Digital Rebellion Kollaborate Blog Category

Kollaborate Server 2026.2.1 - new player and file viewers, side-by-side playback, improved accessibility

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:49:50 +0000

Kollaborate Server 2026.2.1 is out of beta and ready for general use. This is a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform with a lot of new features.

New video player and image viewer

Our video player and image viewer have been completely rewritten from scratch. The new versions are considerably more powerful and easier to use. We’ve made lots of UI improvements and everything feels smoother, more polished and more intuitive.

New controls

There is now a button to skip forward 5 seconds, as well as new keyboard shortcuts comma and period for back and forward 5 secs, respectively. Opening the Seek to Timecode dialog can be accomplished with Shift + T.

The JKL keys function more like an NLE, with slow-mo support when holding K and J or L, as well as fast forward and rewind speeds up to 16x.

You can also change the playback speed separately without having to fast forward.

Switch between proxies and the original file

The new player allows switching between different file proxies, so you can now create multiple proxies and switch between them. It will also allow you to play back the original file (assuming it’s browser-playable) as long as you have download permissions for the file.

Better error handling

The new player is more resilient to playback or network issues. If something does go wrong, error messages are much clearer.

Accessibility

The new player has the ability to speak captions out loud. This allows you to bring in an audio description SRT and have Kollaborate speak it audibly as the video plays.

You can customize Kollaborate’s behavior when speaking captions, including automatically lowering the volume while the caption is spoken, or pausing playback completely. You can also set it to pause playback if the speech overruns the length of the caption and then resume again automatically.

Better mobile support

The player functions better on smaller screens and touch-only devices.

Overlays

Our new player supports overlaying 4:3 and 16:9 safe areas, as well as various aspect ratio mattes.

Side-by-side comparison

You can load a second file alongside another. You can compare any type of file with another, but if it's the same type it will automatically sync with the other player. Video and audio will sync playheads with each other and switching which file is active will switch audio source. Image viewers will sync zoom and pan position between each other, and document viewers will sync page numbers.

This behavior is customizable via the new Sync Settings panel. You can switch off synchronization and automatic audio and comment switching.

Comments switch automatically depending on which file is active, but you can also manually change this with a new dropdown in the Comments tab.

New document viewer

The document viewer for PDFs has been overhauled and now supports full screen and annotations.

New text viewer

There's a new viewer for text files that supports dynamic loading, meaning it can support very large files. It also supports full screen and there are options for line numbers and word wrap. You can comment on a specific line too.

Annotations

Annotations have been completely overhauled and are considerably more sophisticated now.

Instead of a basic drawing pen that can’t be edited, we now have multiple tools including boxes, circles and arrows. After drawing, the shape can be moved about, enlarged, rotated or deleted. There is also a text tool that allows you to write directly on the image.

Shape colors are now independent from the comment’s color and different shapes can have different colors. There is also undo and redo functionality.

Improved accessibility

Kollaborate works much better with accessibility tools like screen readers. We also added a lot of quality-of-life improvements for accessibility including additional navigation links for screen readers, improved keyboard navigation, and audio captchas on the login page.

Other changes

New advanced search fields: frame rate, orientation (portrait / landscape) and uploader
The H.264 level is now shown in the Metadata tab of the player (for new uploads)
The old and new backends now communicate and synchronize with each other, which fixes an issue where encoding jobs might not start immediately after you set up the encoder
The player page is no longer static, which means it loads faster and actions like setting workflows or switching between files can happen without a page refresh
If the player can't play back and it shows a download overlay, it shows a message to explain why it couldn't play (e.g. if "force download" was set on the file)
You can now click on the duration field of the video player to toggle time remaining
Player - Allow dot characters when seeking to timecode. Dots at the start skip that digit and make the timecode relative. Dots at the end substitute for 00. So ..10. seeks 10 seconds from the current position

You can view the full list of changes here after logging in.

Kollaborate Encoder 2.1

We also released a major new version of Kollaborate Encoder recently. New features in this version are:

WebP is now used for hoverscrub thumbnails instead of AVIF
Improved support for handling redirects when communicating with the web server
Several fixes for jobs looping unnecessarily
Overhauled the file downloader for improved speed and reliability
Minor 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).

Kollaborate Quarterly Update - Q2 2026

Tue, 26 May 2026 19:15:39 +0000

This quarter we introduced some major updates to Kollaborate on the cloud and self-hosted version.

New player and side-by-side comparison

We overhauled our video player with improved polish, new keyboard shortcuts, safe area overlays, aspect ratio mattes and the ability to speak captions or audio descriptions out loud. We also introduced new viewers for images, documents and text files.

Two files of any type can now be compared side-by-side. If they're both video/audio files the playheads will sync.

Major annotation overhaul

You can now add different shapes to an annotation including boxes, circles, arrows, and text. Shapes can easily be moved, scaled and deleted after creation, with undo and redo available. Colors are now per-shape instead of taking the comment's color.

Annotations can now be added to PDF documents too.

Organizations

Linked Accounts has been replaced with Organizations on the cloud. At the moment we're just duplicating the old Linked Accounts functionality of allowing users to create and access projects under your subscription, but we plan lots of options in future to make managing a large team with a large number of projects easier.

Coming up next

These new features are in opt-in preview, so our immediate goal is to stabilize the new features and roll them out to everyone. We've had a great response from customers and less than 1% of people who opt in end up opting out for technical or other reasons.

Some of the things we're working on are our new help center, Single Sign-On on the cloud, new workflows, and a captioning overhaul, but not all of these will launch next quarter.

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.

Kollaborate Server 2026.2.1 Beta 2 - side-by-side playback and new file viewers

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:21:55 +0000

Kollaborate Server 2026.2.1 Beta 2 was released today as a pre-release version of our self-hosted workflow platform. This builds on Beta 1 which offered a new video player and image viewer.

Side-by-side comparison

You can now load a second file alongside another. You can compare any type of file with another, but if it's the same type it will automatically sync with the other player. Video and audio will sync playheads with each other and switching which file is active will switch audio source. Image viewers will sync zoom and pan position between each other, and document viewers will sync page numbers.

This behavior is customizable via the new Sync Settings panel. You can switch off sychronization and automatic audio and comment switching.

Comments switch automatically depending on which file is active, but you can also manually change this with a new dropdown in the Comments tab.

New document viewer

The document viewer for PDFs has been overhauled and now supports full screen and annotations.

New text viewer

Overhauled player page

The player page is no longer static, which means it loads faster and actions like setting workflows or switching between files can happen without a page refresh.

Other changes

If the player can't play back and it shows a download overlay, it shows a message to explain why it couldn't play (e.g. if "force download" was set on the file)
You can now click on the duration field of the video player to toggle time remaining
Fixed an issue where some files would incorrectly appear to be unplayable
Reduced browser memory usage
Various UI and styling improvements
Lots of small bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Because it's such a large change, we're releasing this update as a beta. Although it's been extensively tested, you should expect bugs in real-world usage.

Kollaborate Server 2026.2.1 Beta 1 - major player and annotation overhaul

Wed, 1 Apr 2026 22:08:54 +0000

Kollaborate Server 2026.2.1 Beta 1 was released today as a pre-release version of our self-hosted workflow platform.

New video player and image viewer

New controls

There is now a button to skip forward 5 seconds, as well as new keyboard shortcuts comma and period for back and forward 5 secs, respectively.

The JKL keys function more like an NLE, with slow-mo support when holding K and J or L, as well as fast forward and rewind speeds up to 16x.

You can also change the playback speed separately without having to fast forward.

Switch between proxies and the original file

Better error handling

The new player is more resilient to playback or network issues. If something does go wrong, error messages are much clearer.

Accessibility

Better mobile support

The player functions better on smaller screens and touch-only devices.

Overlays

Our new player supports overlaying 4:3 and 16:9 safe areas, as well as various aspect ratio mattes.

Annotations

The biggest overhaul is to the annotation system.

Other changes

New advanced search options: frame rate, orientation (portrait / landscape) and uploader
The H.264 level is now shown in the Metadata tab of the player (for new uploads)
The old and new backends now communicate and synchronize with each other, which fixes an issue where encoding jobs might not start after you set up the encoder
Minor bug fixes and improvements

Because it's such a large change, we're releasing this update as a beta. Although it's been extensively tested, you should expect bugs in real-world usage. While we think the new player is a big step up in usability, we're interested in feedback on the new changes, especially for uncommon workflows.

Introducing Organizations to Kollaborate

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 21:47:49 +0000

We've introduced a new feature to the cloud version of Kollaborate: Organizations.

Organizations allow you to grant other users access to your subscription, replacing the old Linked Accounts feature.

To invite a user to join your organization, generate an invitation link and send it to them. Multiple users can use a single link. You can specify the permissions applied to any user with the link, but these can be changed later if needed. There are two permissions available: creating projects and accessing all projects.

We have migrated users of Linked Accounts to Organizations automatically. We tried to do a best guess of the organization name from the email domain, so we recommend visiting the Organization page and double-checking it's correct.

This is just the first step: Organizations allow us to unlock a lot of future functionality, including Single Sign-On (SSO), as well as improving the experience and customization for companies using our service.

Note: this feature is not relevant when self-hosting so it is a cloud-only feature.

Kollaborate Server 2026.1.1 - new link commenting flow, major architecture overhaul and more

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 22:30:41 +0000

Kollaborate Server 2026.1.1 is now out, with some significant changes to our self-hosted workflow platform.

New Link Commenting Flow

We've overhauled how commenting works for shared links. The order of operations is now reversed: the user enters their comment first and is then asked for their name. This improves user-friendliness and solves situations where users couldn't figure out how to enter a comment or entered their comment in the name field by mistake. This is just for the first comment; they are not asked for subsequent comments.

This is not necessary when sending emails directly from Kollaborate, as Kollaborate will assign their name as the first part of their email address.

Physical comment submit button

There is now a physical submit button for the comment box. This solves issues where some users could not work out how to submit a comment. You can still submit comments by pressing Enter.

Major architecture overhaul

We've made significant changes to how uploads and encoding jobs work behind-the-scenes, including rewriting most of our uploading code. Most of these changes are intended for the cloud and will not have noticeable effects when self-hosting, but you may notice slightly faster uploads.

New admin tool: Dangling File Locator

This tool helps you locate files that exist on disk but aren't in the database. This can occur if the file was scheduled for deletion but permissions issues prevented it from being deleted.

Improved accessibility

We've increased the contrast of some user interface controls to be more accessible, as well as improving how the site appears on screen readers. We plan more improvements in this area in future updates.

