CinePlay 1.6.2 - Oct 2 2019

• Fixed an incompatibility with changes made to realtime / synced sessions on the Kollaborate cloud site

Recently we released Kollaborate Server 3.0, a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform. This follows on from the release of Kollaborate 3.0 on the cloud version of the site.

New UI

We've made many changes to improve the user interface, the most significant of which is the vertical navigation bar which is designed to balance out the interface and place your content closer to the center of the screen.

If you find yourself needing more horizontal space, hover over the Kollaborate logo at the top left and click the arrow that appears to collapse the navigation bar. The navigation bar will automatically collapse by itself on small displays or when you resize your browser window.

Documents

While video is the most popular format used on the site, our customers also upload many other file types such as MS Word and PowerPoint documents. The only way to view these files in the past was to download them.

Now Kollaborate has a specific Document file type that supports file extensions like PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, ODT, ODP. These files will now show thumbnails and be viewable directly in the browser once converted by our servers.

Leaving a comment on a document now tags that comment with the current page number and clicking on a comment will immediately take you to that page.

New Servers page

Encoding server configuration has been moved to its own separate page of the Admin Area.

Moving encoding servers to their own page allows us to offer more settings and features in future, including Kollaborate Hybrid Cloud, which will allow you to offset some of your encoding and other tasks to our servers. We plan to launch this feature in the near future.

Transcript tab

Add transcripts to your videos either manually or by importing SRT or VTT captions. Export as SRT, VTT or plain text. Captions will appear automatically over your video.

The cloud version of the site has a beta of our machine learning-powered automatic transcription feature. Because this is still a beta and is regularly undergoing changes, we're not making it available to self-hosted customers just yet but plan to in future once things have stabilized a bit more.

Customizable file columns

Columns in List view on the Files page can now be resized or dragged to change their order. You can also right-click to hide them or show additional columns. You can now, for example, show the number of comments a file has next to its name and sort the list by this field.

Advanced Search

Advanced Search has been completely overhauled to be more powerful. Use criteria like file size, type or width to narrow down your search. You can even locate files with specific words in their transcript.

Overhauled image viewer

Images can now be zoomed and navigated with a lot more control than before. Annotations can be drawn over the image at any zoom level.

Version names

Versions can be given custom names like "Rough Cut" or "Fine Cut". To do this, click the purple number next to the filename to view all of the versions, then right-click a version and select Rename Version.

Comment attachments

Even though you can leave comments at specific timecode positions and draw over a video, sometimes that isn't enough to get your point across, so you can now attach files to comments. So you can say "I want the color to look like this" and attach a photo, rather than trying to describe it.

This release also contains hundreds of small tweaks, bug fixes and improvements.

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

CinePlay 1.6.1 - Sep 4 2019

    •    IMPORTANT: This version is required to register the software and older versions will no longer register with our website. This doesn't affect you if you've already registered it to your computer and only applies to new registrations.  
    •    Improved drop-frame timecode compatibility
    •    Improved memory usage
    •    Fixed several timecode issues that could occur when exporting files
    •    Fixed an issue where exported files could have no file extension if you deleted it from the filename
    •    Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Encoder 1.4 - Aug 28 2019

Compatibility notes

• See the installation guide for details on configuring the new document conversion feature

Changes in 1.4:

• Support for converting documents to PDFs for Kollaborate Server 3.0's Document file type
• Better support for videos with non-square pixels
• Improved audio track mapping if each track has more than one channel
• Fixed an issue where the queue could stall
• Stopped failing jobs from repeating over and over again
• Many under-the-hood tweaks and improvements

Kollaborate Server 3.0 - Aug 28 2019

Compatibility notes:

• Kollaborate Server now requires PHP 7.2 or higher
• libav support has been removed - to switch to ffmpeg see the installation guide
• We have significantly modified the default page style so you may need to tweak any custom styles you have created
• The Messages feature has been removed

