Widen your opportunities with Widen!
February 23, 2022
Widen your opportunities with Widen!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Widen
Widen is the backbone of our content and creative muscle. We implemented Widen to solve the critical issues of file sharing, storage, and recall that we were having in our various and scattered methods. With one account and many users, we're able to upload all of our creative files not only for sharing and distribution but archive for historic purposes down the road. The customization that Widen allows us has truly helped in quickly and properly tagging our files so they don't get lost in the terabytes of information we upload. By partitioning off our users to access only the files they need to see, we're able to easily ensure accidents won't be made. It's been very helpful and improved our efficiency greatly.
- Widen shares files quickly and easily with no concerns about company firewalls limiting accessibility.
- Widen handles bulk uploads and tagging really well
- Widen's user administration and realtime access to update settings is very powerful.
- Widen could improve its interface to a more media/editor-oriented look. Having many years of experience in video editing applications, the capability to quickly sort, see and update video files on the fly has always been appreciated. In Widen's all or one approach to changing metadata, this can be limited to someone with video editing/logging experience.
- Bounding box selections in Widen seem very picky or particular. If you don't have the mouse in just the right area, you won't know that you can even create a bounding box. So I would say updating the selectivity features would be a good area to look at.
- Editing video files or selecting partial portions of videos would be fantastic! We use Widen as our b-roll library of footage and often may only need 10 seconds of a 7-minute video. Having the option of pulling only a select portion would be excellent.
- Editing videos already existing in the Widen library would be great. For example, combining one video with another to then create a separate video would be a great feature.
- Widen is accessible by all across our organization.
- Users and administrators can control with great confidence who can access which set of assets
- User administration is simple, efficient and effective.
- Asset management can be quick and painless, or in depth and painless.
- Widen has centralized our storage methods and eliminated the need for shared network folders with limited control over naming and tagging conventions.
- The user administration features that are placed in our hands and not the IT department's hands are hands down (see what I did there) the best and easiest control we've experienced.
- Since the pandemic started, our ability to work seamlessly and efficiently with a network of freelance artists and designers has skyrocketed all thanks to Widen.
I would like to see our organization use Widen to its full extent via the excellent file hosting and insight capabilities it has. While we use the storage aspect of Widen extensively, we still use other third-party distributors for media sharing and measuring. There is great power left in the bank that I'd like to see spent when it comes to Widen's abilities.
Widens DAM system has extensive power in publishing and repurposing brand-approved content via API tools, custom configurations, embed code functionality, and other integrations. Our current processes haven't quite dipped into these useful tools however we're undergoing a complete overhaul on our processes and we anticipate these will be useful to our protocols in the near future.
My background and career are video production-based. Therefore, my knowledge and preferences are guided by video asset management systems. I've worked with CatDV and am now researching the iconic brand. The video tools and capabilities in those products far outweigh Widen, however, they're not really apples-to-apples comparisons to be fair as they are designed with different missions in mind.
Do you think Widen delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Widen's feature set?
Yes
Did Widen live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Widen go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Widen again?
Yes