Waiting on a file to upload to send to clients can be torture when under deadline. And yet, you have to upload video content to a cloud dozens—sometimes hundreds—of times in a typical post process. Maybe it's dailies at the top of the show, or elements to a VFX artist, or final full res deliveries at the end of a job, every filmmaker is used to waiting on that upload progress bar. To make it easier, there are consumer level tools like Dropbox that work wonders but are sometimes slower than we want. There are pricy professional tools like Aspera that offer better speed and security, but at a cost. But the process of delivering media via the web remains a pain point for many. Frame.io thinks it has a solution.
After a massive ground up refresh only a few weeks ago, Frame.io is back with another new feature designed around cloud delivery. Called Watch Folders, it's a desktop app built to run full time on your local machine and upload files to the cloud automatically in the background, with a menu bar icon. By moving to a constantly running application Frame.io is able to enable some exceptionally useful features including interruptable uploads. Lose internet, need to move your laptop to another location, or just run out of power? The upload will restart once the machine is open and running again. Files can be private, or shared automatically with a team with notifications sent upon upload.
Credit: Frame.io
The real key feature here is speed. While some of the features we see here are available elsewhere, by combining them all together into one, and then working at the server level to speed up the process, this tool can be a real killer app for filmmakers. For instance, Dropbox almost never uses anything more than a fraction of the bandwidth available to it, even when set to "unlimited" upload. If you aren't a filmmaker, this likely hasn't been a problem, but working with large 4K video files this can be downright painful. By focusing on speed and taking advantage of every ounce of bandwidth every step of the way, Frame.io targets filmmakers with a tool that we will all likely appreciate. Frame.io are claiming 5X speed boost over Dropbox: if that bears out in reality, that's going to be huge.
Check out the Frame.io blog for more details.
Tech Specs
- Privacy and notifications enabled for private clips.
- MacOS native application
- 150GB-file-in-under-an hour
- Up to 2X faster than Signiant and Aspera, Up to 5X faster than Dropbox
No Film School's complete coverage of NAB 2018 is brought to you by Adorama, My RØDE Reel, and Blackmagic Design.
More of No Film School's coverage from the NAB showroom floor:
