The debrief player

1 Getting to a race

1. Open Debrief. If the organisation has more than one boat, pick yours from the selector beside the heading — with one boat there is no selector to find.
2. Choose a regatta. Each card carries its dates, how many days and races it holds, and the venue timezone.
3. Choose a race. They are grouped under their day, and each row shows the race window in UTC plus its anchors — gun 11:00, and warn 10:55 where a warning was recorded.

You did not create any of that. Regattas, days and races are derived from the guns and warnings in your imports — How a race derives itself is the rulebook. A race can be renamed or re-timed on the regatta page, and editing it makes it manual so it survives the next re-derivation.

Every player link carries the boat in the address. Open a race from the Debrief section rather than by editing a URL, and the boat comes along on its own.

Add a race for any stretch of the day

Derivation only ever produces the day’s starts. Everything else worth looking at again — the practice segment between two starts, the tuning run before the first warning, a long downwind, an afternoon of two-boat testing — had no gun behind it, so it was never a race. Each day on the regatta page carries an Add race button: give it a start, an end and a name and it opens in the player like any other race. Series, events, media and leg statistics all bind to the window, so there is nothing else to set up.

The two times are UTC, like every other time the app shows you, and both have to fall inside the day. The suggested name is the same window on the venue’s clock — 13:10–13:50 — because that is what a crew calls a race; type over it and it stops following.

A race you add sits beside the derived ones rather than replacing any of them, and it is expected to overlap them. Derivation tiles the day: an interior race runs until ten minutes before the next start, so the only windows that miss a derived race are those ten-minute gaps. Overlapping is normal here and is not an error.

It takes no part in the Race N numbering either. Add a window between Race 1 and Race 2 and the second start is still called Race 2 — the numbering counts starts, not segments. That is why a race you add arrives with a name of its own rather than a number, and keeps it. On the regatta page its row is chipped added, next to the manual chip a renamed or re-timed derived race carries.

Deleting one takes the race and nothing else. Deleting a derived race removes the telemetry in its window too — that race is the record of a start, and the window is where its data lies — but a race you added is a bracket around time the boat was already recording, so the samples, events and other races underneath it stay exactly where they are. Add a window and remove it again and the day is as you found it.

Otherwise it is an ordinary hand-shaped race: rename it or move its window with the same Edit control the derived races use, as long as the window stays inside its day. Nothing re-derives it and nothing re-shapes it. The one thing that moves it is coverage — correct the venue timezone and it follows whichever day then covers it.

2 The player: an overview

Top to bottom:

• The topbar — breadcrumbs back up the hierarchy, then the pills that open windows (Explorer, Tuning, Offsets, Manage media, Attach local media), the HUD preset picker, and a mono clock showing the cursor’s wall-clock time in UTC.
• Video and Track side by side — the mosaic of video panes, and the map with your track, the start line and the course.
• Nearby Boats — the fleet row, when this boat carries the fleet tracking data add-on and the event was captured.
• The timeline — the scrubber, the zoom brush under it, and your media lanes under that.

The track panel has two modes, Boat and Fleet, plus a trail-length slider. With no position channels in the window it says so plainly rather than drawing an empty square.

3 The timeline

Four rows, and they do different jobs.

1. The toolbar — the view’s start, the cursor and the view’s end, then the zoom controls and how long the visible span is.
2. The scrubber — spans what you are looking at. Click or drag anywhere on it to move the cursor. This is where the event marks are readable.
3. The overview — spans the whole race, with a brush showing the visible slice. Drag the brush body to pan, drag an edge to widen or narrow it, click outside it to jump the same-width view to that point.
4. The media lanes — one row per lane of your own video, audio and photos. They share the timeline’s axis exactly, so a clip sits under the moment it covers. Local video and media is the guide for those.

Zoom with + and − in the toolbar, and ⤢ to fit the whole race again — it stays disabled while you are already fitted. The tightest view is two seconds.

4 The marks along the scrubber

Those are the race’s events, drawn where they happened. Click one and the cursor lands exactly on it — not near it. Hover any mark for its name and time.

