Docs

Welcome to the Blade Archive documentation. Whether you just joined or you’ve been uploading footage for months, this page covers everything you need to know.

What is Blade Archive?

Blade Archive is a video archive built for HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) practitioners. It’s a dedicated place to store, organize, and review your sparring footage.

Fight footage is one of the best tools for improvement, but it tends to end up scattered across phones, cloud drives, and group chats. Blade Archive solves that by giving every bout a permanent, searchable home — organized by participants, weapons, and dates.

Core Concepts

Fights

A fight is the central unit in Blade Archive. It represents a single bout or exchange between participants. A fight can have:

One or more videos (different angles, recordings of the same bout)
Two or more participants (the people in the fight)
A name, location, and date

Fights are what you browse, filter, search, and share. Everything else in the platform exists to support organizing and discovering fights.

Participants

There are two kinds of participants:

User participants — linked to an actual Blade Archive account. Tagged by username or email during upload.
Placeholders — names for training partners who aren’t on the platform yet (e.g., “Bob”, “Red Mask”). When that person eventually joins via an invite, their placeholder can be claimed and all their fights automatically link to their new account.

Every participant has an associated weapon (longsword, rapier, sabre, etc.).

Videos

Videos are the raw footage attached to fights. Each video has:

Duration, resolution, and frame rate (extracted automatically)
A recording date (from file metadata when available)
A thumbnail (generated automatically)
Optional lower-resolution versions (if you request transcoding)

You can upload files up to 20 GB. Large files are automatically split into chunks for reliable uploading.

Uploading

Single Upload

The simplest path: one video, one fight.

Select a video file
Add a fight name and location
Tag the participants — yourself, other users by handle, or use placeholders for people not on the platform
Choose a weapon for each participant
Optionally request a lower resolution copy (e.g., 720p)
Upload

The system extracts metadata (duration, resolution, recording date) automatically. Your video uploads in chunks, so even large files on spotty connections will complete reliably.

Segment Upload

For longer recordings that contain multiple bouts (e.g., a tournament session or a training reel):

Select a video file
Scrub through the video to mark in and out points for each bout
Each segment becomes its own fight with its own participants
All segments share the same location and resolution settings
Upload all segments at once

This is the fastest way to process a full session of footage.

Thumbnails

Blade Archive generates a thumbnail for each video automatically.

Finding Your Fights

The home page shows all fights you have access to, with filters for:

Fighter — show only your fights, or fights involving a specific person
Weapon — filter by longsword, rapier, sabre, etc.
Opponent — filter by a specific opponent

Fights display with a thumbnail, date, opponent name, and weapon. Click any fight to see its full detail page with all videos, participants, and annotations.

Privacy & Visibility

Blade Archive gives you layered control over who can see your fights.

Who Can Always See Your Fights

You — you always see fights you’re in or uploaded
Other participants — anyone tagged in a fight can always see it
Video uploaders — if you uploaded the video, you can always see the fight

Visibility Settings

In your account settings, you control how broadly your fights are visible to other people:

Private (default) — only participants and uploaders can see your fights
My Private Groups — members of your private groups can see your fights
My Clubs — members of your clubs can see your fights
Completely Public — anyone on the platform can see your fights

These settings apply to all your fights at once. You set them during onboarding and can change them anytime in Account > Profile.

Per-Fight Privacy

Any participant can mark a specific fight as private. This overrides all visibility settings — only participants and uploaders can see that fight, regardless of anyone’s visibility preferences.

All Fights Private

There’s also a master override: All Fights Private (in Account > Profile) makes every fight you’re in private, as if you’d toggled each one individually. Useful if you want to temporarily lock everything down.

How It All Fits Together

The system checks access in this order:

Are you a participant or uploader? Always access.
Is the fight marked private (by anyone)? No access for non-participants.
Does any participant have public visibility? Access.
Do you share a club with a participant who has club visibility? Access.
Do you share a group with a participant who has group visibility? Access.
Otherwise: No access.

Clubs

Clubs represent HEMA schools, fencing clubs, or any organization your group trains with.

Joining: A club admin invites you, or you request to join and an admin approves
Visibility: If a club member sets their visibility to “My Clubs”, all other club members can see their fights
Roles: Regular members and club admins. Admins can invite/remove members, promote other admins, and manage the club profile picture
HEMA Ratings: Clubs can optionally be linked to their official HEMA Ratings club profile

Browse available clubs from the Clubs tab in your Account.

