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Kollaborate 3.0.1 - Hide comments from certain users, file pinning, higher quality encoding and more

Kollaborate 3.0.1 is now live on the cloud. Here's what's new:

Hide comments from certain users

You can now choose to hide others' comments when creating a link or when editing permissions for a team member. This means the person can only view comments they made and replies to those comments.

File pinning

Pinning a file or folder makes sure it always displays at the top of the Files page, regardless of how files are sorted. This can be useful to highlight important files to your team.

Mark as Viewed / Unviewed

You can now manually mark a file as viewed or unviewed by you.

Better searching

Advanced Search now populates your current search when you go back to it, so it can be edited or tweaked.

Additionally, we've added new criteria for you to search against: Tag Value, Is Pinned, Version Title, Status Text, File Workflow, Color, Is Alias, Viewed by Me.

SVG logos

You can now upload your company logo as an SVG. Vector SVGs are now our recommended logo format to ensure your logo always looks crisp regardless of screen size or DPI.

Task improvements

Task descriptions are now optional and tasks no longer have to have a due date.

Higher quality encoding beta

When we first launched the site in 2013, the biggest factor affecting viewing experience was CPU processing power - even on desktop computers - so our proxies are optimized to decode quickly and not cause the CPU to spike too much.

However, since then devices and browsers have become much more optimized at playing video. If we sacrifice some compatibility with very old devices (such as the iPad 2 from 2011) we can produce better quality video at lower file sizes.

Because it only affects devices that are 8 or so years old, we're not expecting it to have a big compatibility impact, but we're running it as a beta just in case. You can opt in to the beta here.

Better technical data gathering

A feature that's not visible to users is much better logging of technical data at our end. This allows us to respond better to usage spikes, errors and fine-tune the site to ensure everything stays fast. We have plans to optimize things even further over the next few months.

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. To find out more, see the overview or register for the free trial.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Dec 5 2019 to DR News, Front Page News, Kollaborate
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Black Friday Sale 2019 - Discounts on Kollaborate Server and desktop products

This year we're discounting the following products from November 27th through December 6th 2019:

Pro Maintenance Tools - $129 $99

Pro Media Tools - $99 $79

CinePlay for Mac - $29 $19

Kollaborate Server Small Business - $599 $479

Kollaborate Server Business - $999 $799

Kollaborate Server Unlimited - $1499 $1199

Kollaborate Encoder - $199 $159

Posted by Jon Chappell on Nov 27 2019 to DR News, Front Page News
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Pro Maintenance Tools 2.3 - macOS 10.15 compatibility, Dark Mode, plugin installer notarizing

Last week we released Pro Maintenance Tools 2.3, a major update to our suite of tools for maintaining, optimizing and troubleshooting your editing system.

Catalina support

Pro Maintenance Tools is now compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina. Because Catalina removes 32-bit app support, this required us to transition away from QuickTime and use the more modern AV Foundation framework instead. This comes with numerous benefits, but also the downside that codec support is more limited. As a result, some features were removed or restricted with this release:

  • Media Salvage no longer supports Apple Intermediate Codec
  • You can no longer use third-party codecs with Corrupt Clip Finder

Dark Mode

Pro Maintenance Tools has full support for Dark Mode on macOS 10.14 and higher, respecting whichever look you've set under Appearance in System Preferences.

Plugin installer notarization

Plugin Manager now supports notarization, which is a requirement for all apps in order to run on Catalina. Plugin Manager takes care of almost all of the process for you, but it requires you to setup an App-Specific Password for your Apple developer account first. We've written up a tutorial detailing exactly how to notarize here.

Also note that disk images should be notarized too, so Plugin Manager also includes a feature to notarize them under the Tools menu.

We recommend plugin creators utilizing our installers to recreate them with the latest version to make sure users can continue to use them on modern versions of macOS.

Pro Maintenance Tools is an invaluable toolset to help working video professionals get up and running again quickly in the event of a problem. To find out more, see the feature overview, read the user manual, watch the overview video or download the free 15-day trial.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Nov 11 2019 to Pro Maintenance Tools, Front Page News, DR News
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Recent updates - November 2019

In case you missed it, here are some recent software updates for our products.