Marks are drawn only inside the row’s own span, so an event outside the loaded race window has nowhere to sit. The practical case: pings and a warning that happened before the gun are before the race’s own start, so they will not be on the scrubber even though the start line they define is drawn on the map.

5 Transport, and the keyboard

The play button sits at the left of the scrubber row and shows the current rate beside it when it is not 1×. Everything else is keys — and the line under the timeline is a reminder, not the full list.

Keys do nothing while you are typing in a field, which is what lets a lane rename contain the letter L.

6 The Explorer: channels and compare

The Explorer pill opens a floating window with two tabs.

Its left sidebar is the channel list, shared by both tabs. Filter it, then tick a channel to add it; ticked channels sort to the top. Channels are listed by their registry name — hover one for the friendly name and its unit. Three are on by default: boat speed, true wind speed and true wind angle.

Channels gives each one its own strip: the name in its series colour, the value at the cursor on the right, and the trend underneath. Inside a strip:

• Click to send the whole player to that instant.
• Drag sideways to set the timeline’s view to the range you dragged.
• Double-click to fit the race again.
• Hover for the value and time — and every other strip shows the same instant, so you are reading one moment across all of them.

Compare puts them on one chart, grouped by unit so knots are not plotted against degrees. The first two unit groups get labelled axes; further groups still draw, which is why this tab also shows a live value beside every channel in the sidebar — that is where the absolute reading for an unaxised group lives.

A small cal badge beside a channel name means this boat’s calibration is being applied to that channel’s numbers. It rides with the data, so it is per channel rather than per panel. Calibration in practice is how it got there; The calibration lens is why it can be undone exactly.

7 The tuning guide

The Tuning pill opens the boat’s own tuning sheet at the wind you actually had, one tile per column of your table, in your own column names.

Three mode pills at the top: Auto, Upwind, Downwind. Auto picks the table from the boat’s wind angle and says so; the override lasts as long as you are on the page. Under the pills sits the live wind the tiles were read at, and a percentage where one can be computed.

Each tile reads:

• The column’s name, wearing the cal badge when the live value behind it is calibrated.
• The live value at the cursor, tinted by how far it is from target. With no live value the tile shows the target instead.
• The target line under it — tgt 12.3 against a live number, the bare word target when there is a target but nothing live to grade, and no target when the column has no prescription at this wind.

Nothing to show? The window says which mode has no table and where to make one. See Polars and targets, and Targets and interpolation for how a number between two rows of your table is arrived at.

8 Per-cell readouts and HUD presets

The numbers over a video pane are the HUD, and they are the player’s cursor readout: they render on empty panes too, so a 2×2 layout with one clip still gives you three panels of instruments. The HUD pill on a pane’s toolbar turns it on and off.

With no presets of your own, the HUD shows a built-in four — BSP, TWS, TWA, TWD. Every HUD, built-in or not, ends with a %tgt row: your boat speed as a percentage of the polar’s target at the wind you had.

Building a preset

1. Open Overlays in the nav.
2. Press + New preset, give it a Name and a Phase, and press Create.
3. From Available channels on the right, press + add on each channel you want. Up to twelve.
4. Order them with ↑ and ↓ — the list order is the row order on the video, top to bottom.
5. Press Save.

Presets are personal. They follow you across organisations and nobody else sees them. The phase tag decides which one the player reaches for by default; nothing switches presets mid-playback.

Using them

Once you have at least one, a HUD overlay: picker appears in the player topbar and sets the preset for the whole player. Each pane can then override it from its own preset selector, whose first option — HUD: toolbar — means “follow the toolbar”. Pinning is how you get wind on one pane and trim on another at the same moment.

The pre-start card, replayed

If the boat had Race Control running for the start, the debrief replays the TIME TO LINE card the crew were actually looking at — top left of the video, in step with the playback cursor. It is a recording of that screen, not a re-calculation: the tablet worked those numbers out on the water, and the player shows them back unchanged.

