Kollaborate
Pro Maintenance Tools
Pro Media Tools
CinePlay
Post Haste
Preference Manager
FCS Remover|
Maintain, optimize and troubleshoot your NLE
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Professional cloud workflow platform
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Simplified media management
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Kollaborate 3.0.1 is now live on the cloud. Here's what's new:
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.
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.
You can now manually mark a file as viewed or unviewed by you.
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.
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 descriptions are now optional and tasks no longer have to have a due date.
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
Pro Media Tools 1.8 is a major update to our suite of media management tools. Here's what's new.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We've just launched a public beta of a new tool for self-hosted Kollaborate customers that makes it easy to get up and running with minimal configuration.
Kollaborate Server Manager runs Kollaborate Server and Kollaborate Encoder in Docker containers on your system and handles downloading, setting up and running the software for you. The current release is Mac-only but we will have a Windows version available soon.
The software allows you to easily view logs all in one place, meaning you don't have to go hunting to find the PHP log if a problem occurs.
There are also options to make it easy to edit configuration files and get access to the server through the terminal.
This beta is intended for testing purposes and customer feedback only and we do not yet intend for it to be used in a production environment as we have not yet optimized it for performance and security. However, in the longer term we will be deprecating support for running the software directly on Mac and PC and making it Linux-only, so in future Kollaborate Server Manager will be the only way to run it on a Mac or PC server.
The current beta lacks the ability for Kollaborate Server to send emails and run over SSL, however all other features are operational and you can upload files and use it normally. Kollaborate Encoder is feature complete in this version.
This software requires a valid Kollaborate Server license or trial (contact us if you'd like to sign up for the trial). You can download the beta here.
We're pleased to announce that we will be exhibiting at NAB this year, from April 8th-11th 2019. We will be located in the Lower South Hall at booth SL15205.
We will be showcasing a preview of Kollaborate 3.0, a major update to our cloud workflow platform with lots of new, exciting and powerful features to improve your workflow and make it easier to coordinate with your colleagues and clients.
Use our guest pass code LV3792 to get free access to the exhibit hall (must be redeemed before March 25th).
Kollaborate Server 2.7.3 adds lots of new features and fixes to our self-hosted workflow platform, along with a corresponding update for Kollaborate Encoder.
Renaming a file no longer launches a dialog box or takes you to a different page - it now happens directly in the Files view. This is a better user experience and matches what you would expect in Finder or Windows Explorer.Â
Audio files now show a playhead over their waveform, allowing you to easily skip to specific points in the file.Â
Dates on comments and files now update dynamically to ensure they are accurate without needing to reload the page - i.e. instead of saying "just now" until you hit refresh, it will now say "x minutes ago" automatically depending on how much time has elapsed.
You can also click on a date on a file or comment to toggle between relative and absolute dates.
We've made lots of user interface improvements including new button styles and a new avatar style with a greater range of colors.Â
Server-specific features
Full changelog:
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).
We've listened to customer feedback on our cloud workflow platform and Kollaborate 2.7.2 has a lot of great new features, both large and small, that customers have been asking for.
Kollaborate now supports segmented uploads, meaning that not only can you upload larger files to the site, but your uploads should be both faster and more reliable.
This will soon be the default option on the site but for now it is opt-in. To enable it, head to the beta page and tick the box marked Large file uploads then click Save. Note that this is a per-browser setting so you will need to re-enable it if you switch to a different browser or computer.
Once enabled, segmenting will work automatically for all files over 20 MB. For now the new upper limit is 50 GB per file, but we will likely raise it further as we get closer to making it the default option.
We're keen to hear feedback on this feature, especially from people outside of the US. Your feedback will help us tune it further and make it even faster.
Renaming a file no longer launches a dialog box or takes you to a different page - it now happens directly in the Files view. This is a better user experience and matches what you would expect in Finder or Windows Explorer.Â
Audio files now show a playhead over their waveform, allowing you to easily skip to specific points in the file.Â
Dates on comments and files now update dynamically to ensure they are accurate without needing to reload the page - i.e. instead of saying "just now" until you hit refresh, it will now say "x minutes ago" automatically depending on how much time has elapsed.
You can also click on a date on a file or comment to toggle between relative and absolute dates.
We've made lots of user interface improvements including new button styles and a new avatar style with a greater range of colors.Â
A lot of the changes in this version are on the back-end, including an overhaul of how we manage logins and active sessions. These features may not be noticeable but they pave the way for a lot of exciting things we plan to deliver in the near future.
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.
Cut Notes
CinePlay
Aspect Ratio Matte Generator
Video Space Calculator