Next level team collaboration in video editing

Flixier is all about a better workflow for video editors. In our discussions with most of you, we found out that many work in teams which means a great deal of file sharing, project sharing, communication, version tracking and so on. Given how complex all these things can get it was natural for us to focus on this side of the workflow and try to improve it as much as we can.

Diving into it we can refer back to one of our previous blog posts mentioning our Cloud Storage implementation which allows us to do some cool tricks, well that same implementation comes in very handy this time around as well and this is how.

Getting Feedback 

Currently, to get feedback on a project you need to go through this very lengthy process of rendering a video, uploading it somewhere, sending it and most probably getting some messy comments over e-mail. With Flixier that is not the case, you can send a link to your video and your colleagues or clients can see it in a simplified interface and leave comments with feedback. 

Even more, you see the comments in the editor instantly, you can make the changes and update the link instantly, effectively getting rid of wasted time while waiting for renders and uploads. 

Sharing files

This is usually a very tricky process, moving files around either on physical devices or through cloud services is never easy. Everyone involved needs to be sure they have the latest files sent or downloaded which takes a long time to do. Flixier makes it much easier to manage the library and share it with team members. All you have to do is right-click a file a or a folder and click the share button, you can now select someone from your team and they will have the files available in their library instantly. Even more, a team library can be created allowing you to share files with the entire team in one click. 

Sharing projects

If you could get around with sharing files one way or another, well, sharing an entire project is a whole different story. We have to take into account the project file, the entire library and more. This means that sometimes you have to recreate the perfect environment on a different computer which takes time and effort, Final Cut has a few guides for this and depending on the situation it can be between 12 to 16 steps to achieve it. Adobe has "Shared Projects" but they are also a hassle to set up and use and they are mostly designed for local workgroups anyway, "team projects" could be an alternative but there you get performance hits.

Looking at all these problems we build into Flixier the option to share your project with your team just as I explained above with files, just press a few buttons and you're done, your team members can access your projects. Easy!

Real-time collaboration

But we didn't stop just at sharing, we are currently working on a feature that will allow creators to collaborate in real-time exactly like in Google Docs. Our powerful timeline (I will be talking more about it in a future post) has a feature called groups. We will allow multiple editors to work on different groups at the same time, you can even check or un-check real-time view of what someone else is doing. Alternatively, you can just block the view of a group so you are not distracted or completely lock collaboration editing for a while. This is a hard feature to pull off due to the many factors spanning from user interface to user experience all the way to technical limitations but I am sure you will like it and we can't wait for you to try it.

Source of truth

Looking back at the points we talked about above it is also important to note how difficult it is to work without a decentralized system like the ones presented above. When people start making changes in their project and you want to sync them it becomes a nightmare. With Flixier the project is always up to date making it so much simple for you and your colleagues to see updates or to show updates.

This is how video editing teams should collaborate in 2020. Less wasted time and stress, and faster delivery times coupled with improved team communication and collaboration.