On your own

Running the whole of B/side on one machine — no account, no cloud, nothing leaving the computer — and moving the show to a team later.

B/side does not need a company behind it. Install A/Side, choose Just use this machine, point it at the drive your footage is on, and the editor opens in your browser.

What that means exactly:

• No account. There is nobody to be an account. No sign-in page, no invitation, no password.
• No cloud. Previews are made on your machine and stay in a folder on it. The camera originals never move at all — that is true in every configuration of B/side, but here nothing goes anywhere.
• Nothing is reachable from the network. B/side listens on 127.0.0.1, which means your own computer and nothing else. On a café's wifi nobody can open your show, because there is no address to open it at.

Those last two go together on purpose. A B/side with no accounts on it must not be reachable from a network, so the choice that turns accounts off is the same choice that refuses connections from anywhere but this machine. They are not two settings that can disagree.

It is the same B/side

Not a reduced version, and that matters more than it sounds. A/Side starts the ordinary control plane — the same code a facility deployment runs — and connects to it on your own machine. So every single thing in this guide works: multicam, transcripts, versions, notes, the mixer, stems, export, the loudness check.

Moving the show to a team later

Choose Use a team B/side instead and type their address. The project, every cut and every note travel with it; you will not have learned a different product and nothing has to be exported and re-imported.

That is the whole reason it is the same code rather than a "solo mode": a product with a small version and a real version makes the first one a thing you grow out of, and growing out of an editor mid-show is not something anybody should have to do.

What you still need

ffmpeg, which A/Side will tell you about and help you install if it is missing — it is what makes the previews.

Disk. Previews are about a fortieth of what came off the camera, so an hour of 4K is a few hundred megabytes. A/Side says what it is about to use before it starts (see Ingesting footage).

Two shows at once

Two copies of A/Side on one machine is fine, and they do not collide: each one asks the operating system for a port of its own rather than assuming one. A fixed port would mean the second copy quietly failing to start and then connecting to the first one's project — the right number of frames of the wrong show.