Kollaborate
Pro Maintenance Tools
Pro Media Tools
CinePlay
Post Haste
Preference Manager
FCS Remover|
Maintain, optimize and troubleshoot your NLE
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Professional cloud workflow platform
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Simplified media management
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Kollaborate Server 1.3 is a major update to our workflow platform for video professionals. This is a local in-house version of the update that already made its way to the cloud.
We've made lots of changes to the Admin Area. As well as many improvements to the UI, we've also added the ability for superadmins to promote or demote users to site admin status. (Site admins can view every project on the server and automatically have admin access to them.)
It is now no longer possible to delete user accounts. The reason for this is that some users did not realize it was not possible to delete a user and have everything they created (projects, comments, uploads, etc) remain on the site. To make this clearer, users can now be deactivated instead. This changes their name to "Deactivated User" and frees up their email address to be re-registered if necessary, while keeping their old account around so that their projects, comments and uploads will still be available.
Kollaborate Server 1.3 also has the main features of the cloud update including:
We've completely overhauled the comment system to improve performance and provide timeline markers below the video (you can switch this off in the new Playback Settings dialog accessible from the Actions menu). You can click on a marker to highlight it in the Comments pane.
Comments are now sortable by timecode or date (making it easy to see what's new) and can be filtered by color, author, type or matching text. The export dialog also lets you filter by author and you can even restrict exported notes to Favorites only, thus making it easy to build up a select list of comments to send to someone.
We've also overhauled the Tasks section with a much simpler UI. We now show all tasks in the same list and you can sort and filter them to find the information you need. Tasks are now color-coded, with overdue tasks appearing red, tasks due in the next week appearing orange and high priority tasks appearing blue.
It's now much easier to manage tasks and task status and priority can be batch modified directly from the Tasks page.
The Viewers section below the player shows lists of which users have and haven't viewed the file. Any users that haven't viewed it can be nudged, which sends them an email alert reminding them to view it. You can also click the bell icon to be alerted when they view it for the first time (this is a redesign of the old Receipts feature).
Kollaborate is a cloud workflow platform designed to help you work better with colleagues and clients. Upload files to the cloud, have them reviewed by others and then export their notes back to your editing application. Kollaborate Server gives you all of those features in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, view the feature list or sign up for the free no-obligation 15-day cloud trial (no credit card needed).
We've just released Pro Media Tools 1.3.5, a minor update to our suite of media management tools for video professionals.
In this version we've overhauled Render Watcher's email notifications and particularly the interface for setting them up. The UI is now simpler and some confusing terminology has been changed to be clearer.
We've also fixed some bugs with QT Edit's conform function and Video Check's matte detection facility.
Pro Media Tools is an essential toolkit for media professionals. To find out more view the feature list, read the user manual, watch the overview video or download the free 15-day trial.
Today we're releasing two updates for our Kollaborate helper apps.
Kollaborate Plugin Pack 1.0.1 is a group of plugins for Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere Pro for Mac to allow uploading to Kollaborate directly from your timeline.
This version has a lot more control when creating shared links for users outside your project and adds options previously only available when creating links directly on the site, including custom passwords, the ability to hide the download button, setting an expiration date for the link and granting access to all current and future revisions of the file.
We've also made a lot of minor UI tweaks including an estimate for how long the upload will take.
Kollaborate Transfer is our free tool for batch encoding and uploading files to the cloud.
This version contains the same changes to link functionality as Kollaborate Plugin Pack, in addition to a very useful new option. If you encode the file for the web, you can tick Upload Original File and Kollaborate Transfer will upload the unconverted original alongside it, linking the two together so that the playable copy will play in the user's browser and the high-res copy will download when they click the Download button.
We've also made many other changes and tweaks including improved playback performance in Safari.
These changes are in addition to the great new features recently added in Kollaborate 1.3.
Kollaborate is a cloud workflow platform for video professionals offering file sharing, remote collaboration and team management, all centered around the Digital Rebellion app ecosystem. To find out more, sign up for the free no-obligation trial.
Adobe Premiere Pro's export dialog features several rendering options that are not widely understood. All of them are switched off by default because they either degrade quality or increase rendering times, however they can all be useful in particular situations.