Server-specific features

• Encoding Server information is now stored in the database and can be modified from the new Servers page in the Admin Area. Additionally, the step to add encoders during installation has now been moved after database setup.
• Installer - Added a check for PHP open_basedir setting that could prevent Kollaborate Server from accessing the storage volume
• Admin Dashboard: Support for manually clearing deleted files and projects
• Admin Area - Only superadmins can see Servers, Config and Tools pages now

Changes in Kollaborate Server 3.0

• Transcription - Add captions manually or import them from SRT/VTT files. (Automatic transcription is currently cloud-only and will be available to self-hosted customers in future as the feature matures.)
• Redesigned UI with navigation bar on the left
• New Document format displays Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents and PDFs directly in the browser and allows page-specific comments
• Customizable file columns - Reorder, resize and hide file columns in Detail view on the Files page. You can also show additional columns like the number of comments and sort by these fields.
• Advanced Search - More powerful searching based on combining parameters like title, description, width, transcript text, etc. Search within the current directory or across the entire project at once.
• Image viewer - Zoom and pan across an image with more control. Draw annotations at any zoom level.
• Version names - Give versions custom names like "Rough Cut" or "Fine Cut"
• Comment attachments - Attach existing files to a comment or upload new files directly when creating a new comment. This is useful for directing people to specific files.
• Share a folder directly from its file page
• The page footer shows how many files / items are on a page
• Uploads - Fixed an issue where uploads could be terminated if they took too long
• Comments - Fixed an issue where replies could be sorted out of order
• Comments - Adding a comment no longer relies on the user's local clock being set to the correct time
• Projects - Fixed an issue where muting a project could show a duplicate of the project in the Projects list
• Files - Better support for files with non-square pixels
• Files - Fixed an issue where video files could be detected as audio only
• Projects - Restoring a deleted project now correctly recalculates the project's total size
• Usage - Fixed an issue where deleted files would show up on the Usage page
• Alerts - When uploading a revision, subscribers of the old file are now automatically subscribed to the new one
• Files - Support for MP2, MPA and JFIF formats
• UI - Pages now show the number of items (files, workflows, tasks, etc) in the page footer
• Player - Prev / Next buttons now take into account File page sorting
• Player - Fixed an issue where subtitles wouldn't disappear from a video when the relationship link is removed
• Uploads - The current upload rate (MB/s) is now shown
• Overhauled how login sessions work
• History - Project history is now stored for up to 1 year
• UI - Removed unnecessary/duplicated options from the top of the Files page
• Uploads - Improved how Kollaborate Server deals with a storage drive that runs out of disk space
• UI - Various optimizations to improve file drawing performance
• UI - Prevented non-admins from seeing the Usage page
• Various tweaks / improvements to Adobe panel view
• Dashboard - Fixed incorrect task URLs
• Dashboard - File titles are now resized to fit
• Files - Loosened the permissions for creating aliases
• Player - Hide cursor in full screen when UI is not showing
• Player - Version dropdown now includes thumbnails
• Files - Unimportant column data is now in a smaller font
• Uploads - Fixed an issue with partial progress bars showing if a file uploads too quickly
• Player - Support for rendering PDFs natively in the browser
• Player - Info below the video is now a tabbed view
• Share - Fixed an issue where the password wouldn't be shown when creating an upload request link
• API - Fixed an issue where deleted projects could be displayed within apps
• Upload - Prevented upload links working with deleted projects
• Tasks - Fixed an issue where searches wouldn't persist when moving to a different page
• Encoding - Randomized ordering of sending jobs to encoding servers to more efficiently split the load
• Encoding - Fixed an issue where jobs not assigned to a server would get stuck in the queue even when encoders came back online again
• Player - Fixed an issue where captions couldn't be switched off on Chrome
• History / Dashboard - Fixed some issues with displaying Unicode strings
• Files - Fixed multiple downloads not working correctly on Chrome
• Lots of under-the-hood tweaks and improvements

Pro Maintenance Tools 2.2.7 - Aug 8 2019

• Corrupt Clip Finder - Fixed an issue where some files might get erroneously flagged up
• Plugin Manager - Better support for running installer scripts that take a while or require user input
• Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Pro Media Tools 1.8 - Jul 30 2019

• Auto Transfer - Added a Checksum Validator to compare two or more drives, directories or files
• Auto Transfer - Added a right-click option to add a mounted drive as a destination
• Auto Transfer - Added file sizes to transfer log
• QT Edit - Various conforming improvements
• QT Edit - Added an option to switch off frame rate inversion when conforming, which can sometimes fix issues converting from fractional (e.g. 23.976) and integer (e.g. 25) frame rates
• Edit Detector - Numbers in filenames are now padded
• Video Check - Added space, JKL and arrow key shortcuts to navigate the video
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

CinePlay 1.6 - Jul 23 2019

• Playheads can be ganged either from the start of the file (this is the previous behavior) or from an arbitrary point within each file
• Override timecode start position for a movie by going to Edit > Modify Timecode Start
• Various tweaks to rewinding / fast forward behavior
• Fixed an issue where the timecode of exported movies could have an incorrect start point
• Fixed an issue where the app may not jump to markers correctly
• Fixed an issue where the movie view may sometimes steal key presses away from textboxes
• Various minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate 3.0 - Jul 11 2019

• Transcription - Transcribe files either manually or automatically with our AI transcription (beta). Correct incorrect transcriptions and click the Learn button to help Kollaborate improve transcription in future.
• Redesigned UI with navigation bar on the left
• New Document format displays Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents and PDFs directly in the browser and allows page-specific comments
• Customizable file columns - Reorder, resize and hide file columns in Detail view on the Files page. You can also show additional columns like the number of comments and sort by these fields.
• Advanced Search - More powerful searching based on combining parameters like title, description, width, transcript text, etc. Search within the current directory or across the entire project at once.
• Image viewer - Zoom and pan across an image with more control. Draw annotations at any zoom level.
• Version names - Give versions custom names like "Rough Cut" or "Fine Cut"
• Comment attachments - Attach existing files to a comment or upload new files directly when creating a new comment. This is useful for directing people to specific files.
• Three files now upload simultaneously, which should make uploading large batches faster
• Share a folder directly from its file page
• The page footer shows how many files / items are on a page
• Lots of small tweaks and bug fixes

Pro Media Tools 1.8 is a major update to our suite of media management tools. Here's what's new.

Checksum Validator

Auto Transfer has always checksummed your files when copying them, but it now has a tool to manually verify checksums. It's very flexible - drag in multiple drives, folders or files and it will generate checksums and compare them all.

This is helpful for verifying data integrity between two sources that Auto Transfer didn't copy, or were copied a long time ago.

Conform improvements

QT Edit has undergone several changes to improve frame rate conforming. Most of these are under the hood changes but there is one user-facing addition.

We've added a new checkbox to the Conform pane to disable frame rate inversion. Like the other options on that pane, most people should not need to check it, but this option can help when converting from a non-integer frame rate (e.g. 23.976) to an integer frame rate (e.g. 25). You should only use this option if you get incorrect results with it switched off.

Other changes

 

• Auto Transfer - Added a right-click option to add a mounted drive as a destination
• Auto Transfer - Added file sizes to transfer log
• Edit Detector - Numbers in filenames are now padded
• Video Check - Added space, JKL and arrow key shortcuts to navigate the video

Pro Media Tools is an essential toolkit for media professionals. To find out more, view the feature list, read the user manual or download the free 15-day trial.

 

Kollaborate 3.0 is out now on the cloud, which is a major update to our workflow platform that both delivers new features and sets a foundation for future features to build upon.

AI transcription (Beta)

We're using machine learning technology to create transcripts of the spoken audio in your videos. Kollaborate will automatically highlight the current sentence as the video plays and you can click on sentences to jump to that point in the video.

Kollaborate uses the transcript to create automatic captions below the video and you can even export them as a separate file in common formats like SRT or VTT.

Best of all, this technology is completely self-contained on our servers. Privacy is extremely important to us so we wanted a solution that protected our users' data and did not share it with third-parties. We needed a solution that would also work for our self-hosted customers, some of whom host in environments with no external internet connection.

While it would have been trivial from an engineering perspective to integrate with something like Google or Amazon's speech-to-text technology like our competitors do, those services do not meet this criteria. After a lot of investigation and some code contributions, we finally settled on Mozilla's DeepSpeech. This is a more complex solution to the problem but it gives us maximum flexibility and the ability to finely tailor the technology to fit our customers' specific use-cases.

Our competitors charge extra for transcription and limit the number of hours per month you can transcribe. Using DeepSpeech allows us to make our transcription service free and unlimited. Transcribe as many files as you like for no extra cost and the only limitation is how quickly our servers can process the queue.

Because our speech models are still being refined, we're calling this a beta so that customer expectations are aligned correctly. You can read more details about the situations the model performs best at here, but the short explanation is that content like podcasts and voiceovers will currently return the best results. That's not to say that the transcription feature can't be used in other situations, but the technology is likely to make more mistakes. Over time we will expand the number of situations in which it performs well.

We're building our models on both open source data and data that more reflects our customers' use-cases. You can help improve transcription by correcting any mistakes and then clicking the Learn button. We don't use your data without permission so it is only used when the Learn button is clicked, and you can specify if we can use the entire file or just the sentences you corrected.

The audio of the file then gets cut up into pieces, given a random filename and uses the transcript you provided for training. We don't share your original audio with anyone and once it's part of the model the audio can't be extracted back in its original form.

Another way you can help is by contributing your voice to Mozilla's Common Voice project. This is a public domain speech dataset used by Kollaborate, Firefox and a variety of other projects to create open and privacy-conscious speech technology. All voice data is useful, but especially when it comes from women and non-Americans, who are currently underrepresented in Common Voice's dataset.

New UI

We've made many changes to improve the user interface, the most significant of which is the vertical navigation bar which is designed to balance out the interface and place your content closer to the center of the screen.

If you find yourself needing more horizontal space, hover over the Kollaborate logo at the top left and click the arrow that appears to collapse the navigation bar. The navigation bar will automatically collapse by itself on small displays or when you resize your browser window.

Documents

While video is the most popular format used on the site, our customers also upload many other file types such as MS Word and PowerPoint documents. The only way to view these files in the past was to download them.

Now Kollaborate has a specific Document file type that supports file extensions like PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, ODT, ODP. These files will now show thumbnails and be viewable directly in the browser once converted by our servers.

Leaving a comment on a document now tags that comment with the current page number and clicking on a comment will immediately take you to that page.

Customizable file columns

Columns in List view on the Files page can now be resized or dragged to change their order. You can also right-click to hide them or show additional columns. You can now, for example, show the number of comments a file has next to its name and sort the list by this field.

Advanced Search

Advanced Search has been completely overhauled to be more powerful. Use criteria like file size, type or width to narrow down your search. You can even locate files with specific words in their transcript.

Overhauled image viewer

Images can now be zoomed and navigated with a lot more control than before. Annotations can be drawn over the image at any zoom level.

Version names

Versions can be given custom names like "Rough Cut" or "Fine Cut". To do this, click the purple number next to the filename to view all of the versions, then right-click a version and select Rename Version.

Comment attachments

Even though you can leave comments at specific timecode positions and draw over a video, sometimes that isn't enough to get your point across, so you can now attach files to comments. So you can say "I want the color to look like this" and attach a photo, rather than trying to describe it.

