  • AMD GPUs may take over 5 minutes for this initial setup.

  • Once compiled, future launches will be significantly faster.