Cut Notes for iPad 2.5.4 - Nov 7 2019

  • Fixed a crash when authorizing with Dropbox

Pro Maintenance Tools 2.3 - Nov 6 2019

  • macOS 10.15 Catalina compatibility
  • Dark Mode support
  • Migrated away from QuickTime to AV Foundation - this means that older/third-party codecs are no longer supported by Corrupt Clip Finder and Media Salvage
  • Plugin Manager - Support for notarizing installers for macOS 10.15 Catalina - please recreate your existing installers
  • Various bug fixes and code modernizations

Kollaborate Folder Watcher 1.3.4 - Oct 23 2019

  • macOS 10.15 Catalina compatibility
  • Dark Mode support
  • Stability improvements
  • Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

CinePlay 1.6.3 - Oct 21 2019

  • macOS 10.15 Catalina compatibility
  • Dark Mode support
  • Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Transfer 1.5.4 - Oct 21 2019

Important: The QuickTime fallback for older/third-party codecs has been removed, so these files will no longer be converted. But you can upload the file as-is and choose Actions > Create Playable Versions in the player to convert on the cloud.

  • macOS 10.15 Catalina compatibility
  • Dark Mode support
  • Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Marker Import for Mac 2.2.2 - Oct 17 2019

  • macOS 10.15 Catalina compatibility
  • Dark Mode support
  • Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Post Haste for Mac 2.6.5 - Oct 16 2019

  • Compatibility with macOS Catalina
  • Dark Mode support
  • Project file templates are now ordered alphabetically
  • Updated project file templates for new Adobe apps
  • Added an explanation of what Kiosk Mode is and how to switch it off again when invoking it
  • Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Compressor Repair 2.3.5 - Oct 16 2019

  • macOS 10.15 Catalina compatibility
  • Dark Mode support
  • Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

FCS Remover 3.1.6 - Oct 16 2019

  • macOS 10.15 Catalina compatibility
  • Dark Mode support
  • Added a more informative error message if your selected apps result in no files to remove
  • Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Preference Manager 4.4.4 - Oct 15 2019

  • Compatibility with macOS 10.15 Catalina
  • Dark Mode support
  • Fixed an issue where enabling a password at startup couldn't be disabled again
  • Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Cut Notes for iPad 2.5.3 - Oct 9 2019

  • Fixed an incompatibility with changes made to realtime / synced sessions on the Kollaborate cloud site
Posted by Jon Chappell on Nov 7 2019 to DR News
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Recent updates - October 2019

In case you missed it, here are some recent software updates for our products.

CinePlay 1.6.2 - Oct 2 2019

  • Fixed an incompatibility with changes made to realtime / synced sessions on the Kollaborate cloud site
Posted by Jon Chappell on Oct 7 2019 to DR News
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Kollaborate Server 3.0 - redesigned UI, Documents, Transcripts, Servers page and more

Recently we released Kollaborate Server 3.0, a major update to our self-hosted workflow platform. This follows on from the release of Kollaborate 3.0 on the cloud version of the site.

New UI

We've made many changes to improve the user interface, the most significant of which is the vertical navigation bar which is designed to balance out the interface and place your content closer to the center of the screen.

If you find yourself needing more horizontal space, hover over the Kollaborate logo at the top left and click the arrow that appears to collapse the navigation bar. The navigation bar will automatically collapse by itself on small displays or when you resize your browser window.

Documents

While video is the most popular format used on the site, our customers also upload many other file types such as MS Word and PowerPoint documents. The only way to view these files in the past was to download them.

Now Kollaborate has a specific Document file type that supports file extensions like PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, ODT, ODP. These files will now show thumbnails and be viewable directly in the browser once converted by our servers.

Leaving a comment on a document now tags that comment with the current page number and clicking on a comment will immediately take you to that page.

New Servers page

Encoding server configuration has been moved to its own separate page of the Admin Area.

Moving encoding servers to their own page allows us to offer more settings and features in future, including Kollaborate Hybrid Cloud, which will allow you to offset some of your encoding and other tasks to our servers. We plan to launch this feature in the near future.

