Collaboration is a major part of filmmaking, but sometimes it seems as though technology hasn't quite caught up with our increasingly mobile and online workflows. That's why Frame.io is so exciting. This collaboration platform aims to "pick up where Vimeo left off" by allowing users to upload, review, and share videos privately with collaborators anywhere in the world with a single application. And once you check out the workflow, you'll wonder how you ever did without it.
Right now, you'd be hard-pressed to find a really efficient way to work on a project with your team without being in a room together. There are certainly some powerful and effective tools to take care of certain tasks -- Dropbox is great for sharing files, YouTube or Vimeo for uploading videos for review, and Gmail (or whichever emailing platform you prefer) for communicating back and forth.
Using a bunch of different websites, programs, and tools just to collaborate is an inconvenience that we've lived with for quite a long time, but Frame.io has stepped in to offer users something that incorporates all of the benefits of Dropbox, Vimeo, and email into a single platform. In other words, Frame.io will allow you to upload videos, audio, and more, review the content with collaborators you select yourself, and communicate back and forth through internal messaging.
Here's Frame.io's Jason Diamond to explain the workflow:
Frame.io acts as a home base for all your creative projects. It replaces the hodgepodge of using Vimeo, Dropbox, and Gmail to work with media files online. We solve cloud storage, client review, transcoding, and light asset management into one seamless app. We have great tools for video like time based comments and annotation so you can draw directly on video frames. We have version control and comparison tools built in so you can see what’s changed over time. Frame.io is social too. Every action performed is tied to an individual user and tracked so you get notifications about what’s going on. It’s built for teams from the ground up so you can create a private workspace for each project you’re working on and decide who has access to what.
Frame.io allows you to create projects, add collaborators to them, and drag and drop files from your computer to share all within the dashboard, which is a real timesaver. The review options look especially exciting, too. Users can take a writing tool and highlight areas of the frame that they want to address, send messages to other collaborators about their notes (to which others can reply to the whole thread of comments or to a specific one -- much like many forum comment sections).
Another great feature is the ability to compare different versions of a clip side by side by playing them together at the same time. The comments section is also really intuitive. While reviewing clips, a timecode is added whenever a collaborator comments on a specific frame, which means that clicking on the comment takes you directly to the frame they're referring to. An icon for the draw tool also appears if the collaborator has used it, making it easier to anticipate what you'll be looking for when responding to messages.
So, when all is said and done, and each collaborator is happy with the final product, Frame.io allows you to export to YouTube and Vimeo if you want to publish it and get it out there into the interwebs.
It's easy to get excited about a platform like this, because it solves so many problems we face day in and day out as participants in a collaborative medium. Diamond lists some very astute observations about the very common problems we all face that Frame.io solves:
- Managing a 100 Vimeo passwords is never fun.
- Your clients cryptic feedback of “that brown thing around 12 seconds” will now actually makes sense.
- Trudging through your email to find that download link from that person for that file. Ugh.
- It’s 10PM and you don’t know if your edit is approved (or even viewed).
- It’s 11PM and now you have to export and compress your edit in 25 different formats.
If you want to see the Frame.io workflow in action, head on over to its website and scroll down to the sneak peek. You can also sign up to be notified when this awesome collaborative workflow tool is ready.
Link: Frame.io
