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Disguise User Guide

Sharing Designer Usage Analytics

When installing Designer using either the Starter installer or Full installer you have the option to share usage analytics with us. This helps us understand how you use Designer so we can prioritise and design tools that best support your workflows.

You can toggle this option on or off at any time by going to d3Manager > Help > About Manager and clicking the checkbox at the bottom labelled Share Designer usage and diagnostic analytics. This setting, whether set in the installer or via d3Manager, will persist through machine restarts and Designer re-installs but with NOT PERSIST THROUGH RE-IMAGES (like all of our other settings!).

We understand that in some cases our users are building projects under strict NDAs or have other reasons to turn this feature off. For this reason, we will describe the data that this feature shares with us, so you can make an informed decision about whether to disable this option.

Toggling the option ON will share with us:

  1. Minimal event logs in the system that tell us things at the system level such as:
    • What time Designer was launched and closed.
    • When a user logs in via d3Manager.
    • What Disguise media server model is being powered on or off.
    • What Designer software version has been installed.
    • What CodeMeter License is being used to license Designer.
    • etc.
  2. Specific user events and actions while programming such as:
    • When a layer was added or removed from the timeline and what type it was.
    • When a track is added or removed from the project.
    • When certain device drivers are started and stopped.
    • etc.
  3. A project summary which includes a snapshot of the project on close of a Director and/or Editor.
    • This includes a list of most serialized objects and what they link to. This allows us to infer information like:
      • Media File: <MyVideo> is sequenced on Track: <MyTrack> in Video Layer: <MyLayer>
      • etc.
    • This data is FULLY ANONYMIZED via hashing so no project, media or user-configurable text are identifiable to us.
      • So what we can infer from the example above is ACTUALLY:
      • Media File: ANON17272503146233135311 is sequenced on Track: ANON15467174445949765117 in Video Layer: ANON1895260275497076277
      • This allows us to analyse and understand how our users are building projects, without being able to know anything about the specifics of the project itself.