The advantages of real-time online collaboration for video editing

Working as a team is supposed to help you finish projects faster and result in a higher quality of the final product, but unfortunately, when it comes to video editing, collaboration has always been a bit of a pain point. Working together might be easy enough if all the editors are working in the same location, but work from home is becoming more and more popular and sadly, despite that, remote video collaboration is something that's neglected by a lot of video editing tools. Even disregarding that, however, there are a lot still a lot of issues with regular video collaboration: a NAS can be prohibitively expensive for a small marketing department, and so are video editing workstations. More on that below: 

Pitfalls of traditional online collaboration methods

The most common way people tend to work on videos together at a distance is by sending each other the project files, but having to send around large files is often clumsy and prone to errors. Not only does it require fast internet speeds (which are a luxury in some places) and lots of storage (be it local or in the cloud), but it also makes it incredibly difficult to keep track of different versions of the project and implement everyone’s changes effectively. Sure, this is far from an insurmountable obstacle, especially for a team that’s experienced and well organized, but everyone who’s ever had to work with others knows that you don’t always choose your teammates and that sometimes, people who are otherwise extremely talented may not necessarily be the best when it comes to organizing things. 

Another common issue with traditional collaboration in video editing is receiving feedback. Even if you don’t need to share the editing duties with anyone else, you still might find yourself in a position where you constantly need to ask others for their opinion on the changes you make. This usually involves sending over project files, but if the person who’s providing the feedback is not necessarily a video editor themselves, it might mean having to render different iterations of the video over and over again so you can show them your work. 

This means spending a lot of time looking at progress bars and waiting around on your computer to finish rendering instead of actually editing.. 

That’s not to mention that since video files can’t be easily annotated like a word document, the feedback you receive can often be messy and imprecise, requiring you to spend even more time trying to figure exactly what the other person was referring to or asking questions trying to determine what they meant. And as we all know, even the smallest task can become annoying when you have to ask a dozen questions before starting on it, or when you have to re-do it over and over again because it didn't come out right the first time. 

How real-time collaboration can help your workflow

The issues we brought up above are the reason why, when developing Flixier, we focused a lot on making sure our software facilitates collaboration.

Review links

The Reviews feature, for example, allows you to generate a Review Link that can be shared with your team or clients. This allows them to watch your video without requiring any rendering or downloading of files and even keeps track of versions automatically, making it easy to compare between the current version and the previous ones. 

Comments

The review screen also allows people to pinpoint exact moments in the video and leave comments. You are notified each time someone makes a comment and you can reply to them instantaneously, allowing for quick and precise feedback that is much more constructive than long, drawn out e-mails. 

Sharing projects with your team

Another feature that we worked hard on is giving users the ability to share projects with their team members. What this means is that multiple people can work on the same project and their changes will be automatically synchronized, without anyone having to swap any files around. We feel that this is a huge improvement over most of the other solutions available on the market right now and proper use of it can streamline your workflow to a huge degree.  

Our goal is to provide people with a product that makes their job easier and faster. We hope that our collaboration features help do just that and we’re looking forward to expanding them as time goes on.

Other benefits of using Flixier

Collaboration is far from the only way in which Flixier can help your video editing workflow, however. It's an online video editor with cloud processing, so it's focused on speed. This makes it the perfect tool for relatively simple tasks that you want to do quickly. For example, you can use Flixier to merge videos online. No matter how long your files are, the final video will be rendered in under 3 minutes, since we're using our own heavy-duty cloud servers to do the processing rather than relying on your computer. This means you can get the task out of your way quickly and move on to more pressing issues, without your computer being taken hostage by the rendering process. 

On top of that, there's also things like annotating videos. You can use Flixier to record your screen and add text, images and even drawings to the videos easily, without leaving your web browser. This lets you make short tutorials for your co-workers, clients and team members without having to waste time firing up OBS and waiting for Premiere or other traditional video editing software to render a video that's just going to be watched once and then forgotten in a Downloads folder. 

Of course, Flixier isn't really limited to basic tasks. We offer a full editing platform that has pretty much everything you need in order to create professional videos. You can easily add motion titles, animate elements using keyframes, or enhance your videos using our brightness, saturation, sharpness and color correction sliders. Our editor is also more than capable of multi-track editing using footage from different sources, audio enhancements and green screen effects. You don't have to take our word for it though! You can try it out for yourself right now. Give it a shot, you don't even need to create an account!