We're now offering a free new tool to further enhance your Kollaborate cloud experience. With the Today extension, users on OS X 10.10 or higher can see project alerts directly in Notification Center without having to log into the site to check for them. This is a great way to see what's going on in your project quickly and easily from your desktop.

The extension can be toggled on and off from the Extensions pane of System Preferences. Full installation instructions are in the user manual.

The Today extension is available as part of Kollaborate Plugin Pack, which also allows you to upload directly to the cloud from your Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X timelines. In addition to the new extension, we've also made the following changes to the existing upload plugins:

• Export plugins now encode at a higher resolution
• The FCPX plugin is now more intelligent at choosing a thumbnail for the movie
• Changed how Kollaborate credentials are stored. Some users may be asked to login again.

Kollaborate is a cloud workflow platform to make sharing files and working with colleagues easy. To find out more, check out the quick overview, view the feature list or try the 15-day free trial.

Last week we released Kollaborate 1.4 on the cloud, with some great new features as requested by customers.

Team overhaul

Inviting users to a project is now quicker and simpler. Add as many email addresses as you like, then setup positions and email preferences and invite them to the project in one step.

You can also duplicate users into another department without having to re-invite them.

Full-screen commenting

Hover over the right-hand side of the video in full screen to view comments, add new ones and annotate the image.

Compare revision notes

View comments from previous revisions to check that your notes on the previous cut have been addressed in the new one.

Drag and drop uploading

Easily upload files to Kollaborate by dropping them directly into a department or folder from your operating system.

More permissions

Control whether team members can download files and share them with others. We have also tightened the default permissions for clients and agency reps to be more restrictive.

Link downloads

See how many times a link was downloaded and who downloaded it.

Kollaborate is a cloud workflow platform designed to help you work better with colleagues and clients. Upload files to the cloud, have them reviewed by others and then export their notes back to your editing application. To find out more, view the feature list or sign up for the free no-obligation 15-day trial (no credit card needed).

We've released several updates today to make our products OS X 10.11 El Capitan compatible in time for the operating system's public release on Wednesday.

This includes CinePlay 1.2.5, Pro Versioner 2.1.1, Pro Media Tools 1.4.1 and Pro Maintenance Tools 2.1.5. All remaining products did not need updates to be OS X 10.11 compatible.

Additionally, we made several other changes in Pro Maintenace Tools 2.1.5:

• Redesigned Housekeeper user interface
• Media Salvage - Fixed an issue where it may display an error if the source drive doesn't have enough space, even if a custom destination is set
• System Toolkit - Removed Verify / Repair Permissions options from the Disk tab due to them being unavailable in OS X 10.11
• Various other bug fixes and tweaks

Digital Rebellion products are used every day by studios and freelancers alike. To find out more, see our products page for a full listing.

We've just released a major new version of Pro Media Tools, our suite of media management tools for video professionals.

The focus of this release was Auto Transfer, our tool for offloading and verifying data from camera memory cards. We've given it a complete overhaul which now allows it to copy and verify in a single step, resulting in significantly faster processing speeds.

Embeddable Metadata

Auto Transfer has had the ability to add metadata before transferring for a while, but until now this was used only for naming directory structures or embedding in a spreadsheet. You can now link a metadata field to a corresponding QuickTime metadata key which will be embedded in any QuickTime movies on the transferred volume. We offer a variety of presets for different NLEs and cameras so you can pick the best options for your workflow.

Determine if a volume has already been copied

Auto Transfer can now determine if a drive has already been transferred and such drives will appear as "Finished" upon mounting. If you want to transfer it again anyway, just select it and click Transfer. 

It works by placing a small invisible file on the volume and is smart enough to know if the drive has been updated even if it wasn't fully reformatted. It requires drives to be writeable and can be disabled from Preferences if preferred.

Other changes

• Auto Transfer - Copy progress is now shown in the window title and icon
• Auto Transfer - Notification Center alerts are now shown on failure
• Auto Transfer - Volumes chosen as destinations no longer appear as transfer sources
• Auto Transfer - The Day field intelligently auto-increments
• Auto Transfer - Select multiple volumes at once and batch eject or transfer
• Auto Transfer - The number of copy failures is now linked to the drive serial number rather than volume name
• Auto Transfer - The drive's UUID is now logged in the spreadsheet

You can read the full list of changes here.

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

 

Last week we released Pro Maintenance Tools 2.1.4, a minor update to our suite of maintenance and repair tools for video professionals.

In this update we've improved compatibility with Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X, including a fix for an issue where FCPX preferences may not be correctly restored from a backup in certain situations.

