Frame.io Enterprise – online team edit reviews for enterprises
Today Frame.io announced that their online video production team collaboration system now has features that are useful for larger organisations:
Enterprise offers everything large companies need to manage their creative process at scale. Admins can organize teams by department, brand, production or whatever best suits your company structure.
With this organization teams can work in their own workspaces much like they do with Frame.io today. Admins can control team access and visibility and manage thresholds for team size and resource allocations all from a single platform.
Interesting news for Final Cut Pro X users who need to share edits and notes with other team members online.
Frame.io is a edit review system. Editors can share edits and rushes with others online.
Non-editors review edits in a web browser and can access media used in the edit and selected unused media. They can review edits and make notes at specific times in the edit. They can also make drawings that other team members can see. Useful when planning new shots or briefing changes that need to be made using VFX. Team members can even compare edits with side-by-side version control.
Editors can then import these notes as markers with comments so they can see the exact point in the edit the note is associated with.
Media companies are the beginning
Interesting that Frame.io chose the ‘Enterprise’ suffix for this new service. The announcement may say that Vice, Turner Broadcasting Systems and BuzzFeed are already using Frame.io Enterprise, but media companies should be the tip of the video collaboration iceberg. The very features described in the press release seem more suited to non-media companies and organisations.
Although desktop video has been around for over 20 years, it hasn’t yet properly broken into the world of work as a peer to the report (word processing), financial documents (spreadsheet) and presentation (presentation). Microsoft and Adobe never got video production – or at least editing – into most offices. Now that everyone has a video camera in their pocket, it is time for someone to make this happen. Online or network collaboration will help.
Trojan Horse for Final Cut Pro X
At this point the Final Cut Pro X angle becomes relevant. Although frame.io integrates very well into the Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects user interfaces, those applications aren’t big-business friendly. Due to their history, their metaphors are for editors and motion graphics designers. The very multiplicity of windows, panels and preferences are the kind of features that experienced editors and animators like. They look pretty threatening to people with other jobs. Final Cut Pro X is the application that can be used by people who need to get an edit done, or make last-minute changes based on some notes entered into frame.io by the CEO on her iPhone.
The question for the Final Cut ecosystem is whether a future version of X will allow the kind of third-party integration that makes the notes review process for frame.io in Adobe Premiere so much better than it is in Final Cut Pro X.