Other changes

HAProxy will now automatically restart when new LetsEncrypt certificates are ready
Thumbnails now use WebP
Fixed an issue where not all permissions may be imported when importing custom roles from another project
Fixed an issue where the duration overlay on a file's icon may not appear if the file exceeded 3 hours in duration
History / Webhooks - Fixed an issue where newlines would not be interpreted correctly in history data
Fixed an issue where captions would not be shown on-screen on mobile
Fixed an issue that could prevent deleted files being removed from disk
Fixed an issue where tags could not be added with square brackets surrounding the tag
Player - Fixed an issue where clicking the banner to download an unplayable file wouldn't work
Comments - Fixed an issue where link recipients could see buttons only relevant to logged-in users, such as Favorite and Make To-Do
Uploads - Fixed an issue where uploading a file revision may not apply scoped workflows
Webhooks - Fixed an issue where it may not send a signature for long results
Comments - Fixed an issue where changing the author filter wouldn't update the list of comments
Files - Fixed an issue causing title misalignment when opening a file in a new tab
Workflows - Added an option to view all comments when creating a share link action in a File Workflow
Trash - Fixed an issue where the page will crash if a file is deleted by a user whose account is then deleted
Sharing - Fixed an issue preventing some links from rendering
Player - Fixed an issue where PDF proxies of document files may not render in the player
Fixed an issue where aliases would not work correctly when downloading a folder as a zip file
Fixed an issue where proxies sometimes wouldn't download
Fixed an issue where files with extremely long filenames might become inaccessible after uploading
Fixed an issue causing some database passwords to not work correctly
Fixed an issue where deleting a version would delete all versions
File Deletion - Made trashing large quantities of files significantly faster
Server performance improvements
General bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate quarterly update - Q1 2026

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 01:32:15 +0000

We’re launching a new feature on this blog where we update you on the progress of Kollaborate every quarter. Because this is the first, we’re going to outline the past year and what we’re planning over the next quarter.

Over the past year we released our new Rust backend, which has allowed us to speed up and modernize many features of the site. We have gradually moved more and more features to the new backend, including file operations, viewing comments, file delivery, thumbnails, and some parts of the upload process. User-facing pages are still using the old backend but will speed up as more features are moved to the new backend.

The new backend also gives us a lot more insight into how well the service is operating, so we can respond more quickly to problems, especially problems that are region-specific and don’t affect the US where we are based.

We also added many new features including emoji comment reactions, instant file moves between projects, file tags, tagging a user in a comment, global search, template projects, saved searches, and more.

What we’ve been working on for the past five months or so is switching to a different storage provider. Unfortunately it wasn’t as simple as just swapping over a URL and required us to account for a lot of different factors than we had to with our previous provider, so this has been a long, arduous process. But we’re almost at a place where we can switch over completely, so that will happen very soon.

Part of this process involved making significant changes to how we handle uploads. We rewrote our uploader to better handle every kind of possible network condition, as well as significantly speeding up the Finishing stage. This is most noticeable on larger files, where finishing will now take 1-2 secs irrespective of file size, where before it could take minutes for a very large file. We now have lots of stats about the upload experience to help us monitor and improve it, and our new system is able to detect problems automatically and route around them.

Over the next quarter we plan to finish the storage changeover and begin to reap the benefits of switching storage providers, including faster video encoding and improved video quality. We also have other features in the pipeline, such as new workflows, better accessibility, a new help center, a new video player, and a captioning overhaul, but not all of these will launch this quarter.

Kollaborate Server 2025.3.1 - major storage and backend overhaul, encoder simplification and new permissions

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 20:51:54 +0000

Kollaborate Server 2025.3.1 and Kollaborate Encoder 2.0 have been released, with major changes to our self-hosted workflow platform for video professionals.

Storage overhaul

We've significantly changed how we store files on disk in this version. Files are no longer stored according to the project they reside in, meaning they no longer need to be moved around when moving files between projects. This has the most benefit on the cloud, but will also speed up large transfers for self-hosting too. The two versions are designed to co-exist - all new uploads will use the new format and existing files will remain in the old format but will be upgraded if moved between projects.

This does of course make it harder to downgrade to an older version, so we have provided a tool in the Admin Area to downgrade your files to the older format before reverting back to an earlier version.

More backend modernization

We've continued the work of moving away from our older PHP-based backend. In this release, file deletion, file moves, combining / splitting versions, removing proxies, and removing original files were rewritten on the new backend.

Removing original files also has the added benefit that it is no longer destructive. Instead of immediately permanently deleting the original file, it now gets split off and trashed. Although it's no longer possible to restore it back as the original file, it can be restored as a separate file if needed.

Encoder simplification

Kollaborate Encoder is much simpler to set up in this release, as it no longer requires direct access to your storage volume. This means that you no longer have to share the volume as a network volume between both servers. It will now coordinate file transfers with the web server.

New permissions

You can now control whether or not the user can leave comments on a file, so you can choose to have a user be able to view comments but not add their own.

Other changes

Color Scheme - Added a new option for the active tab background color
Upload Workflows - Support for "doesn't contain" as a match option
Admin - Added an option to disable disk size checks. This is for situations where the host OS doesn't communicate the correct file size of the storage volume to the Docker container (most often occurs on macOS).
Admin - Fixed issue preventing software update notifications from working
More descriptive error message if session Redis URL is not set
Sharing - Fixed an issue where links with an empty password could not be accessed, even if "require password" was off
Player - Make full-screen overlay use page's background color
Team - Fixed a crash if the project was not found
Print Comments - Fixed an issue where settings in the Export dialog would not be taken into account
Player - Fixed an issue where the CC button would not be highlighted when enabled
Fixed several issues causing problems when upgrading from a very old version
Sharing - Fixed an issue where clicking a user's name would produce an error page
UI - Fixed an issue where TimecodeInput wouldn't work with drop frame timecode
Workflows - Fixed an issue where users may not be able to approve files in the project root if they were non-admins added to another department
Projects - Fixed an issue where deleting a template project would not remove it from the list
Emails - Prevent digest emails from showing files that have been deleted
Player - Update the workflow dropdown when approving or rejecting a file
Projects - Fixed a crash when trying to modify a project that had been deleted
Player - Don't show users who can't access that department in the Unviewed section of the player
API - Don't allow comments to be inserted earlier than the start timecode
Team - Fixed an issue where activation link checkbox wasn't working
Projects - Fixed user count in table being inaccurate
Workflows - Fixed an issue where users would be unable to approve a file
Email - Fixed an issue where shared links might have their URLs corrupted
Player - Fixed an issue preventing large files being attached to comments
Files - Align titles irrespective of whether the file is unviewed
UI - Fixed an issue where some icons would not adopt the page's text color
Files - Fixed an issue where thumbnails may show file duration 1 second longer than it really is
Fixed an issue where folders created by the new backend could have the wrong owner
Fixed various issues with information not being copied across to aliases
Timecode - Fix issue where comment timecode would drift over time
Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Server 2025.2.1 released with emoji comment reactions

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 21:05:59 +0000

We've just released Kollaborate Server 2025.2.1, a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform for video professionals.

The big new feature in this version is emoji comment reactions. Now you can add extra context to a comment by acknowledging it with a thumbs-up, or simply laughing at a joke. We support all modern emojis so you're not limited in the reactions you can choose.

We've also modernized the commenting system and comments are now being delivered by our new backend, which should make them much faster to load than before.

Comment exporting has options allowing you to choose the file encoding, which can help with issues importing certain characters into older apps, but the default of UTF-8 will suffice for the majority of cases.

We've added a new option to export comments to a blank slug in an FCP 7 XML file, which makes exporting into Premiere Pro easier. To import using this method, import the XML file into Premiere and place the slug on your timeline on a track above the content. You can then disable the track or hide the slug to see the content below, while still being able to access the markers. This is an alternative to using our Marker Import app and round-tripping an XML of your entire project. However, despite the existence of this feature, our recommended method of importing markers into Premiere Pro remains to use our Premiere panel.

You can view the full list of changes here after logging in.

There is also a new update to Kollaborate Encoder with minor bug fixes and improvements to burning in watermarks.

Kollaborate 2025.1 now live on the cloud

Sun, 6 Apr 2025 18:10:11 +0000

We've just launched a major Kollaborate update with significant changes. To minimize disruption, we are making it opt-in for now and will gradually roll it out to everyone.

Note that if you're opted in but your colleagues are not, you may have access to features they do not. For example, if you grant a user permission to modify others' files, they will only be able to modify them if they are also opted in. This will become less of a problem as more users are opted in, but you may prefer to manually opt in your entire team at the same time.

File Tags

Add tags to files to give them new context. Click on a tag to view all other files with this tag.

Tags are also integrated with Workflows. You can have an Upload Workflow automatically add tags to a file if it meets certain criteria (e.g. adding a "vfx" tag if certain terms appear in its filename). File Workflows can add tags that can disappear when the file is assigned a different workflow, which is great for adding context-specific tags.

Tag Users in Comments

You can now tag a user in a comment to get their attention by pressing the @ key. (Chrome and Firefox only)

Global Search

Trying to find a file but don't know what project it's in? Global Search allows you to locate files wherever they exist.

Template Projects

Template projects can be created with teams, folder structures, saved searches and tasks. You can then create a new project from this template and these elements will be automatically created in the new project.

View by Last Comment

A custom column is available on the Files page to sort by the date of the last comment on a file.

There is also a filter to show files with unviewed comments (i.e. comments added since you last viewed the file), which is very useful for cutting through the noise on a big project and getting to the information you need faster.

Search and Sort by Duration

There is an optional Duration column that can be added to the Files page for sorting, and you can also search by duration.

Update Hold Timecode

There is now a button in the comments tab next to the timecode display to set it to the current playhead position. This is useful if you start typing elsewhere and need to correct where the comment will be inserted.

Higher quality thumbnails

Thumbnails have been upgraded to be double the size.

Saved Searches

Searches can now be turned into filters by saving them.

New Permissions

We've added new permissions: modifying others' files and modifying others' comments. This allows you to grant users control over others' resources without having to make them an admin.

Additionally, links now have the option to make the transcript viewable to recipients.

User Interface Improvements

This isn't a full UI redesign (that's being worked on) but we've updated the color scheme, icons, fonts and made other UI tweaks. This includes new user interface controls for thumbnails, timecode and copying text.

Backend Overhaul

Kollaborate's backend has been significantly improved and modernized, providing security, reliability and performance improvements. Currently the old and new backends coexist and the majority of the user-facing areas are still on the old backend, but we plan significant performance improvements as we switch more things to the new backend.

Deprecations / Removals

The Favorites page has been removed from the user dropdown. Please use the filters on the Files and player pages to filter by favorites.

