Streamlined communication for video editors

As promised in our first post, we are back to explain the best features and benefits of editing video with Flixier. 

Today I will start by digging a little into how sending draft videos and receiving feedback works. As we previously said we were shocked at how much time is lost when asking for feedback with current workflows.

Standard workflow

Let's talk about how most video editors work. An usual workflow looks like this:

Edit the video -> Export -> Upload -> Share -> Receive Feedback -> Repeat

It all looks pretty straight forward at first glance but starting to analyse each step separately shows how badly broken this workflow is. Let's see!

1. Edit the video - of course there is not much you can do here, this is where most of the time should be spent anyways right? A video editor should be enabled to do the work he loves and spend as much time as possible doing it.
2. Export - well here is where things already get problematic, it takes a long time to export a video, there is no other way around it. Sure you could spend a ton of money on the latest hardware or pay for render farms (which adds other steps to the process) and even doing this doesn't guarantee you could do things much faster. Add to this the fact that your computer is practically a hot, noisy, unusable brick while waiting to export and things don't look very bright.
3. Upload - assuming this is how you "quickly" share drafts with people this is also a bottleneck. Most widely available cloud storage services are painfully slow to upload. Not to mention that you have to pay for them too.
4. Share - this is pretty simple assuming you already uploaded your video somewhere.
5. Receive Feedback -  while this looks simple it too can get very messy. What tool do you use for this?  Is it e-mail, Slack, Skype a combination of all of them? It is also very hard to pin-point specific issues, getting into details about many scenes is hard already, having to also explain where in the video they can be found adds a lot of frustration.
6. Repeat - I know this is isn't a step in itself but it is here where everything goes bad rather quickly. Think of all the things I mentioned above and now multiply them by ... I don't know... 5?, 7? more than 7? All the time that is lost in this process is unbelievable.

External plug-ins 

In the past years a slew of tools and plug-ins have emerged trying to solve this issue. Products like Frame.io , Wipster or collaboration features from Vimeo, all gave it a shot. 

They kind-off alleviate part of the problem, sharing and receiving feedback is more streamlined. Frame.io even has plug-ins for a small number of popular video editing software integrating them with their ecosystem of apps and web platforms. 

The downsides? Well the two most time consuming steps are still present, exporting and uploading each time feedback is required. Adding the additional costs commanded by these products and we still think things can be improved. 

A better way 

To give you a little background Flixier is a cloud powered video editing software. So what does that mean for you? Well a couple of important things but today I will touch on the most relevant to our subject, Cloud storage. Storing your project files in one single place in the cloud is great because it allows you to free up a lot of space on your computer and it also allows us to do a lot of cool tricks with them. One of them is completely changing the communication workflow into something like this:   

Edit video -> Share review link -> Get feedback -> Repeat

Quite a different approach but getting into details reveals even more great things: 

          1. Edit video - this of course stays, you get to keep to doing what you love. 

          2. Share review link - well this is new, and it is so new that you probably only heard about it in tools like Google Docs or Figma. This feature allows you to share a link with your colleagues and clients without having to export your video,  since all the files are already in the cloud you don't even need to upload anything. All you have to do is click 2 or 3 buttons.

          3. Get feedback - this part is also very easy to get around now, you collaborators can click anywhere in the video they receive via the link and leave a time based comment. These comments show up directly in your video editor and in the future we will even integrate them in your timeline.

          4. Repeat - After making all the changes, magic truly starts to happen, now you don't have to repeat the whole export/upload process, all that needs to be done is to click "update link" and your collaborators can see the new version instantly. We will even build a versioning system so you can check previous versions of your project instantly.

Try it now! 

When the project is signed-off all you have to do is export it and you might know by now that exporting any video in Flixier takes a minute or so. 

I will let you be the judge of how useful this is but the people we showed it to loved it already. Create a Flixier account now and let us know what you think.