Favorite websites for video draft feedback?

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Neil,

For what it is worth, there are plenty of websites out there offering video feedback tools.

But before choosing one, the bigger issue I’ve found is if your “end-client” can actually access the site, and watch the video?
Some of my broadcast clients uses iPad and other closed systems, where they can’t get some of the basics to work. That is not their fault, neither their problem, but ours to solve, right?
(One memorable moment up to a broadcast we had to Facetime the programme playing on my monitor as a live-stream, whilst the exec watched it remotely. Simply because even as it was a standard MP4 uploaded to Microsoft OneDrive – again, this was my error to sort out).

Vimeo has never worked for me – feels slow and unresponsive + quality isn’t always there, and now they have allegedly decided to price their product out of reach for many freelancers/SME’s that are relying on it.

Frame.io, when I’ve used it, feels like a better looking dropbox, but with less functionality IMHO. There was also an issue with making sure that stake-holders had access to and could review + comment, without paying for an extra seat. Still a mystery to me why Adobe made that purchase… But look at the positive side, something Broadcast News was doing 25 years ago straight to server/ NLE suite in full quality, Adobe is promoting “Camera to Cloud” as the new holy grail in video production – it is not (Although in fairness, back then we were mainly working in PAL or NTSC).

DropBox is painful to use if you are on a slow connection, and they decide to take over your computer and download random files, that will take up space in your Temp files for 3 days – unless you get that secret “location” from them to delete manually. It is the tool that I love to hate, or hat to love. But give them their due, it is made to work everywhere and crunch any video file that you can think off, which makes it accessible to a wide amount of devices (even the big VOD’s encode their video files up to and past over a 100 different formats, so you can watch your streamed video on any device of your choice – would expect DropBox to do something similar).

For my own business I share video reviews on WhatsApp, Slack or similar such as OneDrive. In the last year I have started using https://motionarray.com/review/ only because I am subscribing to the site for all of the other goodies that it has. It is OK and secure, not perfect, but so far none of my clients have complained about it. Although, they don’t tend to use it for adding comments. But is robust and looks good.

Finally, years ago I was a great fan Yousendit which later renamed to https://www.hightail.com/
My reason for not continuing was that they were trying to get me to use (pay for) a lot of features that I didn’t need. I have revisited their site, and it may actually now be of interest. One thing that they have got right from day one, is that you can not only track when the client have downloaded the file, but also which individual person and how many times – which helps in the process of making sure that everybody has watched it. They also have a fairly big section on reviews and comments, including comparing to previous versions.

There you go, You wanted a “quick” response.
I am sure that there are other people here who can add excellent choices to these.

Atb
Mads

[Tod Hopkins]

Vimeo for the previously cited reason. Vimeo has proven to be the easiest tool for clients to understand and use. In fact it’s proven more effective than sending review files so I use it almost exclusively even if the client never uses the review tools, and they generally don’t. Like PDFs, I can control what the client sees so it’s very easy to troubleshoot their experience.

[Steve Kownacki]

http://Www.screenlight.tv is inexpensive and fairly easy for customers, plus you can import comments as markers to your timeline.

[Neil Orman]

Your survey of the options was so helpful Mads, and thanks to Tod and Steve as well! You make a great point about the importance of ease of use for the client, and it’s interesting that you and Tod agree on that but come to opposite verdicts on Vimeo. Tod, may I ask, when you share vimeo drafts with clients, do you have them use the frame-accurate feature? And do you happen to know if you need more than a basic account to use that? These other options like Hightail and Screenlight sound interesting as well, and I’ll definitely give them a look. Thanks so much again to all of you!

[Eric Santiago]

I use frame io for both corporate (day job) and personal (film work/freelance).

Love the options it offers.

Of late my fave is the Version Stack.

I use this a lot with multiple iterations.

So much to list as far as helpful tools on that site.

[Tod Hopkins]

Honestly, I did not know that Vimeo could be frame accurate, so no. I see that Shift-arrow moves one frame at a time but the resulting notes do not include frames. I’m at the “Pro” tier, $240/year. Vimeo works for me because my reviewers are not professionals, but clients, and they are generally not even second-accurate! If I was reviewing in-house with a large team of professionals, Vimeo might not be adequate, but in the past my attempts to integrate “professional” sharing services just caused a massive increase in wasted support time and frustration from everyone. Producers are worse than clients.