Custom file permissions have been removed. Please use departments to control access to files.

The App Storage section of My Private Files has been deprecated and will be removed in a future version.

Synced Sessions have been deprecated and will be removed in a future version. We remain committed to solving this problem but plan to do so in a different way in future.

Other Changes

History can be exported to CSV
Download the current frame as an image
Require Multi-Factor Authentication before accessing a project
Player - Improved JKL key behavior to be more in line with NLEs
Files - New filters: Uploaded by Me and Uploaded by Others
File rename events are now stored in history
File move events for each individual file are stored in history when moving a folder
New file browser offers better performance for large projects
Show link users when a comment is marked as "to-do" or "done"
Sharing - Show search bar on folder links
Comment Export - Fixed an issue where exporting comments from a group of files would produce the error "No comments to export" if one of them didn't have comments
Files - Fixed an issue where it would be difficult to tell if color-coded files were selected

Kollaborate Server 2025.1.1 - major backend overhaul, performance and security improvements, and much more

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 21:08:37 +0000

We've just released a major new update for Kollaborate Server, our self-hosted workflow platform for pro video.

New version number format

The first thing you'll notice is that we're now numbering versions by the current year, the major version number for this year, and a minor version number.

New backend

We've replaced Apache with our own custom web server. This provides performance, security and robustness improvements. Our plan is to eventually rewrite all of the PHP code on the site with the new system. As of right now, file streaming, downloads, heatmaps, captchas, some parts of the upload cycle, some background operations, and some file operations are using the new backend, with the rest being forwarded to the old backend.

So both backends currently coexist and we had to completely reimplement user login sessions to work with both systems at the same time, which now make use of Redis Stack Server. If you have a non-Docker installation you'll need to install Redis Stack Server - see the Installation Guide for details on how to do this.

Automatic upgrades

No more having to visit /upgrade and run the upgrader manually. Upgrades will now happen automatically when Kollaborate Server launches.

Security / traffic management

We've added several security and traffic management features to increase the availability of your site under load or malicious abuse. Kollaborate Server will now shed load at times of extremely high traffic, which can help mitigate DDOS attacks. It will also rate limit requests and return an error if a user makes too many requests too quickly.

You may have seen lots of 404 errors in your logs for URLs that don't exist like /wp-admin. They are users scanning for vulnerabilities (Kollaborate does not use these technologies and is not vulnerable to these issues). Those users are now automatically banned for 3 days or until the server is relaunched. This setting can be switched off if desired - see the Installation Guide for more details.

Automatic database backups

Kollaborate Server will now periodically backup your database, including before a database upgrade.

Synced Sessions deprecated

The Synced Sessions feature has been deprecated and will be removed in a future update. We remain committed to solving this issue in the long-term, but plan to solve it in a different way.

Favorites page removed

The Favorites page has been removed. Please use the filters on the Files / player pages to filter favorites.

Easier setting of maximum uploaded file size

It's now much easier to set the maximum uploadable file size - just edit max_upload_size_gb in server_config.toml.

Update notification

Kollaborate Server now checks for updates automatically and will show an icon to let you know that an update is available.

There are lots of additional changes - see the release notes for more details. We're excited to take this big step with our new backend and we welcome feedback about the changes.

Kollaborate Server 2025.1.1 Beta 1 - new backend with significant performance, security and robustness improvements

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 06:31:30 +0000

We've just released a major new update for Kollaborate Server, our self-hosted workflow platform for pro video. This version is beta due to the number of major changes involved.

New version number format

The first thing you'll notice is that we're now numbering versions by the current year, the major version number for this year, and a minor version number.

New backend

We've replaced Apache with our own custom web server. This provides performance, security and robustness improvements. Our plan is to eventually rewrite all of the PHP code on the site with the new system. As of right now, file streaming, downloads, heatmaps, captchas, some parts of the upload cycle, and some file operations are using the new backend, with the rest being forwarded to the old backend.

Automatic upgrades

No more having to visit /upgrade and run the upgrader manually. Upgrades will now happen automatically when Kollaborate Server launches.

Security / traffic management

Automatic database backups

Kollaborate Server will now periodically backup your database, including before a database upgrade.

Synced Sessions deprecated

The Synced Sessions feature has been deprecated and will be removed in a future update. We remain committed to solving this issue in the long-term, but plan to solve it in a different way.

Easier setting of maximum uploaded file size

It's now much easier to set the maximum uploadable file size - just edit max_upload_size_gb in server_config.toml.

Update notification

Kollaborate Server now checks for updates automatically and will show an icon to let you know that an update is available.

There are lots of additional changes - see the release notes for more details. We're excited to take this big step with our new backend and we welcome feedback about the changes.

What we're planning for Kollaborate in 2025

Fri, 3 Jan 2025 20:40:21 +0000

We’ve become aware that Kollaborate’s existing architecture makes certain features hard to deliver, so after considering all available options we recently embarked on a Rust rewrite of the backend.

The benefits of rewriting in Rust are improved performance, increased reliability, greater efficiency / better use of resources,
and much greater control of the overall experience. We have focused so far on areas where a lot of data was being processed, such as delivering media files and thumbnails, as well as downloading a folder as a zip file, and have seen noticeable performance increases.

Some of the features the new backend will eventually enable are a public API (for self-hosting), background file transfers, and WebDAV support, among many others. For self-hosted customers, it will also eventually offer simpler licensing and an openly-accessible trial version. We have also laid the groundwork for a lot of features that we will enable once we are less reliant on the old backend. We’re still working on rewriting backend parts in Rust, but when we’re ready to start converting user-facing areas of the site we will be conducting a big UI overhaul.

This project will take a long time to complete, but we’ve structured it in such a way that the old and new backends can run concurrently and we can switch features over to the new version as and when they become available. We will be releasing a preview version soon for self-hosted customers and will be rolling it out to the cloud in the next couple of months.

Kollaborate Server 3.9.1 released with Annoucements feature

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 22:01:01 +0000

Kollaborate Server 3.9.1 is now out, which is mainly a bug fix release but has some small new features.

Announcements

You can now add banners to the top of pages to communicate information to users. This could be information like tutorials or details about scheduled maintenance. You can add site-wide banners or just add them to specific pages. Banners support HTML input so you can add styling and URLs to banners.

Additionally, you can choose to add a full-page announcement to users upon their next login. This will show a page that they need to click past to get to the Projects page. This page will only appear once for users.

Announcements can be accessed from the Tools page in the Admin Area.

Share Dropdown

Clicking Share under the player now gives you a choice between sharing a new link or viewing existing links to a file, instead of creating a new link immediately.

The remaining changes are bug fixes and the full list of changes can be viewed here after logging in. There is also a corresponding Kollaborate Encoder 1.8.1 update that is required for compatibility with this Kollaborate Server version.

Kollaborate Server 3.9 - File Tags, Global Search, Comment Tagging, View by Last Comment and more

Mon, 9 Sep 2024 21:52:34 +0000

A new major version of our self-hosted Kollaborate Server software is here, with many new features. Our goal in this update was expanding productivity by adding features that allow you to find what you're looking for faster.

File Tags

Add tags to files to give them new context. Click on a tag to view all other files with this tag.

There are additional filters added to the Files page for viewing files with or without tags, which is useful for finding untagged files when you're tagging your entire project.

We've been testing this feature internally for a while and I can't overstate just how much of a game-changer file tags have been for my own projects.

Global Search

Need to find a file but don't know which project it's in? Global Search allows you to locate files in all projects you can access.

Comment Tagging

Team members can now tag other users in comments to get their attention and there is a new option in notification settings for managing mention alerts.

View by Last Comment

There is an optional Last Comment column that can be added to the Files page, allowing you to sort by the date of the most recent comment. There is also a filter on the Files page for files with unread comments (i.e. comments added since you last viewed the file). This filter is extremely useful for quickly catching up to activity on a large project.

New File Browser

We've created a new file browser which greatly improves performance over the old one, especially for very large projects.

Search and Sort by Duration

Advanced searches can now take into account the duration of a file, and a new Duration column can optionally be added to the Files table for sorting by duration.

Update Hold Timecode

When typing during playback, the comment area will "hold" the current timecode position. You can now move the playhead elsewhere, click the button next to the timecode and have it update to the new position.

Many more changes

Other changes include:

Admin - Added a new Rebuild Caches tool
Player - Hold is now reset if the user has only whitespace in the comment field
Files - Allow filenames to span two lines if no status is set on the file
Comments - Show link users when a comment is marked as "to-do" or "done"
Uploaded AVIF images are now correctly recognized as images instead of generic files
Saved Searches - Editing a saved search no longer requires you to do a Save As under the same name - now just click the Update button
Projects - Project admins can now edit project tags
Docker - Improved proxy performance
Docker - Updated to Ubuntu 24.04
UI - Overhauled multiple interface controls, most notably checkboxes, which now behave more consistently
UI - Navigation links can now have sublinks for more easily locating important pages
Alerts - Added a new alert when a file is uploaded to a File Request link
Encoding - If more than one proxy type is set up and the workflow is set to remove the original file, the original file is removed only for the first proxy
Sharing - Show name of link instead of original folder name to link recipients
Sharing - Shared links are now removed when a file is moved between projects
Player - Filters and searches are taken into account when showing the Next / Previous buttons
UI - Show total storage space for all projects the user can access in the page footer (before this amount was project-relative)
Sharing - Show search bar on folder links
Permissions - Update terminology to clarify that the "access" permission corresponds to viewing others' files
Uploads - Fixed an issue that was preventing uploads with matching filenames from automatically being placed in version stacks
Uploads - Fixed thumbnail stretching on email alerts for file request links
Player - Fixed an issue where video may be pillarboxed on wide displays
Projects - Fixed an issue where deleting a project and then creating one with the same name would say the project still exists
Sharing - Fixed an issue where Quick Share settings may not save when Quick Share is initiated from the player page
Files - Fixed an issue where moving an empty folder might inadvertently move additional files
Files - Fixed an issue where deleting a department with only an empty folder inside could delete additional files
Encoding - Fixed an issue where encoding profile might not be sent to encoder
Uploads - Bitrate now specifies Mbits instead of Mb, for clarity
Uploads - Fixed filesize / bitrate being the wrong way around
Files - Fixed an issue where making a change that causes a version stack item to update would incorrectly collapse the stack
Trash - Fixed an issue where trash size would not be automatically updated when clearing out the trash automatically
Tasks - Fixed an issue where editing or deleting a task could show an error
Various UI tweaks and improvements
General bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Server 3.8 - Single Sign-On, UI refresh, new permissions, template projects, custom encoding profiles and more

Thu, 4 Jul 2024 21:31:26 +0000

We've just released Kollaborate Server 3.8, a major update to our self-hosted workflow and collaboration platform.