Transcript tab

Add transcripts to your videos either manually or by importing SRT or VTT captions. Export as SRT, VTT or plain text. Captions will appear automatically over your video.

The cloud version of the site has a beta of our machine learning-powered automatic transcription feature. Because this is still a beta and is regularly undergoing changes, we're not making it available to self-hosted customers just yet but plan to in future once things have stabilized a bit more.

Customizable file columns

Columns in List view on the Files page can now be resized or dragged to change their order. You can also right-click to hide them or show additional columns. You can now, for example, show the number of comments a file has next to its name and sort the list by this field.

Advanced Search

Advanced Search has been completely overhauled to be more powerful. Use criteria like file size, type or width to narrow down your search. You can even locate files with specific words in their transcript.

Overhauled image viewer

Images can now be zoomed and navigated with a lot more control than before. Annotations can be drawn over the image at any zoom level.

Version names

Versions can be given custom names like "Rough Cut" or "Fine Cut". To do this, click the purple number next to the filename to view all of the versions, then right-click a version and select Rename Version.

Comment attachments

Even though you can leave comments at specific timecode positions and draw over a video, sometimes that isn't enough to get your point across, so you can now attach files to comments. So you can say "I want the color to look like this" and attach a photo, rather than trying to describe it.

This release also contains hundreds of small tweaks, bug fixes and improvements.

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. Kollaborate Server allows you to host the platform in-house on your own servers and storage. To find out more, see the Kollaborate Server overview or register for the free cloud trial (Server trials are available on request).

Posted by Jon Chappell on Sep 11 2019 to DR News, Front Page News, Kollaborate
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Recent updates - September 2019

In case you missed it, here are some recent software updates for our products.

CinePlay 1.6.1 - Sep 4 2019

    •    IMPORTANT: This version is required to register the software and older versions will no longer register with our website. This doesn't affect you if you've already registered it to your computer and only applies to new registrations.  
    •    Improved drop-frame timecode compatibility
    •    Improved memory usage
    •    Fixed several timecode issues that could occur when exporting files
    •    Fixed an issue where exported files could have no file extension if you deleted it from the filename
    •    Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate Encoder 1.4 - Aug 28 2019

Compatibility notes

  • See the installation guide for details on configuring the new document conversion feature

Changes in 1.4:

  • Support for converting documents to PDFs for Kollaborate Server 3.0's Document file type
  • Better support for videos with non-square pixels
  • Improved audio track mapping if each track has more than one channel
  • Fixed an issue where the queue could stall
  • Stopped failing jobs from repeating over and over again
  • Many under-the-hood tweaks and improvements

Kollaborate Server 3.0 - Aug 28 2019

Compatibility notes:

  • Kollaborate Server now requires PHP 7.2 or higher
  • libav support has been removed - to switch to ffmpeg see the installation guide
  • We have significantly modified the default page style so you may need to tweak any custom styles you have created
  • The Messages feature has been removed

Server-specific features

  • Encoding Server information is now stored in the database and can be modified from the new Servers page in the Admin Area. Additionally, the step to add encoders during installation has now been moved after database setup.
  • Installer - Added a check for PHP open_basedir setting that could prevent Kollaborate Server from accessing the storage volume
  • Admin Dashboard: Support for manually clearing deleted files and projects
  • Admin Area - Only superadmins can see Servers, Config and Tools pages now

