Amazon Chime is a communications service from Amazon Web Services with a built-in VoIP solution. Amazon Chime can be used for online meetings, video conferencing, and business calling, and features pay-as-you-go pricing.
$0
per minute
Yamdu
Score 6.5 out of 10
N/A
Short description: Yamdu is a production management software for visual content. It offers tools for all departments and stages of a film, television or commercial production.
Amazon Chime is well suited for online video and audio meetings, IMs, and conducting training sessions using a whiteboard. It can be integrated well with Google Calendar and Microsoft outlook. With Amazon Chime mobile app you can attend meetings on the go as well. Meetings can be locked so that only legitimate participants can join the meeting. Amazon Chime is less suited in case you want meeting transcripts as well for your meetings. Given that Amazon Chime is not used by a larger audience so your client or customer may face some difficulties in join the meeting or accessing some of the features of the Chime.
Even for a small business like mine, Yamdu really felt like a one-stop shop for everything. It's hard to find a comprehensive software for film/video productions, but Yamdu has everything we need. The only thing that really held us back was the cost, ultimately. If anything, I would love a storyboarding feature that let you set the time per shot and build out a sequence in pre-production. I used Storyboarder for this currently and it's very helpful, especially for music videos, to be able to build out a storyboard, set a music/audio track to it, then play it back in real time and see the pacing of the shoot.
More simplified dial-in numbers. The PIN for our conference line is long and easy to mistype.
You do not have to download the Chime app in order to join a conference, but if you want to do anything beyond join (schedule a conference, participate in a group chat, control participants), you have to have the app downloaded and installed. The app that you have to download in order to launch a conference is a memory hog, and slows down a computer's boot up time.
The add-in for Microsoft Outlook is particularly clunky. It helps you add scheduled conference calls/video conferences to your Outlook calendar, but it can cause Outlook to crash, and creates a really slow open time for Outlook. If you can avoid downloading the Outlook Add-In, I would.
They were very supportive in answering all of our questions when we had problems. Their in-person calls but their support site also had a full set of information that can answer a good portion of your questions before you have to pick up the phone. But when you, you will get good service.
Better than Skype for Business in terms of loading the application onto your device. Skype had crashing issues always and those are comparatively low when using Amazon Chime. Amazon chime is fast and easy to work with while collaborating and setting up meetings. The audio and video quality are better than Skype for Business.
At the time, there really wasn't anything else like Yamdu. Especially as, in Celtx's case, at that time they weren't doing Excel/CSV exports of shot lists in the A/V format, something we required for what we were shooting. I understand that StudioBinder has increased its featureset the past few years, but Yamdu always felt like the most robust option and more familiar with the film/tv world.
The positive ROI is Amazon Chime helps make our sales reps more professional in their calls leading to an increase in closed/won deals.
Amazon Chime has increased overall morale across our sales team because it has greatly improved our call processes when compared to other tools we've used in the past.