Single-Sign On (Preview)

Kollaborate Server now supports Single-Sign On (SSO), allowing enterprise users to have logins handled by a third-party authentication provider. When logging in with the identity provider, Kollaborate will link the login to any user accounts that already exist with that email address or otherwise create the account transparently in the background.

In order to facilitate this we have completely redesigned the login page. It is now simpler, more consistent and more reliable.

UI Refresh

We've changed the UI theme to be darker and added new icons and fonts. There are far too many changes to document, but some include relocating the user dropdown to the sidebar, new interface controls, and improvements to the layout of the player page.

Higher-quality thumbnails

Thumbnail images are now displayed at a higher resolution. In order to facilitate this we've completely redesigned how we display thumbnails, resulting in numerous improvements including more consistent handling of non-16:9 frame sizes.

To convert your existing thumbnails, use the option to regenerate thumbnails for all files in the Tools page of the Admin Area.

New permissions

We've added two new user permissions: modifying others' files and modifying others' comments. This allows users to interact with others' assets without needing to be an admin.

Saved Searches

Advanced Searches can be saved and will appear as filters on the Files page.

(Note that we recommend saved searches are limited to the current folder in most cases. Searching the entire project should only be used for specific use-cases because it can be confusing to users when the filter is applied while navigating into subfolders.)

Template Projects

Create template projects that can be used to copy settings when creating new projects. The data that can be stored in a template are folder structures, saved searches, departments, team, tasks and workflows.

Custom Encoding Profiles

The encoding settings used by Kollaborate Encoder can be modified, allowing you to change bitrate, frame size and other settings. This requires Kollaborate Encoder 1.8 and can be set from the Admin Area of the webserver.

Note that while you can have Kollaborate Encoder create multiple proxies of different frame sizes, that is of limited utility right now because there is no way to switch between them and Kollaborate will always just play the highest-quality proxy. This will be more useful with features we are planning in future.

Other Changes:

In-progress uploads are now stored on the storage volume instead of inside the webserver container. This solves issues if the webserver has limited storage space, with the added bonus of making the finishing stage much faster
Admin - Overhauled the UI of the Tools page
History is now shown in the project navigation bar to increase accessibility of this feature
Upgrader - Database tables / columns that already exist are now ignored. This can solve issues where you may have ended up with a partial upgrade
Admin - Added the ability to hide the Help link at the bottom of the page
Player - Improved JKL key behavior to be more in line with NLEs
Files - New filters: Uploaded by Me and Uploaded by Others
Files - Only allow those with file modification permissions to manually set a file's workflow
Custom file permissions feature has been removed. Please use departments to manage file access
File rename events are now stored in history
File move events for each individual file are stored in history when moving a folder
History - Better support for accented user names
Player - Original file extension is shown in the Metadata pane
Files - Added the ability to import comments, metadata and captions by right-clicking a file on the Files page
Upload Workflows - Fixed an issue where workflows set to the project root wouldn't apply inside departments
Files - Fixed an issue where renaming a file and leaving the name unchanged would show an alert that the file already exists
Files - Fixed an issue where it may exit file renaming unexpectedly if you rename immediately after uploading
API - Fixed an issue where special characters in a folder name could cause duplicate folders to be created
API - Fixed a crash when special characters exist in file title
Advanced Search - Fixed an issue where "has versions" parameter wouldn't return results
Files - Fixed an issue where version count wouldn't update when combining a new version
Projects - Fixed controls overlapping long project descriptions
Tasks - Fixed an issue where history description could be garbled
Files - Upload speed is now shown in Mb/s
Many small fixes and tweaks

Kollaborate Server 3.7 - new pricing, major architectural overhaul, trash, UI improvements and more

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 22:39:28 +0000

Kollaborate Server 3.7 is a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform with thousands of code changes, mainly on the backend, to modernize and improve reliability. It also contains many new features, bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements.

PHP 8.1 and MariaDB

This version updates PHP to version 8.1 and uses MariaDB instead of MySQL, both of which improve performance.

Trash

Deleting a file now moves it to the Trash, which can be accessed at the bottom of the screen.

Project admins can restore or empty the trash, otherwise those files will be removed automatically after 30 days.

User interface improvements

New controls for entering timecode and copying text.

Color and theme changes

Many optimizations to theming, including better support for light-colored interfaces. (You may need to rebuild your custom theme from the Tools section of the Admin Area for it to display correctly in this version.)

User administration

View stats for a user, such as the projects they are part of and how many files they have uploaded.

You can now suspend users, preventing them from using the site but keeping their files, comments, etc, intact.

Comment importing improvements

You can now map timecode, author and comment to specific columns within a CSV, as well as getting the author name from the file if the format supports it.

Comments can be imported and exported as TSV (Tab-Separated Values).

Require MFA

You can now require the user to have Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) activated before they can access a project. Edit a project to switch this option on.

There are many more changes and fixes; view the full list here.

Updated pricing

We've overhauled our pricing. Kollaborate Encoder is significantly cheaper and we've added new low-end packages with lower user counts to reduce the barrier to entry for smaller companies. (Existing customers are grandfathered into their old packages.)

At the current time of writing, we're offering a Black Friday Sale with 30% off all packages. This sale lasts through Cyber Monday (November 27th 2023).

If you'd like to try out Kollaborate Server before buying, please contact us for a trial.

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, register for the free cloud trial or contact us for a server trial.

Kollaborate 3.7 Beta 1 - major architectural overhaul, PHP 8.1 and MariaDB support, and more

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 20:26:18 +0000

Kollaborate Server 3.7 Beta 1 is now out. This version has a few new user-facing features but the biggest change is a signficant architectural overhaul. It has thousands of backend improvements and several key components have been rewritten. These changes improve reliability, customization and performance.

This version has been well tested and we're not aware of any issues, but we've given it a beta label due to the sheer number of changes that occurred.

We now support PHP 8.1 which provides performance improvements. The Docker images now use MariaDB instead of MySQL, which also improves database performance. Please note that the Docker image is configured to convert the database to your MariaDB version automatically. As such, we would recommend backing up the database before upgrading as you may be unable to downgrade otherwise.

On the feature side of things, link recipients can now view captions, while history can be filtered and exported to a CSV file from the History page for a project.

We've also made numerous small UI changes including new interface controls for interacting with timecode, copying links and displaying thumbnails.

Some deprecated features have now been removed from the site: namely the App Storage section and Python scripting.

Kollaborate Server 3.6.2 - batch export comments and captions, download frame as image, and more

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 19:08:44 +0000

We've just released Kollaborate Server 3.6.2, a minor update to our self-hosted file sharing and workflow management system.

The main features in this update are batch exporting of comments and captions, downloading of the current playback frame as an image, the option to import folder structures from an existing project when creating a new one, the option to search for a file by its age, and various user interface improvements.

Server-Specific Changes

Added LimitRequestBody to .htaccess file for compatibility with recent versions of Apache
Fixed an issue where avatars could not be uploaded
Admin - Workflows - Fixed an issue where file workflows may not be editable
Admin - Roles - Fixed a crash when deleting a role

Other Changes

Comments - New comment design that is more space-efficient on narrower screens
Files - Support for batch exporting captions and comments
Player - Allow downloading the current frame as an image
Projects - Added the ability to import folder structures from an existing project when creating a new one
Advanced Search - Add option to search by age in days
Preview - Remember previous volume setting for quick look previews
Share - Added 21 day expiration option
Metadata - Add extra frame rates to list on Edit Metadata page
Transcript - Made caption overlap checking less strict
Player - Show Actions button on mobile
Player - Prompt before deleting comment annotations and attachments
UI - Better support for popups on mobile screens
Player - Comments and transcripts are no longer refreshed when the browser tab is not visible
Files - Limit number of emails sent when a batch of files is moved at once
Files - Prevent text box clicks from navigating to files/ folders when renaming
Files - Prevent the rename textbox from appearing multiple times if the file is already being renamed
Player - Improved the accuracy of timecode shown when hovering above play bar
Captions - Fixed an issue where Premiere couldn't import SRTs and improved caption timing accuracy in general
Comments - Fixed an issue where the first Davinci Resolve marker wouldn't be imported
Download Folder - Fixed an issue preventing link recipients from downloading folders
Files - Better logic for detecting the correct frame rate of a video if multiple frame rates are returned
Files - Fixed an issue where renaming a version in a version stack would not reload the file correctly
Files - Fixed an issue where a numeric filename like "1.20" could be shortened to "1.2"
Player - Fixed a crash if reviewers are not accessible
Player - Fixed a crash if user tries to view a file after the project has been deleted
Adobe Panel - Various bug fixes and changes to how information is displayed
UI - Various minor interface tweaks
Various small bug fixes, optimizations and code modernizations

Kollaborate Server 3.6.1 - Copy direct links to comments, import markers from CSV and more

Thu, 19 May 2022 05:46:14 +0000

We've just released Kollaborate Server 3.6.1, a minor update to our self-hosted file sharing and workflow management system.

Server-Specific Changes

Hardened default security settings
The default installer password has been changed (only affects new installations)
Admin Dashboard - An encoding job is now considered unassigned if the server has been removed or is offline
Admin - Number of available encoding licenses is now shown on Servers page

Other Changes

Player - All admins can now remove original files / proxies, not just the file's owner
Comments - Right-click a comment and choose Copy Direct Link to copy a direct link to that comment. To send to someone outside the project, create a shared link as normal, then visit that link and copy the comment link from the player.
Comments - Markers can now be imported from a CSV file (Timecode, Author, Comment format)
Player - The maximum height of a vertical video is now dependent upon your screen size, to ensure it's always visible
Files - Even though it is valid for a URL to contain an exclamation mark, some email apps interpret it as punctuation and mangle pasted folder URLs. This has now been prevented.
Sharing - The default link name is now the title of the file
Tasks - Various fixes for importing tasks from a CSV file
Password Reset - Fixed an incompatibility with users with special characters in their email addresses
Sharing - Fixed an issue where share link connection could be lost when an error appears on the screen
Encoding Servers - Follow redirects when communicating with servers
Files - More robust support for getting a file's frame rate
Player - Ensured download info box is still visible on small size videos
Various small bug fixes, optimizations and code modernizations

Digital Rebellion products are not vulnerable to the Log4j exploit

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 23:21:44 +0000

We've had some enquiries from customers about the Log4j vulnerability currently causing havoc across the internet. Log4j is a Java library and none of our products or backend processes use Java. Therefore, none of our products, including customers' self-hosted Kollaborate Server installations, are affected by this security flaw. (Self-hosted customers could still be vulnerable if they run other software on their servers that uses Log4j.)