Plus, the Review function is a bonus feature. I generally send reviews by link and don’t bother with the review page unless I sense the client would prefer online notes or there are multiple reviewers. Vimeo is powerful, easy to use, and solid as a rock for embedding, sharing, and organizing. I’m not sure I
could do without Vimeo. Any needs it does not satisfy would
require adding a service, and not replace Vimeo.

As for cost, Vimeo’s plans and rates are changing rapidly, and I may be grandfathered into some features. I have not compared newer options in a few years (You are inspiring me to investigate). Flipside, Vimeo keeps increasing its feature set and services while maintaining it’s ease-of-use. They do not rest on their laurels.

[Michael Grenadier]

Thanks for posing the question and to those who’ve answered.

I’ve had serious issues with vimeo over the years… When they started sending me warnings that my payment had been declined and I should pay manually 2 months running and then discovered that I’d paid twice, I cancelled after needing to insist on a refund rather than an extension of my subscription. Over the years, they arbitrarily change the interface in a non-intuitive way (at least to me) on a regular basis. For example, at one time, I was able to directly upload to a folder but suddenly that disappeared til I sent them a message. turned out there were 2 buttons to upload a video, one to the active folder and one to the root level without any feedback as to the change in the behavior that I saw or any helpful feedback… And when the pandemic hit, I was hired to manage some online events which were disasters… They were very anxious to help until my clients had subscribed to a more expensive tier and then support became much less helpful. and setup a number of video on demand pages for clients and that was not simple or intuitive.

I’ve been using dropbox for years for number of years but it was not ideal for onilne client review, particularly if it was a feature length clip. I’ve been using dropbox replay for quite a while in beta, but there was no indication that this would be an additional cost. As they implement the charge, I will be searching for another solution. Frankly, I’m not that interested in tagging comments to specific timecodes. When I output for client review, I usually generate a timecode transcript in premiere, and burn in timecode so the client can quickly make notes in the transcript…

[Graham Withers]

As a freelance doc editor, I’m a big Frame.io fan. Used it with Premiere and Avid, love the integration, super easy and fast.

The whole “sign in process” leading to confusion around “adding a seat” for clients to review and comment needs to be addressed better but otherwise, I really like what it brings to my process.

The speed of upload/downloads using Transfer for passing proxies and assets around is kinda amazing too. Again, some bumps using it but a powerful tool and reasonably priced IMO.

[Neil Orman]

Thank Michael. I originally posted this question, which has generated some great and helpful responses, like yours here. Unfortunately, I’ve been distracted by deadlines the last couple of weeks, and been unable to really dig into this. But my IT colleagues connected me with sales people from Dropbox, since they’re still considering upgrading our account or something, and wanted to know if I wanted these features, which I still really don’t know how to answer (and after reading posts like yours, wonder if I should just pass on this opportunity for a sales schpeel from Dropbox reps). Looking back at this, I was interested that you don’t like Dropbox Replay, which I’ve still never used, for client review. Looking for a bit more info, I just watched this video review https://youtu.be/QycEl2s16dU, which compares Replay with frame.io. Just wondering, if you get a chance to watch the comparison part that starts around 1:16, if you agree or disagree with anything he says on Dropbox Replay advantages (or this changes your take in any way)? Thanks either way for your recent response!

Neil

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[Michael Grenadier]

sorry Neil, don’t have the time to dig in to this right now. but I’m not really interested in my clients tagging comments to an online video… Just looking for a way to post videos with high quality/dependable playback for client review without any additional expense. For the most part I output with a timecode burn in and let me clients make notes referencing the timecode… And given the nature of most of my work, there’s usually only a single client who’s reviewing… Since I’m already paying for dropbox, I may just send them a dropbox link and tell them to download before reviewing as I’ve never found dropbox that dependable for playing videos in a browser… which is why I had high hopes for dropbox replay.