Changes in Kollaborate Server 3.0

  • Transcription - Add captions manually or import them from SRT/VTT files. (Automatic transcription is currently cloud-only and will be available to self-hosted customers in future as the feature matures.)
  • Redesigned UI with navigation bar on the left
  • New Document format displays Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents and PDFs directly in the browser and allows page-specific comments
  • Customizable file columns - Reorder, resize and hide file columns in Detail view on the Files page. You can also show additional columns like the number of comments and sort by these fields.
  • Advanced Search - More powerful searching based on combining parameters like title, description, width, transcript text, etc. Search within the current directory or across the entire project at once.
  • Image viewer - Zoom and pan across an image with more control. Draw annotations at any zoom level.
  • Version names - Give versions custom names like "Rough Cut" or "Fine Cut"
  • Comment attachments - Attach existing files to a comment or upload new files directly when creating a new comment. This is useful for directing people to specific files.
  • Share a folder directly from its file page
  • The page footer shows how many files / items are on a page
  • Uploads - Fixed an issue where uploads could be terminated if they took too long
  • Comments - Fixed an issue where replies could be sorted out of order
  • Comments - Adding a comment no longer relies on the user's local clock being set to the correct time
  • Projects - Fixed an issue where muting a project could show a duplicate of the project in the Projects list
  • Files - Better support for files with non-square pixels
  • Files - Fixed an issue where video files could be detected as audio only
  • Projects - Restoring a deleted project now correctly recalculates the project's total size
  • Usage - Fixed an issue where deleted files would show up on the Usage page
  • Alerts - When uploading a revision, subscribers of the old file are now automatically subscribed to the new one
  • Files - Support for MP2, MPA and JFIF formats
  • UI - Pages now show the number of items (files, workflows, tasks, etc) in the page footer
  • Player - Prev / Next buttons now take into account File page sorting
  • Player - Fixed an issue where subtitles wouldn't disappear from a video when the relationship link is removed
  • Uploads - The current upload rate (MB/s) is now shown
  • Overhauled how login sessions work
  • History - Project history is now stored for up to 1 year
  • UI - Removed unnecessary/duplicated options from the top of the Files page
  • Uploads - Improved how Kollaborate Server deals with a storage drive that runs out of disk space
  • UI - Various optimizations to improve file drawing performance
  • UI - Prevented non-admins from seeing the Usage page
  • Various tweaks / improvements to Adobe panel view
  • Dashboard - Fixed incorrect task URLs
  • Dashboard - File titles are now resized to fit
  • Files - Loosened the permissions for creating aliases
  • Player - Hide cursor in full screen when UI is not showing
  • Player - Version dropdown now includes thumbnails
  • Files - Unimportant column data is now in a smaller font
  • Uploads - Fixed an issue with partial progress bars showing if a file uploads too quickly
  • Player - Support for rendering PDFs natively in the browser
  • Player - Info below the video is now a tabbed view
  • Share - Fixed an issue where the password wouldn't be shown when creating an upload request link
  • API - Fixed an issue where deleted projects could be displayed within apps
  • Upload - Prevented upload links working with deleted projects
  • Tasks - Fixed an issue where searches wouldn't persist when moving to a different page
  • Encoding - Randomized ordering of sending jobs to encoding servers to more efficiently split the load
  • Encoding - Fixed an issue where jobs not assigned to a server would get stuck in the queue even when encoders came back online again
  • Player - Fixed an issue where captions couldn't be switched off on Chrome
  • History / Dashboard - Fixed some issues with displaying Unicode strings
  • Files - Fixed multiple downloads not working correctly on Chrome
  • Lots of under-the-hood tweaks and improvements

Pro Maintenance Tools 2.2.7 - Aug 8 2019

  • Corrupt Clip Finder - Fixed an issue where some files might get erroneously flagged up
  • Plugin Manager - Better support for running installer scripts that take a while or require user input
  • Updated Crash Analyzer definitions
  • Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations
Posted by Jon Chappell on Sep 7 2019 to DR News
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Recent updates - August 2019

In case you missed it, here are some recent software updates for our products.

Pro Media Tools 1.8 - Jul 30 2019

  • Auto Transfer - Added a Checksum Validator to compare two or more drives, directories or files
  • Auto Transfer - Added a right-click option to add a mounted drive as a destination
  • Auto Transfer - Added file sizes to transfer log
  • QT Edit - Various conforming improvements
  • QT Edit - Added an option to switch off frame rate inversion when conforming, which can sometimes fix issues converting from fractional (e.g. 23.976) and integer (e.g. 25) frame rates
  • Edit Detector - Numbers in filenames are now padded
  • Video Check - Added space, JKL and arrow key shortcuts to navigate the video
  • Minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

