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Sending proofs to clients and getting feedback
Hey all,
I have a production company and we were going through serious communication problems when sending proofs out to our clients and getting good feedback. We used e-mail and ftp but it had all kinds of problems – video can’t be watched, too large to attach, etc. And getting feedback for a particular spot was pretty much impossible. And of course it was always hard to keep the whole thing organized.So we developed a web app that eases all these problems. Think of it as Vimeo crossed with Google Docs. We used it internally for a year and we just recently made it available to the public at https://www.takeoffvideo.com.
It works well with FCP and at some point we’re going to hook it up so when your client adds comments, you’ll see them on your timeline. We’d love to get your feedback on that one.
The app is super simple and free. We just want our fellow video producers to use it. Please check it out – https://www.takeoffvideo.com. It’ll make your life easier and will impress your clients.
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15 Replies
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Sounds interesting. Does it require plugins or anything? Will people be able to download proofs because I want to avoid that.
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Jodi,
Thanks for writing. Takeoff is a pure web app. There is a tiny Flash plugin that plays the video, but that’s it. So if you can watch YouTube, you can use Takeoff.We do provide the option to make the source video downloadable (the orignal MOV or whatever), but that’s off by default. We want to protect you from the situation where someone uses your proof before you get paid (not cool!). The final encoded video, which is h.264, is extremely hard for someone to download (as hard as Vimeo anyway). So your proofs are protected.
I forgot to mention that Takeoff is fully secure. Every page uses HTTPS to encrypt data. Your videos are invite-only, never public. It’s all about letting you produce video in a secure, easy way.
Thanks Jodi!
Stephen Potter
CTO, http://www.mediascend.com
Creator of http://www.takeoffvideo.com – video producers check this one out -
Any plans for integration with editing or motion graphics app?
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Hi,
very interesting. What is the upload limit?
Patrice
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This looks just great! Thanks for sharing.
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This looks great!
I’m going to try to get the clients going on it for the next few weeks for a broadcast production. It involves 7 or so 2-4 minute videos and we’ve got 5 left to finish. Each one has been ftp’d and then of course the resulting email forwarding and communication loss.
This looks perfect. But I thought there was something out there a couple years ago. Walter was trying it and it seemed similar but I never used it. Probably wasn’t free.
Is there a specific way we should encode the h.264s we upload for maximum benefit? I’m usually creating 640×360 800mb/sec 29.97.
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Patrice,
There is no limit as to how many videos or assets can be uploaded. Each file can be up to 2gb (technical limitation for now).How does that sound?
Stephen Potter
CTO, http://www.mediascend.com
Creator of http://www.takeoffvideo.com – video producers check this one out -
Bret,
Thanks for writing. Takeoff is definitely right for you. There are a few other sites out there but they are all overpriced and complex. One of our highest priorities is simplicity. Us production guys are pretty tech savvy, but not necessarily our clients. We tried some other solutions but they were so difficult to learn that we knew our clients would reject them and just ask to go back to email.There is no specific way to encode the videos. It takes just about any codec, not just h.264. Higher quality always comes out best…it just takes longer to upload. We use whatever frame size and rate the source video uses, so it’s quite flexible.
Stephen Potter
CTO, http://www.mediascend.com
Creator of http://www.takeoffvideo.com – video producers check this one out -
Jackson,
Yes we plan on it. One way to do it is to simply insert feedback people write into the timeline of whatever NLE or gfx suite you use. We will probably start with FCP and Premiere. That kind of integration isn’t so time-consuming for us, because we can just leverage the XML nature of those projects to insert markers into timelines.The ideal way to do it would be to create a plugin that keeps FCP always hooked up to Takeoff. Instead of using Compressor then uploading to Takeoff via Safari, you just hit a single button inside FCP. Or you could reply or cross off comments right on the timeline. Stuff like that. The only problem is that plugin authorizing is a big deal and we don’t have the resources to embark on such a project. But we can start with basic XML-driven integration. Expect that at some point over the next few months.
We will be publishing an API for Takeoff in the future. Once that is done, there is nothing stopping a 3rd party from creating such a plugin. Maybe one of the developers at Red Giant will get inspired and write a sick Takeoff plugin for FCP!
Stephen Potter
CTO, http://www.mediascend.com
Creator of http://www.takeoffvideo.com – video producers check this one out -
I see it recompressed my video though. So there isn’t any particular setting that will allow it to just pass through? Are you clamping the bit rate at a certain number?
I also provided feedback that you need to support folders in the assets. We’re dealing with lots of stills and it would be great if all the folks involved could upload stills to the correct folders.
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