Kollaborate Server 3.6 - direct SMTP email sending, customize default workflows and more

Wed, 8 Dec 2021 21:13:50 +0000

Kollaborate Server 3.6 is out now - a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform.

Direct SMTP email sending

Kollaborate Server can now send emails directly using a user-supplied SMTP server, which is much more user-friendly than the old system utilizing Postfix. If you were using Postfix with a previous version, you will need to add your SMTP server information in the Configure page of the Admin Area to resume sending emails with version 3.6.

Your email provider will be able to supply information about connecting to their SMTP servers, or alternatively you can use Gmail or Amazon SES. Note that if you have two-factor authentication switched on with your email provider, you will likely need to set up an App-Specific Password for Kollaborate Server; your provider will be able to provide more details on this if it is necessary.

This is now our recommended way of sending emails from Kollaborate Server so we are also deprecating the Email Routing subscription service. This service will shut down in March 2022 (the exact date depends on your billing renewal date) and we have contacted affected customers about this directly. To avoid disruption, customers should upgrade to 3.6 and setup their SMTP information before the shutdown date.

Customize Default Workflows

The default workflows added automatically when creating a new project can now be customized from the Admin Area. Setup rules for automatically color coding files or complex approval chains that will be applied when the project is created.

(It should be noted that actions requiring specific files (such as adding a watermark image) cannot be set in default workflows as those files won't exist in new projects.)

Codec and track information in player

The Metadata tab in the player now shows information about the video codec of the original file and the audio track configuration. This information will not show for older files but will be gathered for all files uploaded from now on.

Set language on a per-file basis

The audio language setting is used to determine which caption language to show by default. Previously this could only be set on a project-wide basis but now can be overriden for specific files. This can be done from the Edit Metadata page.

Other Changes

Admin Dashboard - Only calculate average encoding time for files from the last 24 hours
Admin Dashboard - Fixed an issue where clearing the render queue doesn't requeue jobs correctly
Admin Dashboard - Added the ability to clear failed encoding jobs only
Fixed an issue where errors wouldn't be shown when creating a new user from the Admin interface
Roles has been moved to the main navigation bar in the Admin Area
You can now override the "From" name shown in emails from the Configure page (by default it is the site's name)
Uploads - Show remaining upload count in page title
History - Show file move events on the History page
Share - Show the file upload link's description to users when uploading
Player - Added n / p shortcut keys to go to next / previous file
Fixed an issue causing potential conflicts with similar folder names
Files - Various page performance improvements when navigating and uploading files
Files - Fixed strange behavior when interacting with a file immediately after upload (e.g. favoriting or Quick Look)
Player - Disabled browser player download button on mobile
Files - Fixed page scrolling unnecessarily when dragging in files to upload
Player - Fixed an error when subscribing / unsubscribing to a file
Various minor fixes, code modernizations and refactorings

Kollaborate Server 3.5 - Security improvements, massive overhaul, extra admin tools

Thu, 8 Apr 2021 17:52:20 +0000

Kollaborate Server 3.5 was released last week - a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform.

As well as a massive under-the-hood overhaul, it introduces the following new features:

Security improvements

For improved security and privacy, we're now encrypting parts of the database. This happens automatically when running the upgrader for this release. Encryption keys are stored in config/keys.php and you will need to backup this file if you reinstall or move to a different server otherwise the database will be unreadable.

New admin tools

We've added new tools to the Admin Area to easily export a backup of the database, manage the number of days files remain in the trash and regenerate thumbnails if they are missing.

Project tags

You can now add tags to projects to categorize them, such as "in-progress" or tagging them with the name of the client. Clicking on a tag shows you other projects with that tag.

Multi-speed fast forward and rewind

Press J, K or L multiple times to increase or decrease rewind / fast forward speeds.

Edit custom department names

Department names can now be edited after they are created. Previously you would have to remove and re-add the department under a different name.

More export options

Captions can now be exported to CSV and comments can be exported to Reaper.

Kollaborate 3.5 - major under-the-hood overhaul, project tags and more

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 19:37:36 +0000

We recently released Kollaborate 3.5, a major update to our cloud workflow platform.

Major overhaul

While the site may look largely the same as before, under-the-hood it's actually a massive rewrite of large parts of the code, with a focus on improving performance and reliability.

There are over 4000 changes in this update, which amounts to about a two-thirds rewrite of the entire backend. The remaining third will be taken care of in future updates. This version improves performance, but we'll be able to take performance improvements even further once that final third is rewritten.

New features

While this version was primarily intended as an infrastructure update, not a feature update, there are a few small new features:

Project tags

You can now add tags to projects to categorize them, such as "in-progress" or tagging them with the name of the client. Clicking on a tag shows you other projects with that tag.

Multi-speed fast forward and rewind

Press J, K or L multiple times to increase or decrease rewind / fast forward speeds.

Edit custom department names

Department names can now be edited after they are created. Previously you would have to remove and re-add the department under a different name.

Auto-transcription for French

French-language audio can now be automatically transcribed from the Transcript tab of the player.

More export options

Captions can now be exported to CSV and comments can be exported to Reaper.

Kollaborate Server 3.1 - Modify default roles, folder downloading, heatmaps, task tags and more

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 07:36:31 +0000

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 transcription improvements

Wed, 2 Sep 2020 18:40:36 +0000

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 3.1 - Heatmaps, folder downloading, task tags and more

Thu, 20 Aug 2020 07:27:01 +0000

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

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

Quick Share

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

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 Server 3.0.3 - improved Docker integration and bug fixes

Wed, 20 May 2020 18:00:35 +0000

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 Server 3.0.2 - improved Docker integration and backend polish

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 18:38:30 +0000

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 Server 3.0.2 pre-release available with improved Docker integration

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 07:30:00 +0000

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 Server 3.0.1 - Docker integration, hide comments, file pinning and more

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 20:01:44 +0000

Last week we released Kollaborate Server 3.0.1 - a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform.

Docker integration

Both Kollaborate Server and Kollaborate Encoder are now integrated with Docker, allowing them to be run in a container. We know some of our customers in the past had difficulty getting everything setup, so integrating with Docker allows for considerably simpler and faster installation.

In the next update, we are planning to make the software Linux-only, so Docker will become the only way to run the software on a Mac or Windows computer. For now, customers on macOS/Windows can use the latest version on their existing installations but will need to switch over to Docker in order to use the next version. We recommend all new installations on macOS / Windows to be via Docker. (Linux users have the choice of installing manually or via Docker.)

For more information on the Docker integration and converting an existing installation to use Docker, see the installation guide.

Hide comments from certain users

You can now choose to hide others' comments when creating a link or when editing permissions for a team member. This means the person can only view comments they made and replies to those comments.

File pinning

Pinning a file or folder makes sure it always displays at the top of the Files page, regardless of how files are sorted. This can be useful to highlight important files to your team.

Mark as Viewed / Unviewed

You can now manually mark a file as viewed or unviewed by you.

Better searching

Advanced Search now populates your current search when you go back to it, so it can be edited or tweaked.

Additionally, we've added new criteria for you to search against: Tag Value, Is Pinned, Version Title, Status Text, File Workflow, Color, Is Alias, Viewed by Me.

SVG logos

You can now upload your company logo as an SVG. Vector SVGs are now our recommended logo format to ensure your logo always looks crisp regardless of screen size or DPI.

Task improvements

Task descriptions are now optional and tasks no longer have to have a due date.

Higher quality encoding beta

We're testing new encoding settings that both improve quality and lower file size, at the expense of compatibility with very old devices (>8 years old). Higher quality encoding can be enabled on a per-user basis by visiting http://[your site]/beta .

Kollaborate 3.0.1 - Hide comments from certain users, file pinning, higher quality encoding and more

Thu, 5 Dec 2019 17:43:38 +0000

Kollaborate 3.0.1 is now live on the cloud. Here's what's new:

Hide comments from certain users

You can now choose to hide others' comments when creating a link or when editing permissions for a team member. This means the person can only view comments they made and replies to those comments.

File pinning

Pinning a file or folder makes sure it always displays at the top of the Files page, regardless of how files are sorted. This can be useful to highlight important files to your team.

Mark as Viewed / Unviewed

You can now manually mark a file as viewed or unviewed by you.

Better searching

Advanced Search now populates your current search when you go back to it, so it can be edited or tweaked.

Additionally, we've added new criteria for you to search against: Tag Value, Is Pinned, Version Title, Status Text, File Workflow, Color, Is Alias, Viewed by Me.

SVG logos

You can now upload your company logo as an SVG. Vector SVGs are now our recommended logo format to ensure your logo always looks crisp regardless of screen size or DPI.

Task improvements

Task descriptions are now optional and tasks no longer have to have a due date.

Higher quality encoding beta

When we first launched the site in 2013, the biggest factor affecting viewing experience was CPU processing power - even on desktop computers - so our proxies are optimized to decode quickly and not cause the CPU to spike too much.

However, since then devices and browsers have become much more optimized at playing video. If we sacrifice some compatibility with very old devices (such as the iPad 2 from 2011) we can produce better quality video at lower file sizes.

Because it only affects devices that are 8 or so years old, we're not expecting it to have a big compatibility impact, but we're running it as a beta just in case. You can opt in to the beta here.

Better technical data gathering

A feature that's not visible to users is much better logging of technical data at our end. This allows us to respond better to usage spikes, errors and fine-tune the site to ensure everything stays fast. We have plans to optimize things even further over the next few months.

Kollaborate Server 3.0 - redesigned UI, Documents, Transcripts, Servers page and more

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 06:00:00 +0000

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 3.0 - AI transcription, new UI, Documents, customizable file columns and more

Thu, 11 Jul 2019 18:27:45 +0000

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

Documents

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

Advanced Search

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

Comment attachments

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

Introducing Kollaborate Server Manager (Beta)

Wed, 13 Mar 2019 21:21:48 +0000

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.

Digital Rebellion at NAB 2019

Tue, 12 Mar 2019 17:36:14 +0000

We're pleased to announce that we will be exhibiting at NAB this year, from April 8th-11th 2019. We will be located in the Lower South Hall at booth SL15205.

We will be showcasing a preview of Kollaborate 3.0, a major update to our cloud workflow platform with lots of new, exciting and powerful features to improve your workflow and make it easier to coordinate with your colleagues and clients.

Use our guest pass code LV3792 to get free access to the exhibit hall (must be redeemed before March 25th).