CinePlay 1.6 - Jul 23 2019

  • Playheads can be ganged either from the start of the file (this is the previous behavior) or from an arbitrary point within each file
  • Override timecode start position for a movie by going to Edit > Modify Timecode Start
  • Various tweaks to rewinding / fast forward behavior
  • Fixed an issue where the timecode of exported movies could have an incorrect start point
  • Fixed an issue where the app may not jump to markers correctly
  • Fixed an issue where the movie view may sometimes steal key presses away from textboxes
  • Various minor bug fixes, tweaks and optimizations

Kollaborate 3.0 - Jul 11 2019

  • Transcription - Transcribe files either manually or automatically with our AI transcription (beta). Correct incorrect transcriptions and click the Learn button to help Kollaborate improve transcription in future.
  • Redesigned UI with navigation bar on the left
  • New Document format displays Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents and PDFs directly in the browser and allows page-specific comments
  • Customizable file columns - Reorder, resize and hide file columns in Detail view on the Files page. You can also show additional columns like the number of comments and sort by these fields.
  • Advanced Search - More powerful searching based on combining parameters like title, description, width, transcript text, etc. Search within the current directory or across the entire project at once.
  • Image viewer - Zoom and pan across an image with more control. Draw annotations at any zoom level.
  • Version names - Give versions custom names like "Rough Cut" or "Fine Cut"
  • Comment attachments - Attach existing files to a comment or upload new files directly when creating a new comment. This is useful for directing people to specific files.
  • Three files now upload simultaneously, which should make uploading large batches faster
  • Share a folder directly from its file page
  • The page footer shows how many files / items are on a page
  • Lots of small tweaks and bug fixes
Posted by Jon Chappell on Aug 7 2019 to DR News
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Pro Media Tools 1.8 - manual checksum validator, conform improvements and more

Pro Media Tools 1.8 is a major update to our suite of media management tools. Here's what's new.

Checksum Validator

Auto Transfer has always checksummed your files when copying them, but it now has a tool to manually verify checksums. It's very flexible - drag in multiple drives, folders or files and it will generate checksums and compare them all.

This is helpful for verifying data integrity between two sources that Auto Transfer didn't copy, or were copied a long time ago.

Conform improvements

QT Edit has undergone several changes to improve frame rate conforming. Most of these are under the hood changes but there is one user-facing addition.

We've added a new checkbox to the Conform pane to disable frame rate inversion. Like the other options on that pane, most people should not need to check it, but this option can help when converting from a non-integer frame rate (e.g. 23.976) to an integer frame rate (e.g. 25). You should only use this option if you get incorrect results with it switched off.

Other changes

 

  • Auto Transfer - Added a right-click option to add a mounted drive as a destination
  • Auto Transfer - Added file sizes to transfer log
  • Edit Detector - Numbers in filenames are now padded
  • Video Check - Added space, JKL and arrow key shortcuts to navigate the video

Pro Media Tools is an essential toolkit for media professionals. To find out more, view the feature list, read the user manual or download the free 15-day trial.

 

Posted by Jon Chappell on Jul 31 2019 to DR News, Front Page News, Pro Media Tools
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Kollaborate 3.0 - AI transcription, new UI, Documents, customizable file columns and more

Kollaborate 3.0 is out now on the cloud, which is a major update to our workflow platform that both delivers new features and sets a foundation for future features to build upon.

AI transcription (Beta)

We're using machine learning technology to create transcripts of the spoken audio in your videos. Kollaborate will automatically highlight the current sentence as the video plays and you can click on sentences to jump to that point in the video.

Kollaborate uses the transcript to create automatic captions below the video and you can even export them as a separate file in common formats like SRT or VTT.

Best of all, this technology is completely self-contained on our servers. Privacy is extremely important to us so we wanted a solution that protected our users' data and did not share it with third-parties. We needed a solution that would also work for our self-hosted customers, some of whom host in environments with no external internet connection.

While it would have been trivial from an engineering perspective to integrate with something like Google or Amazon's speech-to-text technology like our competitors do, those services do not meet this criteria. After a lot of investigation and some code contributions, we finally settled on Mozilla's DeepSpeech. This is a more complex solution to the problem but it gives us maximum flexibility and the ability to finely tailor the technology to fit our customers' specific use-cases.

