SyncVUE – My Pick for NAB!

[Erik Lindahl]

That does look like a very cool tool. How does it work? Do you export your timeline from FCP via XML to the and it fixes all the AVC transcoding for you?

What a bout performance? Bandwidth requirments? Stability?

For instance iChat doens’t quite fitt under a “pro and stable environment”. When it works, it’s great, but all to often we have issues with it.

[John Burgan]

Thanks for the heads up.

I’m already a Skype user and found this link to a download of a demo version.

https://share.skype.com/directory/syncvue_media_synchronizer_for_remote_video_file_collaboration/view/

This is a pre-release alpha limited to two clients & two movies that come packaged inside the app for testing purposes.

I’m in Berlin, Germany and just tried it with a friend in Amsterdam. It worked as promised, more or less. We were able to play the demo clip in sync, add markers and comments and chat live as we were doing it. Playback on both of our machines was not so smooth unfortunately, but my pal thought this might because of the H264 codec on the clips which is apparently fairly processor intensive. OTOH they play fine in QT player (on G4 PB 1.25) annd we were both on DSL. It may be the alpha release, after all.

Neat. I bet we’re about to see a whole slate of apps like this.

BTW Skpye (free download for Mac, Windows, Linux etc) has a file transfer facility identical to iChat, but has the advantage of being truly cross platform. Windows already has video chat, Mac to follow in this quarter.

https://www.skype.com

[Walter Biscardi]

[Erik Lindahl] “How does it work?”

You export a quicktime movie and then get it to your client either via email, FTP, iDisk, whatever. At the scheduled time, you all log into Skype and launch SyncVUE. You all open the movie file. Then the person who’s in control of the playback at that moment hits “Sync.” All the people logged in automatically have their playback sync’d to the “master” machine.

That’s the basic gist of it. There are some other features in there that are incredibly cool and could really open up your client marketele in a hurry.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Director, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Michael Buday]

First of all, thank you Walter for your enthusiasm about syncVUE. The reaction at the show has been far beyond our expectations.

Re: the problem experienced by Mr. Burgan:

The alpha version posted on the SKYPE was intended only to demonstrate the basic concept and has some known bugs that we failed to include in the user’s guide that comes packaged with the download. “Staggered” playback on some CPU’s is one of those bugs and has been fixed in the beta version being shown at NAB. Mr. Burgan’s friend is correct however, H.264 does place a lot of demand on the host CPU, but it should work fine on a G4 PB 1.25MHZ as long as their is sufficient RAM (we recommend at least 512MB for 480P files).

We will be posting updated minimum specifications on our website as we get closer to release and benchmark more codecs and CPU speeds/types. In addition, we’ll be providing encoding “guidelines” to help people better understand how to export files that will balance image quality, file size and playback performance.

A pre-release trial version will be available soon after NAB on our website: http://www.syncvue.com

Sincerely,

Michael Buday
President
Intelligent Gadgets

[John Burgan]

Even on the alpha app you can get a pretty good idea of how it’s supposed to work. I look forward to checking out the updated version.

Cheers

John B

[Paul Nevison]

i was really excited when i stumbled upon this product the other day…..Our work here involves a lot of collaboration on projects between our base here in the UK and colleagues in Australia… i thought for a moment it might also include some kind of fast file transfer function – that is always the bug bear for or workflow – the transfer of large video files takes forever via FTP and isnt all that stable in our experience.

this will definetly help with the creative process cross continents – now just have to find a good and fast way to send large video files….Pro Tools has a system that i remember reading about from a year or two back – sounded great but it was for audio only.

anyone know of good solutions for sending full rez video to the other side of the world – other than fibre optics?

G5 DP 2.0
4.0G RAM
OS 10.4.6
QT 7.0.4
FCP 5.0.4
BMD Decklink Extreme 5.5.1
PAL Land

[John Burgan]

Just in case this is not clear – Skype already gives you direct transfer capability “out of the box” without the need for any other app, as long as the person on the other end is running Skype as well. Whether this competes with FTP is another matter but ultimately file transfers are only limited by bandwidth and hard disk space. It’s a pretty useful add-on to the free telephony/webcam app.

[Michael Buday]

Hi Paul,

Just FYI, a future version of syncVUE (syncVUE:SHARE) will include a much faster then FTP transfer function built-in to the app.

Michael Buday

[Paul Nevison]

hey Michael

thanks for that. what is the pricing for this product as im not in Las Vegas and the website doesnt have any pricing info

thanks looking forward to seeing how the product develops

G5 DP 2.0
4.0G RAM
OS 10.4.6
QT 7.0.4
FCP 5.0.4
BMD Decklink Extreme 5.5.1
PAL Land

[Walter Biscardi]

[paul nevison] “thanks for that. what is the pricing for this product as im not in Las Vegas and the website doesnt have any pricing info”

Pricing is $199 per license though as Michael explained to me you can give a license to a client for a particular project and then retract that licensse and give it to another client.

Very very useful. I plan to purchase 4 or 5 licenses here at the shop and then just assign them to clients as needed. I’m REALLY excited about the potential with expanding our client base now that they will no longer need to be with us for client reviews.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Director, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters