2020 is over - and not a moment too soon. This was a grueling year that somehow managed to pass by both quickly and slowly at the same time.

Kollaborate

The pandemic meant our users relied on our Kollaborate cloud service even more, so much of the year was spent on infrastructure and making sure we could accommodate the spike in usage. We did however deliver major new features such as folder downloading, heatmaps and transcription improvements.

Our self-hosted version of Kollaborate received Docker integration, which greatly simplifies installation and management for customers.

We embarked on a mission to rewrite Kollaborate in its entirety, which we designed in such a way that the new components could be slotted into the existing site so that we could roll it out in stages.

Some of the new parts are already live on the site and we're just about to roll out a new release in which the vast majority of the site is running under the newer backend. There are still a small number of features using the old system that we plan to address in a future update. The new version provides speed and reliability improvements, and once all features are running on the new system in future we'll have even more options to improve speed further.

We are planning to do the same for the frontend next, which will also be done in stages.

In addition, we plan to focus on the Kollaborate helper apps over the next year, including new workflow plugins for Final Cut Pro X and DaVinci Resolve.

And of course, we have lots of new ideas for features that we want to keep under wraps for now...

Digital Rebellion apps

We've been wanting to create cross-platform apps for a while now and the big barrier to that was one of tooling (it was difficult to find tools that met all of our needs and were also reasonably pleasant to use). This is an issue that is almost fixed now and so we plan to look more seriously at Windows support in 2021.

Since this would require products to be rewritten from scratch, we will do so on a priority/ease-of-development basis and so not every product will therefore be cross-platform by the end of 2021.

We also plan Big Sur / Apple Silicon compatible versions of our apps after the upcoming Kollaborate release.

This is intended as a list of our major goals / priorities and we are planning many more things not listed here. Thanks to all of our customers for their support and we hope Digital Rebellion products continue to improve your projects in 2021.

Last week we released Kollaborate Server 3.1, a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform for creatives.

Edit default roles

You can now modify the default roles for projects server-wide from the Tools page of the Admin Area.

Installer passwords

The installer and upgrader are now password protected for added security on Docker installations by default. You can find the password inside the config.env file.

Non-Docker manual installations do not have the password set by default but it can be set through the environment variable KOLLAB_INSTALLER_PASSWORD.

Folder downloading

The contents of folders, departments or entire projects can now be downloaded all at once as a single zip file.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps show how a video has been viewed - where people skipped ahead and where they watched more than once. Click the Heatmap button in the player for all results combined, or go to the Users tab to view heatmaps for individual users.

Currently heatmaps are recorded only for team members but we plan to record them for link recipients in future.

Quick Share

Clicking the Share button on the player or Files page now generates a link that you can copy and paste immediately, which can dramatically speed up the process if you need to generate lots of links at once. You can edit the link options in the dialog and they will be remembered for future links.

If you clicked the button by mistake, you can also delete the link from that dialog.

Task tags

You can now add tags to tasks. Some uses for this could be:

• To segment tasks into categories such as "sound" and "VFX"
• To tag tasks with milestones such as "v3.0"
• To convey a task's status - e.g. "Needs verification" or "Successfully reproduced"
• To add additional context or information to a task - such as "5.1 mix" if the issue only appears in a particular mix

Keyboard shortcut overhaul

While Kollaborate has supported keyboard shortcuts for a long time, these weren't easily discoverable. Now whenever a page has available shortcuts, a keyboard icon will appear at the bottom of the screen that will show you shortcuts available for that page. This update also added lots of new shortcuts for things like image zooming and PDF page navigation.

Other changes

• Import / export metadata to CSV files
• Pin important tasks to the top of the Tasks view
• Improved icons
• You can now add captions in languages other than English
• Language can now be specified when creating a project - this controls which caption language displays by default
• Lots of 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).

We've made big improvements to the automatic transcription feature of our Kollaborate cloud workflow platform.

English transcription is now more accurate and we're offering support for Russian, Chinese and German too. We expect to add additional languages in future as speech models become available.

Automatic transcription is free and unlimited for all Team accounts.

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.

We recently released Kollaborate 3.1, a major update to our cloud workflow platform for film and TV.

Massive under-the-hood overhaul

Kollaborate has had a complete under-the-hood overhaul to improve scalability and provide a secure base on which we can quickly develop new features. All new features are being delivered on the new foundation and we plan to convert existing features to the new system over time.

Folder downloading

The contents of folders, departments or entire projects can now be downloaded all at once as a single zip file.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps show how a video has been viewed - where people skipped ahead and where they watched more than once. Click the Heatmap button in the player for all results combined, or go to the Users tab to view heatmaps for individual users.

Currently heatmaps are recorded only for team members but we plan to record them for link recipients in future.

Quick Share

Clicking the Share button on the player or Files page now generates a link that you can copy and paste immediately, which can dramatically speed up the process if you need to generate lots of links at once. You can edit the link options in the dialog and they will be remembered for future links.

If you clicked the button by mistake, you can also delete the link from that dialog.

Task tags

You can now add tags to tasks. Some uses for this could be:

• To segment tasks into categories such as "sound" and "VFX"
• To tag tasks with milestones such as "v3.0"
• To convey a task's status - e.g. "Needs verification" or "Successfully reproduced"
• To add additional context or information to a task - such as "5.1 mix" if the issue only appears in a particular mix

Custom Roles

Roles on the Team page can now be customized. Project admins can click the Manage Roles option in the dropdown next to a user to add, edit or remove custom roles.

Keyboard shortcut overhaul

While Kollaborate has supported keyboard shortcuts for a long time, these weren't easily discoverable. Now whenever a page has available shortcuts, a keyboard icon will appear at the bottom of the screen that will show you shortcuts available for that page. This update also added lots of new shortcuts for things like image zooming and PDF page navigation.

Other changes

• Import / export metadata to CSV files
• Pin important tasks to the top of the Tasks view
• Improved icons
• You can now add captions in languages other than English (although automatic transcription is still English-only)
• Lots of 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. To find out more, see the overview or register for the free trial.

We recently released a major new update to Pro Media Tools, our suite of media management tools for video professionals.

macOS 10.15 Catalina compatibility

The main change in this version is long-awaited compatibility with macOS 10.15 for all apps in the suite, with the exception of QT Edit, where a Catalina-compatible version is still in development and will be released in a future update.

Additionally, as previously announced, Gamma Shift Detector has been removed from the suite, but can be downloaded free of charge here.

Some apps required few or no changes in order to be Catalina compatible, but the two apps that required the most work were Edit Detector and Video Check. The QuickTime foundations of these apps were stripped out and replaced with AV Foundation equivalents, resulting in faster processing speeds as well as the aforementioned compatibility.

Other changes

The apps in the suite now support Dark Mode on macOS 10.14 and higher.

Additionally,  we managed to optimize and improve Edit Detector’s detection accuracy as a nice side-effect of the rewriting work we did.

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 Server 3.0.3 is now out, which is a minor update to our self-hosted workflow platform.

Docker changes

• Fixed an issue where the container may not be able to communicate with LetsEncrypt's servers
• Setting USE_LETS_ENCRYPT to false now removes existing certificates, which is useful for troubleshooting
• Fixed an issue where Postfix may not start automatically
• When LetsEncrypt is switched on, http requests are now automatically forwarded to https

Other changes

• Support for showing image files in the Adobe Panel
• Comments - Replies are still listed under their respective parent comments when ordering comments by date
• Comments - Fixed an issue where comment replies may not be threaded correctly
• Player - Fixed an issue where pressing Play on Cut Notes wouldn't stop rewinding/fast forwarding when synced to the web UI
• Users - Fixed an issue where admins could be unable to add users in some instances
• Various minor tweaks and bug fixes

Upgrading from a previous version

Please see the Upgrading section of the installation guide for instructions on how to upgrade your existing installation.

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).

The latest update for our self-hosted workflow platform, Kollaborate Server 3.0.2, is out with significant improvements to the Docker integration plus lots of backend tweaks and polish.

Docker changes

• Environment variables have been moved to a separate config.env file to make future updates simpler
• LetsEncrypt integration allows you to easily setup SSL encryption
• A proxy is now used to route HTTP and Websocket data to the correct services, increasing the compatibility of Synced Sessions with certain firewalls / network configurations
• Kollaborate Server now has a local mail server for sending emails directly from the server, although you'll still need to setup things like SPF, DMARC, reverse DNS records, etc, at the domain level in order for emails to get past spam filters.
• Fixed an issue where special characters may not display correctly
• Fixed an issue where thumbnails may not display
• Limited the size of Docker logs to save disk space

Other changes

• Deleted files and projects can now be restored for up to 30 days, up from 14
• Deleted file events now appear on the History page for a project (only project admins can see this)
• You can customize the port that the websocket server listens on and allow Kollaborate to connect to it over web ports (80 or 443) if it's running through a proxy. Connecting through standard web ports increases compatibility with firewall and network configurations.
• Overhauled how encoder pinging works on the Admin Dashboard and statuses can now be refreshed manually without needing to reload the page
• Some browsers may block autoplaying videos with sound, which can affect Synced Sessions. Kollaborate now mutes audio if it detects this to allow the video to still play in sync. Users can click on the Mute icon to unmute audio. Repeated use of Kollaborate will eventually teach a browser to allow autoplaying video with audio.
• More efficient preloading of hoverscrub thumbnails
• Fixed an issue where the size of a file could be reported incorrectly if it takes a while to move to the shared storage volume
• Fixed an issue where link recipients could only download the originally linked file and not any other versions
• Fixed an issue where folder link recipients couldn't view comments in certain situations
• Fixed an issue where caption durations could be incorrect depending on the timecode start point
• Only documents below 300 MB are converted to PDF, which fixes extremely long encoding jobs for documents with embedded videos
• Improvements to how folder disk usage is calculated when moving files
• Various minor installer tweaks and improvements
• Various minor backend tweaks and bug fixes

See the release notes and setup guide for information on installing from scratch or upgrading from a previous version.

There's also a corresponding Kollaborate Encoder 1.5.1 update with the following changes:

• Compatibility with Kollaborate Server 3.0.2
• Communication with Kollaborate Server now follows redirects, which fixes an issue where you may get a blank response from the server if you set the web server URL as http instead of https.
• Limit images passed to ffmpeg to 15Kx15K as it can't deal with images bigger than that
• Fixed an issue where document jobs wouldn't requeue if they fail
• Fixed an issue where soffice could be killed prematurely, preventing office docs being converted
• Fixed an issue where some temporary document files wouldn't be cleaned up after encoding finished
• Various small bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

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).

We've now got a pre-release version of our self-hosted workflow platform, Kollaborate Server 3.0.2, with significant improvements to the Docker scripts. We've tested it internally but need some extra feedback on how the Docker scripts work in certain environments.

Docker changes

• Environment variables have been moved to a separate config.env file to make future updates simpler
• LetsEncrypt integration allows you to easily setup SSL encryption
• A proxy is now used to route HTTP and Websocket data to the correct services, increasing the compatibility of Synced Sessions with certain firewalls / network configurations
• Kollaborate Server now has a local mail server for sending emails directly from the server, although you'll still need to setup things like SPF, DMARC, reverse DNS records, etc, at the domain level in order for emails to get past spam filters.
• Improved performance when macOS is the host OS
• Fixed an issue where special characters may not display correctly
• Fixed an issue where thumbnails may not display

Other changes

• Deleted files and projects can now be restored for up to 30 days, up from 14
• Deleted file events now appear on the History page for a project (only project admins can see this)
• You can customize the port that the websocket server listens on and allow Kollaborate to connect to it over web ports (80 or 443) if it's running through a proxy. Connecting through standard web ports increases compatibility with firewall and network configurations. (Note: our apps currently assume the websocket port is always 8000; we will be releasing updated versions of our apps shortly that respect the new settings.)
• Fixed an issue where folder link recipients couldn't view comments in certain situations
• Various minor backend tweaks

See the release notes and setup guide for information on installing from scratch or upgrading from a previous version.

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).

Due to the ease of remote working in our industry, many of our customers are continuing working during the pandemic and so we wanted to make a statement about the continued availability of our services.

We have always been a remote and nimble company so the coronavirus pandemic does not change our business operations in any material way. Customers should therefore expect services and support to continue as normal.

If you're looking for a way to help in the fight against coronavirus, we recommend people with fast computers download Folding@Home to aid in scientific understanding of the virus. We'd also recommend people contribute to Mozilla's Common Voice project, as this pandemic will likely accelerate the need for non-touch machine interfaces like voice.

We've got a new webapp on the site: Aspect Ratio Matte Generator. This allows you to generate a transparent PNG image with black bars at the top and bottom to mask video to a certain aspect ratio.

While there are image packs like this already on the internet, the creator of such a pack has to try to anticipate all the resolutions the end-user is likely to need in advance. This means you may need to resize such an image if the pack creator didn't create one for the specific resolution you're working at. The advantage of our tool is that you can create one on-the-fly at the exact image size you need. It also supports aspect ratios less than 1.0 (i.e. with black bars at the sides), if such a thing is desired.

This tool is completely free and works in modern web browsers.

If you like this tool, check out our other webapps, our numerous products for video professionals and our cloud workflow platform.