Our competitors charge extra for transcription and limit the number of hours per month you can transcribe. Using DeepSpeech allows us to make our transcription service free and unlimited. Transcribe as many files as you like for no extra cost and the only limitation is how quickly our servers can process the queue.

Because our speech models are still being refined, we're calling this a beta so that customer expectations are aligned correctly. You can read more details about the situations the model performs best at here, but the short explanation is that content like podcasts and voiceovers will currently return the best results. That's not to say that the transcription feature can't be used in other situations, but the technology is likely to make more mistakes. Over time we will expand the number of situations in which it performs well.

We're building our models on both open source data and data that more reflects our customers' use-cases. You can help improve transcription by correcting any mistakes and then clicking the Learn button. We don't use your data without permission so it is only used when the Learn button is clicked, and you can specify if we can use the entire file or just the sentences you corrected.

The audio of the file then gets cut up into pieces, given a random filename and uses the transcript you provided for training. We don't share your original audio with anyone and once it's part of the model the audio can't be extracted back in its original form.

Another way you can help is by contributing your voice to Mozilla's Common Voice project. This is a public domain speech dataset used by Kollaborate, Firefox and a variety of other projects to create open and privacy-conscious speech technology. All voice data is useful, but especially when it comes from women and non-Americans, who are currently underrepresented in Common Voice's dataset.

New UI

We've made many changes to improve the user interface, the most significant of which is the vertical navigation bar which is designed to balance out the interface and place your content closer to the center of the screen.

If you find yourself needing more horizontal space, hover over the Kollaborate logo at the top left and click the arrow that appears to collapse the navigation bar. The navigation bar will automatically collapse by itself on small displays or when you resize your browser window.

Documents

While video is the most popular format used on the site, our customers also upload many other file types such as MS Word and PowerPoint documents. The only way to view these files in the past was to download them.

Now Kollaborate has a specific Document file type that supports file extensions like PDF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX, ODT, ODP. These files will now show thumbnails and be viewable directly in the browser once converted by our servers.

Leaving a comment on a document now tags that comment with the current page number and clicking on a comment will immediately take you to that page.

Customizable file columns

Columns in List view on the Files page can now be resized or dragged to change their order. You can also right-click to hide them or show additional columns. You can now, for example, show the number of comments a file has next to its name and sort the list by this field.

Advanced Search

Advanced Search has been completely overhauled to be more powerful. Use criteria like file size, type or width to narrow down your search. You can even locate files with specific words in their transcript.

Overhauled image viewer

Images can now be zoomed and navigated with a lot more control than before. Annotations can be drawn over the image at any zoom level.

Version names

Versions can be given custom names like "Rough Cut" or "Fine Cut". To do this, click the purple number next to the filename to view all of the versions, then right-click a version and select Rename Version.

Comment attachments

Even though you can leave comments at specific timecode positions and draw over a video, sometimes that isn't enough to get your point across, so you can now attach files to comments. So you can say "I want the color to look like this" and attach a photo, rather than trying to describe it.

Other changes

  • Three files now upload simultaneously, which should make uploading large batches faster
  • The Files page has been overhauled to update dynamically without page refreshes. This should improve the speed of file browsing.
  • Share a folder directly from its file page
  • The page footer shows how many files / items are on a page
  • Lots of small tweaks and bug fixes

Coming soon

  • Kollaborate Archive - Cloud archival of your camera media and project files - entering beta soon
  • Video/audio comments - Leave audio or video comments without typing - opt-in available soon
  • Kollaborate Server 3.0 - Self-hosted version of Kollaborate 3.0 - coming in the next 2-3 weeks
  • Kollaborate Hybrid Cloud - Launching in conjunction with Kollaborate Server 3.0

Kollaborate is an essential cloud workflow platform that allows you to share files with clients and team members while integrating with Digital Rebellion apps and services. To find out more, see the overview or register for the free trial.

Posted by Jon Chappell on Jul 11 2019 to Front Page News, DR News, Kollaborate
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