This renders content at 32-bit color depth. Very few output formats actually support 32-bit color but processing at this depth can produce better quality for compositing and effects operations before being scaled back to the output format's bit depth. It can reduce or eliminate artifacts and banding in your video but that benefit comes at the cost of an increase in processing time, so only use it when completely necessary.
You may benefit from this option in the following situations:
You can read more about Premiere's color processing here.
This is a high-quality resize operation that should be used when outputting to a different frame size from your sequence. It can reduce aliasing (jagged edges) when resizing images but is of no use when outputting to the same frame size. This operation significantly increases render times so only use it when resizing.
This option smooths out juddery motion when exporting to a different frame rate than your sequence. While it may improve motion quality compared to not having it switched on, it's not considered a high quality option. You will probably get better results from exporting with the sequence frame rate and then converting in Adobe Media Encoder, Apple Compressor, a standards-conversion tool like JES Deinterlacer or a hardware conversion device like Teranex.
This results in reduced export times because your sequence render files are used instead of having to re-render the sequence. This is of course assuming that you have a significant amount of your timeline already rendered, which may not be the case if you have a fast computer or your sequence is simple enough to be played back without rendering.
Generally you should not use this option because it is likely to result in reduced image quality, particularly when outputting to a different format from your sequence and also because it will bypass the quality options detailed above. It should only be used where processing time is more important than image quality, such as previews or rough cuts for example, although these are likely to be simple enough that this option doesn't significantly affect processing times.
Kollaborate 1.3 is a major update to our cloud workflow platform for video professionals. We've listened to your feedback and have added many new features based on your requests.
We've completely overhauled the comment system to improve performance and provide timeline markers below the video (you can switch this off in the new Playback Settings dialog accessible from the Actions menu). You can click on a marker to highlight it in the Comments pane.
Comments are now sortable by timecode or date (making it easy to see what's new) and can be filtered by color, author, type or matching text. The export dialog also lets you filter by author and you can even restrict exported notes to Favorites only, thus making it easy to build up a select list of comments to send to someone.
We've also overhauled the Tasks section with a much simpler UI. We now show all tasks in the same list and you can sort and filter them to find the information you need. Tasks are now color-coded, with overdue tasks appearing red, tasks due in the next week appearing orange and high priority tasks appearing blue.
It's now much easier to manage tasks and task status and priority can be batch modified directly from the Tasks page.
The Viewers section below the player shows lists of which users have and haven't viewed the file. Any users that haven't viewed it can be nudged, which sends them an email alert reminding them to view it. You can also click the bell icon to be alerted when they view it for the first time (this is a redesign of the old Receipts feature).
You can change the thumbnail of a video to the current frame by going to Actions > Set Thumb to Current Frame.
Kollaborate is a cloud workflow platform designed to help you work better with colleagues and clients. Upload files to the cloud, have them reviewed by others and then export their notes back to your editing application. To find out more, view the feature list or sign up for the free no-obligation 15-day trial (no credit card needed).
2015 is now upon us so here's a look back at the past twelve months.
We introduced several new products:
CinePlay for Mac, a Mac video player with professional features like timecode, markers, safe areas and overlays. It also integrates with our Kollaborate cloud service to provide cloud video playback, commenting and synced sessions with colleagues.
Kollaborate Plugin Pack - Upload files to the cloud directly from Final Cut Pro X or Adobe Premiere Pro for Mac.
Kollaborate Folder Watcher (beta) - Automatically upload files to the cloud when copied to a particular folder on your hard drive.
Marker Import for Windows - Free Windows tool for importing markers created by our apps into Adobe Premiere Pro. There is also a Mac version available here.
We also released the following major updates free of charge:
Pro Media Tools 1.3 - Complete overhaul of QT Edit's batch processing mode, offering significantly improved performance and stability.
CinePlay 1.1 for Mac - Audio playback, gang multiple files together for simultaneous playback (useful for comparing two or more shots) and playlist support.
CinePlay 1.4 for iOS - Audio playback support.
Cut Notes 2.3 for iPad - Added an Autosave Vault, changed hold behavior to be in line with Cut Notes 1.x and greatly improved Kollaborate cloud integration.
Preference Manager 4.2 - Compatibility with Adobe Creative Cloud 2014 and Lightworks beta for Mac.
In total we released over 100 updates for our apps.