Private Groups

Private groups are smaller, ad-hoc collections of people — a study group, a tournament team, training partners at a specific event.

Creating: Any user can create a private group
Membership: Group admins invite members by username
Visibility: If a group member sets their visibility to “My Private Groups”, all other group members can see their fights
Roles: Members and group admins. Admins manage membership and can delete the group

Groups are managed from the Groups tab in your Account.

Annotations

Annotations let you mark up videos with comments and tactical analysis.

Comments

Leave timestamped comments on any video you have access to. Comments can be:

General — about the video as a whole
Timestamped — linked to a specific moment (click on the timeline to set it)

Comments support threading — reply to any comment to start a discussion.

Mentions

Use @handle in a comment to mention another user. They’ll get a notification, as long as they have access to the fight.

Hits

Hit annotations are tactical markers for scoring events. They record:

Who scored (attacker)
Who was hit (target)
Target area on the body
The timestamp in the video

This is useful for post-tournament analysis, coaching review, or tracking patterns in your sparring.

Personal Notes

Personal annotations are private — only you can see them. Use them for self-coaching notes, things to work on, or observations you don’t want to share.

Fight Merging

Sometimes the same bout ends up as two separate fights — maybe two people uploaded different angles independently. Blade Archive detects potential duplicates automatically.

How Detection Works

The system looks for fights with:

Overlapping participants
Videos recorded around the same time
Similar location or fight name

If the overlap score is high enough, you’ll see a “Merge” suggestion on the fight detail page.

Merging

When you merge two fights:

All videos move to the target fight
Participants are combined (duplicates removed)
Annotations update their references
The old fight URL redirects to the merged one, so shared links keep working

You can also manually select two fights from the fights list to merge (use the “Select to Merge” button).

Invites

Blade Archive is currently invite-only. If you’re here, someone invited you.

How Invites Work

An admin sends an invite to an email address
You receive a link with a unique invite code
Click the link and create your account
If the person who invited you added you as a placeholder in any of their fights, those fights automatically link to your new account

Placeholder Claims

There are two ways to convert a placeholder into a real user:

Via invites: When you send an invite, you can specify a placeholder name. When the invited person creates their account, all fights where you used that placeholder are automatically assigned to their new account. They join and immediately have a full archive waiting.

Via fight editing: On any fight detail page, you can replace a placeholder participant with a real user. If that placeholder appears in other fights you uploaded, Blade Archive will ask if you want to reassign all of them at once. This is the easiest way to link someone who already has an account.

Notifications

Blade Archive notifies you when things happen that involve your fights:

Someone comments on a fight you’re in
Someone @mentions you in a comment
You’re tagged as a participant in a new fight
Hit annotations are added to your fights (batched daily)
A fight you’re in is merged with another
You’re added to a club or group
Someone requests to join your club (if you’re an admin)

Preferences

You can toggle each notification type on or off from Account > Preferences. You can also configure email digests — daily, weekly, or monthly summaries of your notifications.

Check notifications from the bell icon in the navigation bar, or from Account > Notifications.

HEMA Ratings Integration

If you have a profile on HEMA Ratings, you can link it to your Blade Archive account:

Go to Account > Profile
Search for your fighter name in the HEMA Ratings section
Select your profile to link it

Once linked, your rating history is visible on your profile. Clubs can also be linked to their HEMA Ratings club entry.

Storage

Each account has a storage quota for fight videos. You can check your usage in Account > Usage.

Fight Storage: Videos in fights where you’re a participant (counts toward your quota)
Upload Storage: Videos you uploaded to fights where you have no participants tagged yet

If you exceed your quota, your oldest videos are restricted first. They’re still in the system — you just need to manage your storage to keep everything accessible.

Tips

Tag everyone: The more participants you tag, the more useful the archive becomes for everyone. Use placeholders for people not on the platform yet — they’ll be able to claim their fights when they join.
Use segment upload for sessions: If you film a whole training session or tournament, use segment mode to split it into individual bouts. Much faster than uploading each clip separately.
Set your visibility early: Think about who you want seeing your footage. Club visibility is a good default for most people — your clubmates can review footage together.
Mark things private when needed: If a specific bout was a bad day or you just don’t want it shared, use the per-fight privacy toggle. It overrides everything.
Merge duplicates: If you and your opponent both uploaded the same fight, merge them so all angles live together.
Use annotations for coaching: Timestamped comments and hit markers turn raw footage into a coaching tool. Personal notes keep your self-analysis private.