By site editor Dan Chung:
Frame.io Launch from Emery Wells on Vimeo.
You are on assignment and have just sent the first cut of your video back to your editor. Naturally she wants changes, but you are at one end of the world and she is at the other. She tries to explain what changes she wants, but you can’t quite visualise it. You edit another version but again it isn’t quite what they had in mind. After several more back and forths you might have a final cut, but you have wasted precious time and the whole process is super-tedious.
Now there may be a professional solution to all this. Frame.io was launched earlier this week as a collaborative workflow tool for filmmakers working on creative projects. The brainchild of filmmakers Josh and Jason Diamond, founder Emery Wells and co-founder John Traver, it aims to replace the ‘hodgepodge’ of using Vimeo, Dropbox, and Gmail to work with media files online. The idea is simple – build cloud storage, client review, transcoding and light asset management into one seamless app. Clients can remotely see versions of your edit and add annotations and comments directly on video frames. Any confusion over what changes are to be made should be gone. There is a version control to see what has changed over time. Once you have a perfectly polished and finished piece that everyone has signed off on, you can publish it to the world from within Frame.io using export options to YouTube and Vimeo.
The app isn’t specifically designed for factual shooters, but I can see it being just as useful to us as commercial types. There are other solutions for collaborative working out there but nothing I’ve seen looks as simple as Frame.io purports to be. Frame.io does more than just video review and notes. You can store, organize, review and comment on any media you upload. That includes audio files, stills and archival footage, which is perfect for both news organisations and documentary filmmakers. You can also upload full quality source footage and distribute to other team members via transcoded proxy files.
Frame.io isn’t available yet but if you want to know more and stay up to date with its progress then you can sign up at http://frame.io/