Other changes

• Three files now upload simultaneously, which should make uploading large batches faster
• The Files page has been overhauled to update dynamically without page refreshes. This should improve the speed of file browsing.
• Share a folder directly from its file page
• The page footer shows how many files / items are on a page
• Lots of small tweaks and bug fixes

Coming soon

• Kollaborate Archive - Cloud archival of your camera media and project files - entering beta soon
• Video/audio comments - Leave audio or video comments without typing - opt-in available soon
• Kollaborate Server 3.0 - Self-hosted version of Kollaborate 3.0 - coming in the next 2-3 weeks
• Kollaborate Hybrid Cloud - Launching in conjunction with Kollaborate Server 3.0

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. To find out more, see the overview or register for the free trial.

Post Haste for Windows 2.2.2 - Jun 25 2019

• Fixed an issue that could cause templates to not be renamed correctly
• Minor bug fixes and tweaks

CinePlay 1.5.7 - May 6 2019

• Which file types will automatically open in CinePlay can now be set in the installer and also preferences
• Fixed an issue where a black line may show to the left of certain videos
• General bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Marker Import for Mac 2.2.1 - May 3 2019

• Marker colors are now set when importing into Adobe Premiere via FCP XML
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and improvements

Marker Import for Mac 2.2 - Apr 5 2019

• Improved compatibility with captions in FCPX

Kollaborate Folder Watcher 1.3.3 - Mar 22 2019

• Fixed an issue where metadata may not be detected correctly
• Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Server Manager for Mac 1.0 B1 - Mar 13 2019

Please note that this is a beta intended for testing purposes and is not intended for use in a production environment.

Kollaborate Server Manager allows you to run Kollaborate Server and Kollaborate Encoder in Docker containers, which significantly simplifies setting them up.

You will need a license or trial of Kollaborate Server in order to use the software.

Note that Kollaborate Server Manager will setup the bare minimum in order to get the software up and running, so you may still need to edit configuration files according to your preferences.

Beta limitations:
* Postfix is not yet setup for sending emails
* SSL certificates are not yet setup

Important Note: the Docker container resets every time it is run. This does not affect your data, which is stored outside of the container, but it affects any operating system settings or tools that you install inside the container. We are working on ways of allowing the container to be customized in future versions.

Preference Manager 4.4.3 - Mar 11 2019

• Support for backing up and restoring FCPX workspaces
• General bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

CinePlay 1.5.6 - Mar 9 2019

• Exported H.264s now have "fast start" enabled to help them play back faster over a network
• The frame rate of a file's timecode track now overrides its source frame rate
• Added an Open Cloud File option to the File menu
• Kollaborate users can no longer download files if they don't have download permissions on the project
• Improved the reliability of movie export/conversion
• Fixed an issue where users couldn't unregister if they had already reset their license via our site
• Various minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

We've just launched a public beta of a new tool for self-hosted Kollaborate customers that makes it easy to get up and running with minimal configuration.

Kollaborate Server Manager runs Kollaborate Server and Kollaborate Encoder in Docker containers on your system and handles downloading, setting up and running the software for you. The current release is Mac-only but we will have a Windows version available soon.

The software allows you to easily view logs all in one place, meaning you don't have to go hunting to find the PHP log if a problem occurs.

There are also options to make it easy to edit configuration files and get access to the server through the terminal.

This beta is intended for testing purposes and customer feedback only and we do not yet intend for it to be used in a production environment as we have not yet optimized it for performance and security. However, in the longer term we will be deprecating support for running the software directly on Mac and PC and making it Linux-only, so in future Kollaborate Server Manager will be the only way to run it on a Mac or PC server.

The current beta lacks the ability for Kollaborate Server to send emails and run over SSL, however all other features are operational and you can upload files and use it normally. Kollaborate Encoder is feature complete in this version.

This software requires a valid Kollaborate Server license or trial (contact us if you'd like to sign up for the trial). You can download the beta here.