Other improvements include support for trashing FCPX font caches and Avid Application Manager unfinished downloads, in addition to providing the ability to force Spotlight indexing of network volumes in System Toolkit.

You can view the full list of changes here.

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.

Our professional media player CinePlay for Mac has a new update with some useful new features and lots of bug fixes.

Import markers

By popular demand, we've added the ability to import markers from FCP 7 and Avid marker lists directly into CinePlay. This makes it easy to transfer your markers to other computers running CinePlay and provides compatibility with other tools like Cut Notes.

Markers import at the same timecode positions and with the same assigned colors.

Other changes

• Added a keyboard shortcut to copy the current timecode position to the clipboard
• Timecode display settings are now respected in the timecode hover and Info window
• Fixed an issue that could cause the user interface to not appear when moving the mouse in full screen
• Fixed an issue where the timecode overlay could appear off-screen when choosing the View > Half Size option
• Fixed an issue where playback would start at the beginning if it reached the end and the user seeked somewhere else and started playing
• Fixed a hang that could occur when closing a movie
• CinePlay no longer asks to convert movies that are corrupt
• Numerous UI tweaks
• Various other bug fixes and improvements

CinePlay is a powerful playback and note-taking tool for video professionals. To find out more, see the feature list, read the user manual, watch the overview video or download the free 15-day trial. Kollaborate customers get cloud functionality in CinePlay free of charge.

We've just released a new beta of Kollaborate Folder Watcher, which is a free tool for automatically uploading files to Kollaborate when they're added to a watch folder on your hard drive.

This version has a Finder Sync extension which allows you to see the status of files in your watch folder when you browse to it in Finder. It will show an orange icon if the file is currently processing and a green icon if it has been successfully uploaded to the cloud (note that these icons will only appear for files added to the folder from now on). You can also right-click files and either reupload them or cancel an existing upload.

Kollaborate Folder Watcher will work on OS X 10.6 and up but the Finder integration requires OS X 10.10. After installing, the extension may not automatically be enabled so please go to Extensions in System Preferences and tick the box marked "Finder" under the "KollabWatcher" heading (you may need to restart your computer for this to appear).

Please be aware that this version is beta quality, which means that it may have bugs and other limitations that could cause problems in a production environment. If you find any issues or have any feedback about integrating the tool into your workflow, please file a bug report on our support site.

Earlier this week we released Pro Versioner 2.1 which provides many tweaks and improvements to our project backup tool for creative professionals.

64-bit only

Due to several under-the-hood changes we are no longer providing a 32-bit version of Pro Versioner and all updates will be 64-bit only from now on.

Improved FCPX compatibility

We've improved compatibility with Final Cut Pro X, which boosts performance and cuts down on erroneous backup notifications.

Other changes

•  Improved app responsiveness when deleting large numbers of projects
• Support for full-screen mode on recent OS X versions
• Various UI tweaks
• General bug fixes and improvements

Pro Versioner is a comprehensive backup tool to keep your project safe, complete with screenshots, annotations and cloud sync. To find out more, check out the feature list, read the user manual, watch the overview video or download the free 15-day trial.

We've given our higher-end Kollaborate subscription packages a massive storage space boost completely free of charge. Subscribers now get the following:

The full list of packages and prices can be viewed here.

Kollaborate is a cloud workflow platform for video professionals, centered around Digital Rebellion's post production apps. To find out more, visit the Kollaborate site, view the feature list, watch the overview video or sign up for the free 15-day trial (no credit card needed).

Today marks the launch of a brand new website design for Digital Rebellion. This isn't just a new skin though - it's a massive rewrite from top to bottom that adds a host of useful features for our customers.

The first thing you'll notice is that it's much cleaner, organizes information more clearly and displays well on mobile devices. It's designed to get you the information you need as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Instead of being a separate section on the site, user accounts are now front and center and underpin many of the site's features. Being logged into the site saves time by auto-filling certain information and some functions such as blog comments now require an account.

We've also revamped our support section and reorganized it to make it much easier to find the information you need. Bug reports and feature requests are now handled through support tickets instead of email. This makes it easier to keep track of the current status of your support ticket.

Not only does the new site offer useful features to our customers, it's also much better for us too. Our backend was 8 years old and extremely clunky. The new dynamic site allows us to more easily update things and even automate many of the tasks we currently do manually.

This is just the first phase of the site redesign. The ultimate goal is to create a powerful foundation for delivering new features and cloud services through our apps. We will be launching additional features later in the year so stay tuned.