Work Time Tracking
Redactor can record how long editors actively spend working on each session, giving supervisors a per-video and per-user picture of the effort involved. Tracking is designed for interactive human editors — automated sessions are never tracked (see What Is Tracked).
Starting and Stopping the Clock
When work-time tracking is enabled, a small clock icon appears in the video editor immediately to the left of the settings (cog) button. Click it to start the clock; click it again to stop. A live HH:MM:SS readout beneath the icon shows the time accumulated for the current session and ticks up once a second while the clock is running.
The accumulated total is stored on the server, so it is preserved across reconnects and page reloads — when you re-open a session the readout resumes from the recorded total. Only time that has already been counted is saved; if the application closes unexpectedly while the clock is running, only the current (uncounted) interval is lost.
Where Recorded Time Appears
- In the editor — the live readout beneath the clock icon.
- In the server video list — each video shows its accumulated work time as
HH:MM:SSonce the value is greater than zero. See Work Time on the Videos page.
Administrators and supervisors can also reset a session's recorded work time from the video list.
Configuring Tracking
Work-time tracking is controlled by the REDACTOR_TRACK_TIME environment variable. It is enabled by default: when the variable is unset or empty, tracking is on and editors start and stop the clock manually.
To change the behavior, set REDACTOR_TRACK_TIME to one or more of the following flags (combine several with commas):
off— disable work-time tracking entirely; no clock is shown.offtakes precedence over every other flag, so if it is present tracking is disabled no matter what else is set.autostart— start the clock automatically when a session is opened. The editor can still stop and restart it manually.forced— start the clock automatically and prevent the editor from stopping it. The stop control is shown greyed-out and inactive, and the clock stops only when the editor closes (detaches from) the session.
If none of these flags is set, tracking stays in its default manual mode.
What Is Tracked
Only interactive human editors — the User, Admin, and Supervisor roles — accrue work time. Automated API clients and the embedded editor are excluded and never accrue work time.
Audit Log
Work-time activity is recorded in the session's audit log so it can be reviewed later. These entries appear in the standard audit CSV produced by Acquire Audit Data:
- A
redactor.session.worktimeentry is written each time an interval is counted — when an editor stops the clock or detaches from the session. The entry identifies the user who did the work and records the running total asHH:MM:SS. Because there can be several such entries, they build up a per-user distribution over the life of the session. (Zero-length intervals are not logged.) - A
redactor.session.worktime.resetentry is written when an administrator or supervisor resets a session's work time, identifying who performed the reset.