Kollaborate subscribers also received the following features at no extra cost:
Our most-downloaded app was FCS Remover but our most-used app was Post Haste. Our most popular paid tool was Pro Maintenance Tools. Our most popular iOS app was Video Space Calculator.
We also improved our website in a lot of ways, but most significantly was the creation of an Account section that allows customers to login to manage their licenses and print invoices.
The most popular blog posts in 2014 were:
10 Useful Avid Console Commands (on track to be our most popular of all time)
Fixing missing database errors in DaVinci Resolve
How to protect your video content
Managing frame sequences in Batch Renamer
You may have noticed we've been a little quiet for the past couple of weeks and the reason for this is that we're working on some big updates, so stay tuned for new products and major updates in early 2015. You can keep up to date with new products, features and tips by subscribing to this blog, following us on Twitter or Facebook or by subscribing to our mailing list.
Last week we released Kollaborate Transfer 1.2, an important update to our free Kollaborate uploader.
This update adds lots of improvements to queue management and greater performance and stability when dealing with large batches. We also fixed a couple of issues where the queue could stop processing if one of the files failed.
In addition, the ability to choose whether or not a file should be automatically revised is now back, based on user feedback.
We were made aware that due to an issue in the software update mechanism in version 1.1.5, some users may not be prompted to update when running the older version. If you do not see an update prompt, please download the new version manually.
We've just released Pro Media Tools 1.3.4, a minor update to our suite of media management tools.
If your video is supposed to have a matte on it, Video Check can determine if it is the correct aspect ratio. It can flag up frames where the matte is missing or the wrong size.
Other Video Check improvements include a reduction in flash frame false positives and the fact that detected problems are now listed by timecode instead of frame number.
We've improved support for extreme gamma shifts, added timecode displays for each video plus many other UI tweaks.
The app will also now display an error if you try to compare a black or almost entirely black frame, prompting you to select a different one where a gamma shift can be detected.
We've added new Quick Tasks to help you automate disabling or removing audio tracks in batches. We've also added a timecode field to help you navigate through a movie.
Pro Media Tools is an essential toolkit for media professionals. To find out more view the feature list, read the user manual, watch the overview video or download the free 15-day trial.
Yesterday Apple released Pro Video Formats 2.0 (an apparently renamed version of Pro Apps Codecs), which is a set of professional codecs to coincide with the FCPX 10.1.4 update with MXF integration.
The release notes imply this only adds MXF support to FCPX, Motion and Compressor, however it is actually much broader than this. It adds MXF reading to any application on the system that uses the QuickTime APIs.
You can test this by taking an MXF file on your system (such as from an Avid_MediaFiles folder), right-clicking and choosing to open in QuickTime Player 7. This will work in any app that uses the QuickTime 7 APIs and does not require the latest version of OS X.
There are however some limitations:
We would also recommend users do not use MXFs with any of our apps that make changes to movie files. So Edit Detector will work fine but QT Edit will not.
This update will appear for anyone with Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5 or Compressor 4 installed on your system. If you don't have these apps and still want the MXF functionality, I recommend buying Compressor from the App Store for $50.
Sometimes it is necessary to protect video content against unauthorized redistribution. Here's an overview of the main ways of doing this.
This involves placing text or a logo over the video to show the name of the company owning the content.
Pros
Cons
Some companies offer invisible watermarking by tagging content with a fingerprint. One such example would be Digimarc Guardian.
You would tag the movie and give it to the end user, then if it appears on a file-sharing website you can download it and read the tag to find out which user shared it.
Pros
Cons
Browser plugins like Flash and Silverlight offer their own Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection systems.
Pros
Cons
This uses web technologies to allow content protection without the need for a plugin. It is frequently misunderstood as a protection mechanism in itself, but in actuality it is just a means of linking HTML5 web video with existing third-party protection systems, so a lot of the pros and cons of plugins still apply.
Pros
Cons
Streaming a file can make it difficult for users to download it, and for someone people this is all that is needed. This can be achieved with proprietary technologies like Adobe Media Server or HTML5 technologies like HTTP Live Streaming.
Pros
Cons
So which is best? That entirely depends on the content you are trying to protect.
Cut Notes
CinePlay
Aspect Ratio Matte Generator
Video Space Calculator