Kollaborate Server 2.7.3 and Kollaborate Encoder 1.3.1 - encoding progress, inline renaming, audio playheads and more

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 19:20:00 +0000

Kollaborate Server 2.7.3 adds lots of new features and fixes to our self-hosted workflow platform, along with a corresponding update for Kollaborate Encoder.

Inline renaming

Renaming a file no longer launches a dialog box or takes you to a different page - it now happens directly in the Files view. This is a better user experience and matches what you would expect in Finder or Windows Explorer.Â

Audio playheads

Audio files now show a playhead over their waveform, allowing you to easily skip to specific points in the file.Â

Dynamic dates

Dates on comments and files now update dynamically to ensure they are accurate without needing to reload the page - i.e. instead of saying "just now" until you hit refresh, it will now say "x minutes ago" automatically depending on how much time has elapsed.

You can also click on a date on a file or comment to toggle between relative and absolute dates.

File browsing improvements

File titles dynamically resize so you can view longer titles
Creating new folders or aliases no longer reloads the page
Sorting columns no longer reloads the page
Added F shortcut key for favoriting files
Departments now show size and last modified date and can be sorted by this information
Right-clicking two or more files now reveals a Combine Versions option
Entering a folder after searching now continues the search inside that folder
Quick Look - Improved the UI of folder previews - scroll to see files in the folder, click on a file to view it in the player

UI changes

We've made lots of user interface improvements including new button styles and a new avatar style with a greater range of colors.Â

Other changes

Server-specific features

Added a tool to the Tools page in the admin area to regenerate the scheduled tasks (useful if you upgrade MAMP and your PHP path changes)
The Installer now automatically checks if your Apache AllowOverride setting is correct
A message is now shown at the top of the site when a new version has been installed but the database hasn't been upgraded
More button style options on the Customize Colors page

Full changelog:

Alerts - Project titles are now mentioned in alert emails where appropriate
Alerts - Fixed an issue where digests would show alerts for folders moved to a user's department
API - Fixed an issue where workflows added during upload wouldn't execute
Comments - Updates dates dynamically and you can now toggle between relative / absolute
Comments - Show error if the user has been logged out
Comments - Markers are now aligned correctly to the playhead
Comments - Fixed an issue where the marker bar wouldn't update when removing a comment
Files - Inline renaming
Files - Sorting no longer reloads the entire page
Files - Creating folders and aliases no longer requires a page reload
Files - Departments now show size and last date and can be sorted by this information
Files - Added F shortcut key for favoriting files
Files - Searches are now continued when entering a new folder
Files - Support for recognizing Ogg audio/video files, MP4 ringtones and WebP images
Files - Added the ability to disable thumbnails on specific files from the Edit Metadata page or via an Upload Workflow
Files - Added Combine Versions right-click option
Files - Dates now update dynamically and you can toggle between relative / absolute
Files - Fixed an issue where revisions may be numbered incorrectly
Files - Fixed an issue where moving a file to another project does not recalculate storage space
Files - Restoring a deleted file now recalculates disk space correctly
Files - Fixed an issue where thumbs could be low quality on iPhone
Files - Fixed an issue where in certain situations the files view may be empty if files had previously been deleted
Files - Fixed an issue where Advanced Search may return no results for non-admins
Files - Fixed an issue where folder size may include the size of deleted files
Files - Fixed an issue where moving a file to a different project would switch projects even if "Navigate to destination folder" was switched off
Files - Fixed an issue where deleted files may not be sorted correctly
Installer - Added the ability to manually download launchd plists on Mac even when installed correctly
Installer - Fixed an issue where the config file couldn't be parsed
Login - Increased the number of attempts required to trigger account lockout
Login - Warn user their account may be locked out if they have too many login attempts
Marker importing - Fixed an issue where Resolve EDLs may not import correctly
MFA - Support for copying a text string instead of scanning the QR code
Player - Real-time encoding progress (requires Kollaborate Encoder 1.3.1)
Player - Audio files now have a visible playhead over the waveform
Player - Prevented link users from entering empty usernames
Player - Fixed an issue where the left/right arrows in the player may try to navigate you to a file that has been deleted
Player - Fixed an issue where the wrong avatar could show for custom uploaders
Projects - Fixed an issue where projects couldn't be unarchived
Projects - Don't show deleted files or aliases when showing project file count
Quick Look - Improved the UI of folder previews - scroll to see files in the folder, click on a file to view it in the player
Share - Share link summary page now includes the password if specified
Share - Moved buttons to create new links to a New dropdown menu
Tasks - Tasks can now be imported from a CSV file
Tasks - Fixed an issue where task import page could be blank
Thumbs - Fixed an issue where manual time position may not be set correctly
UI - New shaded button style
UI - Changed avatar style and added new avatar colors
UI - File titles now dynamically shrink if the filename is long
UI - Login page now has centered content look
UI - Improved folder path naming on links
UI - File thumbs are now center-aligned on mobile
UI - Link pages now show your company logo more prominently
UI - Improved the display of alerts in the alert dropdown
UI - Increased spacing in thumbnail view
UI - Don't show hoverthumbs on mobile
UI - Fixed an issue where the player page footer would display on links
UI - Fixed an issue where the hoverscrub popup wouldn't display correctly
UI - Fixed an issue where deleted projects could appear in the Projects dropdown
UI - Fixed an issue where checkmarks in menus were not highlighted when hovering the mouse over them
UI - Fixed an issue where the triangle icon in the path bar could appear too big in some browsers
Workflows - Fixed an issue where some users would receive emails asking them to review files they did not have permission to access
Workflows - Fixed an issue where file expiration dates could be extended after editing a file workflow
Workflows - Fixed an issue where links shared from a workflow may not be emailed
Overhaul of browser sessions with a greater focus on security
Various minor fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate 2.7.2 - large file uploads, inline renaming, audio playheads, dynamic dates and more

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 21:26:59 +0000

We've listened to customer feedback on our cloud workflow platform and Kollaborate 2.7.2 has a lot of great new features, both large and small, that customers have been asking for.

Large file uploads (beta)

Kollaborate now supports segmented uploads, meaning that not only can you upload larger files to the site, but your uploads should be both faster and more reliable.

This will soon be the default option on the site but for now it is opt-in. To enable it, head to the beta page and tick the box marked Large file uploads then click Save. Note that this is a per-browser setting so you will need to re-enable it if you switch to a different browser or computer.

Once enabled, segmenting will work automatically for all files over 20 MB. For now the new upper limit is 50 GB per file, but we will likely raise it further as we get closer to making it the default option.

We're keen to hear feedback on this feature, especially from people outside of the US. Your feedback will help us tune it further and make it even faster.

Inline renaming

Audio playheads

Audio files now show a playhead over their waveform, allowing you to easily skip to specific points in the file.Â

Dynamic dates

You can also click on a date on a file or comment to toggle between relative and absolute dates.

File browsing improvements

File titles dynamically resize so you can view longer titles
Creating new folders or aliases no longer reloads the page
Sorting columns no longer reloads the page
Added F shortcut key for favoriting files
Departments now show size and last modified date and can be sorted by this information
Right-clicking two or more files now reveals a Combine Versions option
Entering a folder after searching now continues the search inside that folder
Quick Look - Improved the UI of folder previews - scroll to see files in the folder, click on a file to view it in the player

UI changes

We've made lots of user interface improvements including new button styles and a new avatar style with a greater range of colors.Â

Architecture improvements

A lot of the changes in this version are on the back-end, including an overhaul of how we manage logins and active sessions. These features may not be noticeable but they pave the way for a lot of exciting things we plan to deliver in the near future.

Other changes

Multi-Factor Authentication: You can now copy a text string instead of the QR code
Tasks can now be imported from a CSV file
Share - Share link summary page now includes the password if specified
Numerous bug fixes / minor tweaks

Kollaborate month-to-month price reductions

Mon, 5 Nov 2018 17:48:15 +0000

When we created Kollaborate we set out to encourage long-term subscriptions, with short-term subscriptions intended for situations where you might only work on a project for a few months and therefore not need a whole year's subscription. So for this reason there was a significant price difference between annual and monthly subscriptions.

While more than 80% of our customers are on annual subscriptions, we know that some customers prefer to be billed monthly and have in fact been using our service for years on the monthly plan even though it costs more. Based on feedback we have decided to reduce pricing on the monthly plans so there is less of a difference between month-to-month and annual plans, although it will still remain better value to subscribe for the whole year.

Plan	Old monthly price	New monthly price	Annual price
Freelance	$45	$25	$180 ($15/month equivalent)
Small Business	$65	$40	$300 ($25/month equivalent)
Business	$79	$60	$480 ($40/month equivalent)
Production	$119	$99	$780 ($65/month equivalent)
Studio	$149	$129	$1188 ($99/month equivalent)
Studio Plus	$199	$169	$1548 ($129/month equivalent)
Network	$279	$239	$2388 ($199/month equivalent)
Network Plus	$379	$339	$3599 ($299/month equivalent)

You can view our entire list of packages including storage space and features here.

Existing subscribers will be charged the new prices the next time their account bills and don't have to do anything to receive the lower price. Customers who were charged within the last 10 days have received a credit on their account for the difference, which will be subtracted from next month's bill (so if you were charged $45 your next bill would be $25 - $20 = $5).

Kollaborate Server 2.7.1 - more customization, restore deleted files, print view and more

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 21:23:41 +0000

Kollaborate Server 2.7.1 adds some great new features and changes to our self-hosted workflow platform.

Server-specific changes

More style customization

You can now customize more of the UI and even use different logos for the site and email headings if you choose.

Disable features

You can now hide pages completely or only make them available to admins. So for instance if you never use the Dashboard feature it can now be hidden from the UI.

You can also hide features from the player page such as making it so that only admins can see viewing statistics.

Prevent non-admins from creating projects

By default everyone has the ability to create a project. You can now limit this to site admins only from the Configure page of the admin area.

Other changes

Kollaborate Server 2.7.1 has the same features as the cloud version, including:

Restore deleted files and projects

Files are no longer deleted instantly and can now be restored by an admin for up to 14 days. To view deleted files, click the Show dropdown at the top right of the Files page and select Deleted Files (note: only admins can see this option).

Deleted projects can be restored by choosing Deleted Projects from the dropdown at the top right of the Projects page. You will only see projects you created here and they can be restored for up to 14 days.

File expiration

To protect your content, files can now be given an expiration date from the Metadata page. The file will be deleted once this date passes, but can be restored by an admin for up to 14 days.

Comment print view

You can now view comments in a printable view complete with thumbnails. To do this, click Actions in the player, then go to Export Comments and choose Print.

