What’s the best cloud storage for editors who send links and want them to play in browser?

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Bryan,

[Bryan Roberts] “I just read the nail in the coffin for Hightail Spaces. On their Vimeo video which has comments under it, it appears people found out that if you send a link to a client who isn’t a member of Hightail Spaces, it requires them to sign up for a free account in order to even view the files. A support member of Hightail Spaces confirms this and makes it sound like this is going to be something permanent that they as a team had already discussed. That does it for me, Hightail Spaces is out.”

Interesting, Thank You. As said earlier, I am a long time Hightail user as it allows me to track the videos that I send to my clients.

However, I do not like being offered a “trial” for 30 days where I don’t know the cost of it once I commit.

In any case, I would expect Adobe CC to have that as an offering within the package. I know that you used to be able to send videos to clients for comments in one of the earlier CS versions, just haven’t worked out how to do it in CC. But a qualified guess would be to embed the video into a pdf document. This method obviously won’t solve your original problem of needing instant playback.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Bryan Roberts]

In the FAQ it says Spaces Pro is $15/mo. Not bad… if it didn’t require clients to sign up for an account before they can view a file. Ugh.

EDITOR
Features : Television : Commercial
http://www.BryanRobertsEditor.com

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

[Bryan Roberts] “In the FAQ it says Spaces Pro is $15/mo. Not bad… if it didn’t require clients to sign up for an account before they can view a file. Ugh.”

Thank you.

And yes, there seems to be a misunderstanding by some companies that anyone using a modern “app” will want all their family, friends, associates, clients, horse, dog, hamster etc to hand over their details too…

At least the main Hightail service does not suffer from the same issue as one can distribute files to anyone without them having to get engaged, be married and have children with Hightail – I shall have words with them directly.

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[David Roth weiss]

Hey Mads!

Believe it or not, my newest pet is a Preying Mantis. Do you think Hightail would require his/her contact info? I’m prepared to give them my dog’s last three years tax returns, but I hadn’t figured the Mantis into my fiscal 2015 budget.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey David,

[David Roth Weiss] “Believe it or not, my newest pet is a Preying Mantis. Do you think Hightail would require his/her contact info? I’m prepared to give them my dog’s last three years tax returns, but I hadn’t figured the Mantis into my fiscal 2015 budget.”

I do believe, except it is disappointing that you didn’t get two of them. However, I am sure that MBNA or Capital One will give your Preying Mantis a Credit Card, which should keep it happy viewing for the foreseeable future.

Although I am sure that the dog would prefer the National Geographic channel which should have much more animal-on-animal action in it…

Before any of the above can happen you must set up email addresses for each of the pets – and don’t apply for anything else until you receive the $30 Million offer from a Nigerian Prince.

See what happened here? I just sorted your life out, and wasted everyone else’s 😉

All the Best
Mads

@madsvid, London, UK
Check out my other hangouts:
Twitter: @madsvid
https://mads-thinkingoutloud.blogspot.co.uk

[Tim Kolb]

I’ve used Dropbox for a long time…I have a paid subscription with a pretty hefty capacity.

I know some clients view the videos from the public link…most download them. Whether or not real time playback works seems to be a browser-related factor.

I’m not sure I follow the point about flash being blocked preventing Dropbox playback…are you using flash for your video format? Dropbox and Google drive are data pails…there isn’t any video file conversion just to store a file on them.

I’ve actually moved GBs of production quality files from clients and collaborators using Dropbox without any issues I can recall.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Video Producer at I-CAR

[Bryan Roberts]

Hi Tim, Dropbox uses flash to load their video player which automatically is used when you send a public link to a client to a video file. I deal with all sorts of clients and it seems the further up the totem pole you get, the more propensity there is to not understand how to download a file and play it (no, seriously). It’s been a big problem with any studio head folks or any brand people for commercials etc. Not only can they not handle figuring out how to download a file and then play it in quicktime, or itunes or just double click it (many of them are on outdated PC systems) but their IT departments can’t figure it out either. They want to click a link and have a file start to play an they generally don’t have the time to wait even a minute for something to download so it needs to be almost instantaneous. So I was looking at options which could start automatically streaming a file like it does when they click on a quicktime I’ve sent them on my website server. Dropbox uses flash for their in built video player and I’m finding in my tests that it trips up most newer Macs since Apple went on the whole anti flash campaign, flash is blocked by default. Google drive must use HTML5 for Macs as it doesn’t seem to give newer macs any issue when pulling up their file to view. Both Dropbox and Google Drive offer the ability to download that file for my savier clients but again, most just want to click a link and start watching right away.

EDITOR
Features : Television : Commercial
http://www.BryanRobertsEditor.com

[Phillip Hollweg]

I have good success with the performance, reliability and features of Wistia, although I am not sure if they support everything you need. You can set view only/download/edit permissions for each user in each project, and their embedded players work well, too. Users can download the original file as well as re-compressed versions.

[Eric Santiago]

I’ve tested Frame.io for a few weeks now on a current project.
Director and DoP love it.
Ive been using the FCPX plug-in and sending 720p to save on costs.
The collaboration and marking option is perfect for communicating.

[Adriano Blanaru]

Hi Bryan,

I’m a product manager at Hightail, working directly on Hightail Spaces since it started, and I wanted to address your comments / concerns (sorry it took us so long to see this thread!)

About the infrastructure, there are actually two pieces of good news on this front: First, the server infrastructure for Spaces is completely different than the one for “classic” Hightail. It currently runs on Amazon Web Services, which is pretty much the standard in the industry these days. Second, as for the speed issues around “classic” Hightail, we are actually in the process of revamping most of the storage and delivery infrastructure. The work done over the past few months has significantly improved speeds in some regions and, in the next few weeks, we should be seeing major improvements across the board.

About the need to create a free account to view files, that’s partially true. Files can be viewed without creating an account or logging in – you only need an account to comment or download. There are two points that I’d like to make about this:
– First, since this is a product focused on collaboration/feedback vs. simple file delivery (even though you can use it to deliver the files as well), the decision to require signup was to make sure that the people were properly identified so that the interactions had all the context needed to be valuable.
– That said, we’ve been hearing the same concern around forcing clients to create accounts from other creative professionals as well, and it is becoming clear that we will have to try to find another solution that reduces the barrier for clients while maintaining value of the interactions.

I hope this addresses some of your concerns. Feel free to reach out if you have any other comments or questions, and please stop by to check the features released last week – Hightail Spaces is looking better and better, and we’re moving fast 🙂

Cheers,
Adriano