Frame.io in New York offers a video collaboration platform, supporting the video editing process by providing creative teams with time stamped comments, annotations and hashtags, and an accelerated sharing and approval process, as well as integrations with popularly used editing tools (e.g. Final Cut Pro) to enhance the editing and collaboration process.
$15
per user/per month
Glip (discontinued)
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
Glip was a conversation platform to plan, share and organize work. Glip featured text and video chat at its core, with file sharing, collaborative task management, shared calendars, and automatic version control. Glip was acquired by RingCentral in 2015 and is no longer available standalone, though its features are included in RingCentral MVP.
The best thing about frame.io (and the reason we subscribed to the service in the first place), is it is very easy for clients to give notes when reviewing videos we produce for them. It allows them -- forces them, actually -- to give frame specific notes, so there is no confusion about what shot they are talking about. The one thing that would be nice would be another area for clients to make more global, general notes, so that both the global and specific notes could all be referenced in one place. But overall, had this service for about three years and still very happy with it.
Glip should definitely be on your shortlist for a team collaboration tool. Glip has a lower cost and contains all the features found in competitive tools such as Microsoft Teams and Webex Teams. Glip is also scalable and robust enough for large enterprises and is great to coordinate and document large projects with hundreds of tasks and hundreds of resources. Glip, MS, and Webex Teams are excellent for an individual to create and receive task assignments and document and complete those tasks but these tools do not replace enterprise project management software and tools. Glip, MS Teams, and Webex Teams quickly become complicated and disorganized and it becomes easy to drown in all the sea of data unless you work diligently and continually at organizing your workspace.
Simple UI. Its drag and drop interface makes uploading and organizing something that happens inherently. Versioning is a huge issue when reviewing videos and frame allows you to keep old versions while prioritizing updated edits on the same link.
Frame.io allows you to make accurate notes on a video down to the frame - including drawing on a frame to indicate exact details your notes refer to. This allows for your post team to know exactly what the note-maker is referring to.
Privacy settings. Frame has an easy way to manage sharing by providing a "review link" and a "presentation" - this allows you to limit whether a reviewer has access to provide notes or just to review an edit. Simple password protection is an option for any review as well as the option for allowing a file to be downloadable.
Though I love the integration with After Effects, it's a tiny bit buggy from time to time. You'll need to re-sign in once a week (at least, this is what my tests have determined) and there is an issue with timeline jumping. If you click onto a comment, the timeline takes you to the problem area, but if you move the playhead elsewhere and click onto the same comment, it will not return you to the location. You must first click onto a different comment, then back onto the original. It's silly, and to me, a bug that will be resolved eventually.
Frame.io does not provide an archiving feature, so it's a bit of sore spot to delete old videos. When running into storage problems, which you might depending on your plan, you'll need to remove old videos.
Video links play natively at 560p. I don't understand this, as 720p or 1080p should be the standard playback resolution. This means some clients might not be as technologically-savvy, and won't think to click onto the resolution button to upgrade the resolution playback. I've had clients ask why the video was "low-quality" when they needed to change the resolution. This feels like boneheaded development to me.
Glip has saved us so much time that my team could no longer live without it. I don't know what we would do. All of us used it constantly all day every day. It is one of the best tools in my arsenal!
I've used other video review systems, Frame was the only one I didn't question how they allowed you to review - I just started reviewing. It's that simple. It's easy to set up projects, invite collaborators, and then provide a final cut for download. It's naturally built for the kind of work that TV/Film & video production companies do.
I've only reached out to Frame.io a few times but they responded quickly and offered achievable solutions. The fact that I haven't had to reach out to them more is proof that the platform is easy to use, reliable, and can run on its own. The only issues we have had were related to uploading issues on our end.
We have a free account so I understand why we are not at the top of the list. But we have had issues before that took forever for them to get back to us. Once I had to make a Twitter account just to tweet at them about the issue and they finally got back to me. After several weeks. And the issue was something we just had to wait out for a few more days. Normally you have to submit a ticket through their support page and maybe they will get back to you and maybe not. We had one issue where the standard user on the iMac was getting popups every few minutes about installing a helper tool. The only way to fix this was to delete and reinstall Glip as an admin user. This was frustrating because it took time to do this for me as the IT person, and after reaching out to a few times, I was finally given an answer two years after I had asked about it! Finally some devs reach out to me on Glip and told me to just put the app in the user folder instead of the app folder which is managed by the admin account. They said it should be fixed now and I believe it is.
Frame.io is better when being compared to the Google Drive as a platform just because of the usability. Frame.io has a more simple design format, that makes organizing projects and file structures much more readily available when doing a quick search. The ability to review and comment on the different projects is also better in Frame.io as it shows who said what and at what timecode they are referring to.
Zoom, Slack, and Wunderlist are all great applications. They do a good job at one core focus. If your team is already familiar with these applications and satisfied with them, you can stick with them. I found Slack confusing and difficult to learn, as did others when onboarding. Zoom and Wunderlist both have a solid user interface and do their jobs well -- not many complaints from them. I just valued simplicity and ease of adoption, which made us look at Glip as one app to do it all.
Because Glip was free, it helped us save money on our chat app. While not a crucial part of the business, the costs of software for your company add up and it was nice that, in this case, it did not add to our expenses.
This isn't really Glip directly, but we used it because we were using RingCentral Meetings for video conferencing with clients, and unfortunately RingCentral Meetings was a bit difficult to use. This was often the client doing things wrong, but it was annoying to have frequent audio feedback, etc. So if that is part of your reason to use Glip, check out if you have any problems there first.