New Share options

There are two new options on the Share page:

Force users to download - This forces the user to download the file instead of playing it in the browser. This is useful for situations where you don't intend to keep a file up for a long time and want to make sure the client downloaded it before it gets deleted.

Automatically relink to latest version - In earlier versions of the site, if you sent out a link and allowed the user to view all versions, the link would still default to the version it was originally linked to even when newer versions exist. This option makes sure that the first file shown is the latest version but still gives the option to view earlier versions.

There is also a new option when emailing a link to send the password in a separate email. This was requested by users who were concerned about link recipients forwarding the link to others.

New Workflows

There are two new Upload Workflow actions:

Don't combine versions - This prevents the uploaded file from being part of a version stack, even if the filename matches that of an existing file in the folder. Files will always be independent with this option switched on.

Remove original file after conversion - This automatically deletes the original file after it has been converted by our encoding servers and replaces it with the highest-quality proxy. This is useful for saving storage space. Note that deleted original files cannot be restored by the new file restoration features.Â

There is also a new File Workflow action:

Set file expiration date - This allows you to automatically change the file's expiration date. This is very useful for creating content lifecycles - you can now create multiple File Workflows and set expiration settings automatically depending on the file's sensitivity or importance.Â

Kollaborate Encoder 1.3

There is also a corresponding update to Kollaborate Encoder. You must install this version if using Kollaborate Server 2.7.1 as older versions are not compatible.

Changes include support for password-protecting encoders and better support for image and multi-track audio files.

Full release notes for Kollaborate Server 2.7.1 and Kollaborate Encoder 1.3 are available on the Updates page or on the Kollaborate Server page after logging in.

Kollaborate 2.7.1 - restore deleted files/projects, file expiration, print view, Incognito Mode and more

Wed, 3 Oct 2018 18:56:24 +0000

Kollaborate 2.7.1 is now live on the cloud, with lots of great new features.

Restore deleted files and projects

File expiration

To protect your content, files can now be given an expiration date from the Metadata page. The file will be deleted once this date passes, but can be restored by an admin for up to 14 days.

Comment print view

You can now view comments in a printable view complete with thumbnails. To do this, click Actions in the player, then go to Export Comments and choose Print.Â

Linked accounts can now see all projects

When linking a subscription to your account from the Linked Accounts page, you can now choose whether the user can automatically access all projects you create. If this box is unchecked, they will be able to create new projects but will need to be specifically added to the Team page of each project in order to see them.Â

Note: users linked in this way will become admins on every project.

New Share options

There are two new options on the Share page:

There is also a new option when emailing a link to send the password in a separate email. This was requested by users who were concerned about link recipients forwarding the link to others.

New Workflows

There are two new Upload Workflow actions:

There is also a new File Workflow action:

Improved Adobe panel UI

We've improved the UI for the Adobe panel to make it easier to download files and import markers.Â

Note that this is a server-side change so you don't need to update the panel plugin itself.

Incognito Mode

We've renamed the previous Disable Alerts option to Incognito Mode to make its function more obvious.

Incognito Mode allows you to prevent your actions on the site (e.g. uploading a file or making a comment) from sending email alerts to others on the project. It is available by clicking your avatar at the top right of the screen and toggling Incognito Mode.

Unviewed folder icons

This is one of those very simple small changes that can make a big difference. You will now see a blue circle next to folders that contain unviewed files. This can be really useful when working on a big project where lots of changes are happening, so you can just follow the blue dots to find files you haven't looked at yet.

Other changes

No more black thumbnails - Kollaborate now rejects black frames or frames with little information (like slates) so that thumbnails are more representative
Storage space now updates dynamically in the bottom right corner when uploading or deleting files
Views and downloads are now logged on a per-user basis and shown in the Users tab of the player
Quick Look shows the name of the file at the top
Quick Look automatically switches to the selected file when user selects a new file with the mouse and closes when files are deselected
Quick Look - Added a button to open file in player
Subscribers can change ownership of a project to themselves if it is owned by another user linked to their subscription
Files - You can now see whether a file has been favorited without needing to hover over it
Files - Improved resizing of the file table on smaller screens
Files - Added a button to clear the current search
Files - You can now choose to go back to the source folder when moving files instead of being taken to the destination
Player - Individual views / downloads are now visible in the History tab
Tightened permissions so that non-admins cannot move others' files and you now need upload permissions in order to create a folder.

In addition, we have conducted some server upgrades to make the site faster and more responsive.

Kollaborate 2.7 - Embed LUTs, watermarks and overlays; folder uploading; view limits; Resolve marker import/export

Wed, 9 May 2018 17:35:49 +0000

Kollaborate 2.7 is a major update to our cloud workflow platform for sharing files and working more effectively with your team.

Upload Workflows

We've expanded our Workflows feature to include Upload Workflows. Upload Workflows are a new type of Workflow that allow you to set certain actions to occur when uploading a new file. You can choose whether to convert the file to a playable format, add LUTs and watermarks, and burn in data like timecode or the project name over the frame. This works for both videos and still images.

Upload Workflows can be limited to apply only to certain folders, which allows you to setup different rules depending on the folder the file is uploaded to. For example, you could choose to apply LUTs to files uploaded to a Dailies folder and watermarks to files uploaded to a Client Review folder.

You can also use Upload Workflows as a way of validating uploads. So if you require your deliverables to be uploaded as 1080p, you can set an upload workflow to apply a file workflow that will highlight the file red if it is a different resolution.

Upload Workflows are very powerful and we plan to release some videos soon showing more things you can do with them.

Send out a link from a File Workflow

What were previously known as Workflows are now called File Workflows to differentiate them from Upload Workflows. You can now automatically email out a link from a File Workflow, which will allow you to do things like automatically send a link to the client after your team has approved the file.

Trigger workflows from Tasks

Tasks can now trigger File Workflows when they are completed. This would allow you to, for example, sort task deliverables into a Tasks Completed folder after they are finished or allow others on your team to review them. You can trigger File Workflows for related files and deliverables separately.

Image conversion

Image files can now be converted to web-viewable formats by our encoding servers. There's a default Upload Workflow that will automatically convert unsupported images (e.g. BMPs or DPXs) to JPEGs when uploaded.

Workflow import / restore

Workflows can now be imported from other projects or restored back to the default versions.

(Note that Upload Workflows may not import in their entirety if they depend on files or custom departments that only exist in the other project.)Â

DaVinci Resolve marker import / export

Kollaborate can now import and export markers to Davinci Resolve as marker EDLs.

To import into Resolve, right-click on your timeline in the Media or Edit pane and go to Timelines > Import > Timeline Markers from EDL.Â

Folder uploading

Folders can now be dragged in to upload them. Kollaborate will respect the original folder structure and create subfolders accordingly.

Link recipients can now edit / delete their comments

Link recipients can now edit and delete their comments for up to 1 hour after posting.

View / upload limits for links

You can now specify how many times a link can be viewed or how many files can be uploaded to a File Request before the link will automatically expire. Links that have hit their expiration limit are highlighted in red on the Share page.Â

File History

You can now see the history of a file directly from the player.Â

Other changes

Batch create aliases
Batch favoriting from the Files page
Added an option to hide the play icon overlay when a video is paused in Playback Settings
Full-screen auto advance - if you are in full screen mode and Kollaborate is set to automatically advance to the next or previous file, full screen mode will be maintained when switching to the new file.
Removed the comment submit button - press Enter to submit comments
Tags are now duplicated when creating aliases
Link expiration dates can now be removed after being set
You can now opt out of being automatically subscribed to files you interact with (e.g. by commenting) from the Profile page
File Request recipients are no longer asked for their name to improve the user experience. If the link is not sent through the site, their uploads will be tagged with their IP address
You can now favorite, link and download files directly from the QuickLook dialog
Many UI improvements and tweaks
Lots of bug fixes

Kollaborate Server 2.6 - batch downloading, auto-advance, custom approval button labels and more

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 18:56:39 +0000

Last week we released Kollaborate Server 2.6, a major update to our self-hosted cloudÂ workflow platform for video professionals.

This update contains some important new features but many of the best changes are the smaller ones. We really smoothed and polished a lot of things in this release and many tasks are faster and easier to accomplish than before.

Batch downloading

Select a group of files, then hit the download button next to one of them to download all of them at the same time. This works on the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Auto-advance

Click the circle arrow to the left or right of the player to automatically advance to the next file in the folder after the current one finishes.

Download proxies

If the file has a lower-quality playable proxy, you will now be given the option of which file to download when clicking the download button in the player.

Custom approve/reject button labels

You can now give the Approve / Reject buttons in your workflows custom titles, allowing you to make it clearer what pressing a particular button will actually do.

Project thumbnails

Projects now show the icon of the most recent file that everyone can access. This only applies to files outside of departments.

Keep your place

If you click a file to view it and then press the Back button to go back to the Files page, Kollaborate now goes back to exactly where you were instead of going back to the top of the Files page. This is really useful if you were 20 pages deep.

Quick Look overhaul

We overhauled Quick Look to be more polished and responsive and increased the screen space it takes up so you can see your files better.

Improved image support

Large images are now displayed more prominently in the player and the image full-screen view has been redesigned and polished.

Additionally, we've improved support for animated GIFs, which now have frame rate, duration and hoverscrub thumbnails.

Security improvements

We've made a variety of security improvements. These will largely not be noticeable but one noticeable change is that you will need to re-login the first time after this update. After that the site will automatically log you in in future as normal.

Various uploading improvements

Videos and images now show thumbnail previews during upload if the file is a format your browser can read
Uploads now stay where you dragged them instead of scrolling you to the bottom of the page
Estimated time remaining is now shown during uploads
Lots of performance optimizations

Other changes

New filter - show only Favorites on the Files page
You can now favorite a file directly from the player
The next / previous buttons in the player now show a preview of the upcoming file
You can now separate version stacks by right-clicking them
Folders are now ordered before files in the list
Many UI tweaks
Many performance optimizations and bug fixes

Kollaborate 2.6 - batch downloading, auto advance, custom button labels and more

Wed, 9 Aug 2017 17:27:34 +0000

Last week we released Kollaborate 2.6, a major update to our cloud workflow platform for video professionals.

Batch downloading

Select a group of files, then hit the download button next to one of them to download all of them at the same time. This works on the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Auto-advance

Click the circle arrow to the left or right of the player to automatically advance to the next file in the folder after the current one finishes.

Download proxies

If the file has a lower-quality playable proxy, you will now be given the option of which file to download when clicking the download button in the player.

Custom approve/reject button labels

You can now give the Approve / Reject buttons in your workflows custom titles, allowing you to make it clearer what pressing a particular button will actually do.