The card carries the sequence clock (−4:32 before the gun, +0:07 after it), BURN as the big number — the seconds to kill before resuming the speed and angle that make the gun, green with time in hand and red once you are late — and the same four answers underneath:

A dash is a dash. Where a row reads —, the tablet had no answer at that moment and showed you the same dash. Nothing is filled in, smoothed over or carried forward from a second ago — that silence is usually the most interesting thing on the card, and inventing a number over it would replay a start that never happened.

The card appears while a recorded sequence is playing and fades out shortly after you cross the line, because that is where the recording stops. It follows the same HUD pill as the readouts above — there is no separate switch for it — and it moves to whichever pane you put fullscreen.

Two reasons you may see nothing: the start was sailed before Race Control began recording the card, or that day’s recording has not reached us yet. The first will not change, and the debrief simply shows the video without a card rather than an empty frame where one should be. For the second, bring the tablet back into signal and let its uplink reach SYNCED.

9 Windows, fullscreen and Escape

Video panes and the track can be popped out of the layout with ⧉ and pushed back with ⤡; ⛶ takes one fullscreen. Drag a floating window by its title bar, resize it from the corner, and press anywhere inside it to bring it to the front. A popped-out video keeps playing — nothing restarts.

Fullscreen is exclusive and is for panes only; the Explorer and the tuning guide float but never take the whole screen.

Escape dismisses exactly one layer, in this order: the photo viewer, then the alignment window, then fullscreen, then the topmost floating window. One press, one layer, so it is safe to lean on.

Floating and fullscreen are per visit — leave the player and the layout comes back docked. The Explorer’s and the tuning guide’s size and position are remembered; so are your mosaic layout, your channel selection and your lane order.

10 Sending someone a moment

The player’s address carries the cursor and the view, so copy the URL out of the address bar and the person who opens it lands on the same instant with the same slice of the race in view. There is no share button to look for.

One place builds those links for you: the Duel panel on a regatta page, where each of the biggest split swings against a chosen rival ends with View → — straight into the race, cursor and window already set on the swing.

11 What can be locked, and what never is

The player needs an active subscription, day pass or trial on the boat. When coverage lapses the screen says so and offers See billing rather than disappearing from the nav.

Three fleet surfaces — the track panel’s Fleet mode, Nearby Boats and Duel — belong to the fleet tracking data add-on. It is enabled per organisation on request, and then added per boat, so it is the boat you are watching that decides: a team can carry it on one boat and not another. They show a padlock and what it would take, not a blank — and the padlock names which of the two steps is missing.

Deleting a race, or a whole regatta, is never billing-locked: removing your own data must not require a paid boat. It is role-gated to admins and owners instead, and for everyone else the controls are simply not there. Both live on the regatta page — a race deletes from its own row in the day’s list, where you can see the races that will stay; a regatta from the danger zone at the foot of the page. The player has no delete of its own: it is for watching a race, deliberately nowhere near the play button.

Why deleting a race takes more than removing a row

Regatta, day and race are derived, not written. Nobody types them in. They are recomputed from the gun and warning events in the imported data every time an import lands, which is what makes the hierarchy appear on its own after an upload. It is also why removing one of those rows on its own would be a change that undoes itself: the practice start comes back at the next import of that day, and again when a Race Control tablet drains its offline queue and re-sends the same gun.

So a race delete records a dismissal alongside the removal. That is what makes it stays deleted a statement rather than a hope: re-derivation reads the dismissal and does not rebuild the race, including when the same gun arrives a second time from a tablet that was offline.

A race delete does not lock its window. An import still in flight can land samples in that time range afterwards, and they are stored normally. The race stays gone; the data does not. The confirmation says so rather than leaving you to find out — there is no refusal on this operation and nothing seals the window behind it.

The regatta confirmation’s list of what will be deleted is advisory, and it says so on screen. It is the imports that overlap those days right now, read by this page before you type the name. The set that is actually deleted is computed inside the deletion itself, so an import that lands in between goes with it too. When the list cannot be read at all, the panel names it as missing and still lets you continue: it was never the authority for what happens.