Project thumbnails

Projects now show the icon of the most recent file that everyone can access. This only applies to files outside of departments.

Keep your place

Quick Look overhaul

We overhauled Quick Look to be more polished and responsive and increased the screen space it takes up so you can see your files better.

Improved image support

Large images are now displayed more prominently in the player and the image full-screen view has been redesigned and polished.

Additionally, we've improved support for animated GIFs, which now have frame rate, duration and hoverscrub thumbnails.

Security improvements

Various uploading improvements

Videos and images now show thumbnail previews during upload if the file is a format your browser can read
Uploads now stay where you dragged them instead of scrolling you to the bottom of the page
Estimated time remaining is now shown during uploads
Lots of performance optimizations

Other changes

New filter - show only Favorites on the Files page
You can now favorite a file directly from the player
The next / previous buttons in the player now show a preview of the upcoming file
You can now separate version stacks by right-clicking them
Folders are now ordered before files in the list
Many UI tweaks
Many performance optimizations and bug fixes

Kollaborate Transfer 1.5 - accelerated uploads and faster batch encoding

Wed, 17 May 2017 22:01:15 +0000

We recently released an update to Kollaborate Transfer that should significantly improve the speed of batch processing.

Encoding behavior has been changed so that it will no longer wait for a file to finish uploading before encoding the next file in the list. Encoded files now enter a Waiting state and will start uploading immediately upon the previous upload finishing. This can reduce total queue time significantly for large batches or long videos.

Additionally, we have now switched over to the accelerated upload system we recently activated on the cloud. This boosts upload speeds for everyone but is most noticeable for customers outside of the US.

Other changes:

Reduced situations where the queue could hang
Fixed an issue that could cause some hoverscrub thumbnail frames to be black when processing large batches
Reduced memory usage
General bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Server 2.5 - Workflows, File Requests, Subtitles, Color Coding and more

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 17:23:15 +0000

We've just released a major new update to our Kollaborate Server self-hosted workflow platform for video professionals, with a lot of new features and important changes. This follows on from the update we recently released on the cloud.

Workflows

Workflows are an extremely powerful new feature that tells Kollaborate to perform certain tasks on a file when it is assigned a specific workflow. The tasks can range from labelling or marking the file to moving it to a specific folder. It's an easy way of quickly sorting files so they are easier for your team to access.

They are also the new way of getting file approvals from other people on your team. This is considerably more powerful than before and allows you to target specific people or departments as being able to approve files, rather than everyone with approval rights. You can also specify that every single marked person must approve the file before it is considered approved, as opposed to the old system where it was approved simply by the first person to approve it.

Each approval workflow has options for running another workflow when it is approved or rejected, so you could for example run another workflow to automatically highlight approved files and move them to an Approved folder. It also means you can chain approvals together so that an approval on one workflow triggers another approval workflow, allowing a file to filter up to higher members of your team for a decision before it is finally approved.

Another way you could use this is to implement milestones. So Milestone 1 would move the file to a particular project or department, someone works on the file and they then assign it Milestone 2, which moves it onto someone else to work on. Then they assign it Milestone 3 which asks a manager to approve it and then if it is approved it is automatically assigned an Approved status which moves the file to an Approved Files folder.

That's just an example - you can set it up however you like and it's extremely flexible.

We have lots of plans for this in future and are keen to know how customers plan to incorporate this feature into their workflows.

Upload Requests

Need some files from a vendor but don't want to add the person to the project? Send them an upload link. Upload links work just like sharing links but show a file upload page instead of a video player.

Team overhaul

The Team page has been completely overhauled. Each department now has a text box at the bottom that allows you to type in an email address to invite a team member. This is a considerably quicker and simpler way of setting up your team than the previous version.

Positions have been replaced by Roles, which apply a set of default permissions to a user. In a future update you will be able to add your own roles.

Inviting new users to the service is easier than before. Rather than assigning the user a default password, they now receive an activation link. Upon clicking the link they will be asked to choose a password for their account. We feel this is a more user-friendly way of doing things that should result in fewer forgotten passwords. You can also choose to manually send a user the activation link rather than having Kollaborate send it if you want to add a personal message.

Another change is that departments are no longer required to have users inside them. This is useful if you just want a private storage area for Admins, as they are not required to be part of a department to see inside it.

Project muting

Don't want to receive alerts from a specific project but still receive alerts from others? You can now mute it. Hover over the project on the Projects page and click the bell icon next to its name.

Subtitle support

You can now view SRT subtitles in the video player. Here's how to do it:

Upload both the video and SRT caption file to your project.
Right-click on the video file on the Files page and click Relationship Editor or go to Actions > Related Files > Relationship Editor.
Click New Relationship.
Browse to the SRT file and choose Subtitles as the relationship type.
Save and go back to the video. You'll now see a green icon at the bottom of the player that will allow you to toggle the captions on and off.

We plan to support additional caption formats in future.

Admin Dashboard

The Admin Dashboard shows you statistics about your installation including software versions and configuration information. It can also alert you to problems that have occurred.

A full list of changes is available here after logging in.

Kollaborate 2.5 - Workflows, File Requests, Subtitles, Color Coding and more

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 17:47:40 +0000

We've just released a major new update to our Kollaborate cloud workflow platform for video professionals, with a lot of new features and important changes.

Workflows

That's just an example - you can set it up however you like and it's extremely flexible.

We have lots of plans for this in future and are keen to know how customers plan to incorporate this feature into their workflows.

Upload Requests

Team overhaul

Positions have been replaced by Roles, which apply a set of default permissions to a user. In a future update you will be able to add your own roles.

Inviting new users to the service is easier than before. Rather than assigning the user a default password, they now receive an activation link. Upon clicking the link they will be asked to choose a password for their account. We feel this is a more user-friendly way of doing things that should result in fewer forgotten passwords. You can also choose to manually send a user the activation link rather than having our system send it if you want to add a personal message.

Project muting

Don't want to receive alerts from a specific project but still receive alerts from others? You can now mute it. Hover over the project on the Projects page and click the bell icon next to its name.

Subtitle support

You can now view SRT subtitles in the video player. Here's how to do it:

Upload both the video and SRT caption file to your project.
Right-click on the video file on the Files page and click Relationship Editor or go to Actions > Related Files > Relationship Editor.
Click New Relationship.
Browse to the SRT file and choose Subtitles as the relationship type.
Save and go back to the video. You'll now see a green icon at the bottom of the player that will allow you to toggle the captions on and off.

We plan to support additional caption formats in future.

Other Changes

File color coding
Batch metadata editing
New filters on the Files page - show unviewed, with comments, without comments, with revisions and since my last visit
Metadata tags are now matched when searching from the Files page (previously you could only do this from the Advanced Search page)
Previously if you wanted to see detailed viewing statistics about a link, you would need to send it via the site so it could match the stats to the user's email address. Now in cases where the link is emailed manually and Kollaborate doesn't know who clicked it, the site will show viewing statistics by IP address instead.
If you're not viewing a playable file, the comment box is now selected by default to make note-taking easier
Many UI changes plus an overhaul of the email skin

The site has also had a complete architecture overhaul where every single page was modified and optimized. We're also running on faster servers and cache data more aggressively which should result in the site being faster than before.

Kollaborate Folder Watcher 1.2 - Finder progress bars and improved network drive support

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 21:39:08 +0000

Kollaborate Folder Watcher 1.2 is a significant update to our automatic file uploader for our Kollaborate cloud platform.

Finder progress bars

Based on your feedback, encoding and uploading now displays progress bars directly in Finder, allowing you to see at a glance the progress of any file.

Improved network drive support

Kollaborate Folder Watcher works by listening for messages from macOS that tell it when changes to a folder have occurred. These messages do not get sent on network drives so before now the app didn't work with such drives. Now it manually scans for changes too so it will detect changes on these drives, albeit with a delay compared to a local drive.

Massive storage boost for Kollaborate subscribers

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 16:59:13 +0000

We've given Kollaborate subscribers a massive free storage space boost. Kollaborate was already one of the best-value review platforms on the market due to the fact you get 5 team members and all features on the base plan, in addition to free access to several of our products, and this increases the value even more.

Additionally, our higher-level plans now come with unlimited team members.

Plan	Old Storage	New Storage
Freelance	25 GB	30 GB
Small Business	50 GB	60 GB
Business	75 GB	100 GB
Production	140 GB	200 GB
Studio	225 GB	250 GB
Studio Plus	400 GB	500 GB
Network	1 TB	1.5 TB
Network Plus	2 TB	3 TB

You can view the full list of package benefits, including pricing, here.

Kollaborate Server 2.0.3 released with PHP 7 support

Sat, 19 Nov 2016 02:31:51 +0000

Earlier this week we released Kollaborate Server 2.0.3, a minor updateÂ to our in-house version of our Kollaborate cloud workflow platform. These fixes have already been rolled out to users of the cloud version.

Kollaborate Server can now be run on PHP 7, as well as PHP 5.6. You will need to make sure you have the very latest version of the Ioncube Loader to do this. Even if you are not using PHP 7 you may still need to update the loader if you are using a very old version.

Other changes

When emailing out a link through the site, the user's name is populated from their email address so they no longer need to enter it before commenting
Users can hold down Shift to prevent the comment overlay showing in full screen
Uploads from the FCPX plugin are now matched for revisions based on their title, not filename
Black thumbnails are now shown instead of the "unknown document" icon if a video thumbnail is pending
Prevented comments on archived projects
The comments box is now sized proportionally to the height of your browser
Added a popup alert to ask the user if they want to reset their password if they get it wrong too many times
API - Shared links generated by apps now take the file's title instead of appearing as Untitled
Forward and back slashes are now stripped from file titles
Extended OAuth token expiration dates to prevent infrequent users from constantly having to reauthorize
Improved the browser compatibility of annotation drawing
Fixed an issue where admins could not email a link created by another user
Fixed an issue on OS X where multiple link reminder emails may be sent
Fixed an issue where admins could not add Approval permissions to other users
Fixed an issue where revision uploads could fail if the parent folder contained invalid characters
Fixed an issue where aliases may not be playable
API: Fixed an issue where the server could choose the original file instead of the proxy when playing an alias
Fixed an error that could occur when trying to move thumbnails for a file type that does not intrinsically support thumbnails
Fixed an issue where comments may not show when a task with Japanese characters in the title is attached to it
Fixed an issue where invisible users could exist and not be able to be removed from a project
Fixed an issue where encoding jobs may not be distributed evenly across encoding servers
Security improvements
UI tweaks
Various other minor bug fixes and improvements