Tutorial: Client Collaboration and Review With Frame.io and Wipster

In this tutorial, I’ll tell you all about something that has made my life a whole lot easier: having an efficient way to share a video project with a client that allows them to comment and approve the video without having to upload and download files repeatedly through a service like Dropbox, or Google Drive or a private FTP. I’m going to focus on two services that are available now: Frame.io and Wipster. Frame is a New York City-based company that recently won an Apple design award for their mobile app. Wipster is based in New Zealand. You may know them if you're a Vimeo user because they have tight integration with vimeo.com.

Rather than compare them and or declare one better than the other, I’ll introduce you to both so that you can see what you can do with them, and judge for yourself which might be the better option for you to use. Both of these services have integration with Premiere Pro now. They have their own panels that you can download and install. If you haven't installed a custom panel before, a custom panel is like a plug-in, but it gives you an entire tool set and its own window within your application.

Both Frame.io and Wipster do more than just loading a webpage within the application; they’re software to run inside Premiere Pro. This approach is very efficient. It doesn't bog anything down because it saves you from having to export a video in a manual way outside of the application, and then open your browser, and navigate to a webpage and upload the video. It does it all from without the application.

Frame.io

Let's start by walking through Frame.io. For this example, I'm going to share a video with two of my family members, and who are ready and waiting to comment on these videos once I get them uploaded. The accompanying video demonstrates how their comments come in real-time, and how I can sync those back to my timelines and then start addressing the comments and changes that they want to see.

We’ll be working with a project open that I just completed recently. On the left in Figure 1 (below) you’ll see my Premiere Pro Program Monitor, with my timeline and my edited project. I've got this project done and I want to send it to clients for feedback to see what they think.

Figure 1. Left to right: my Premiere Pro Program Monitor, the Frame.io panel, and the Wipster review panel, prior to uploading any clips for review. Click the image to see it at full size.

To begin, I’ll upload a video in the Frame panel. You can choose from the options shown in Figure 2 (below). Of course I want this active sequence because that's the project I'm working on in Premiere Pro. Next, you choose options for quality: ProRes, audio only, or two different web compressions. I'm going to choose the 720 because that's adequate for a review, and you can choose what part of the project you want to render, and then you can tell it where to go.

Figure 2. Choosing rendering settings in Frame.io

In my case I'm going to set it to a folder on my external hard drive because that's where I save everything. Regarding the checkboxes below the pull-downs, if you have made comments and markers to your client you can include those now, or you can leave them off, and then you can keep the rendered file or have it just upload it and then delete it from your local drive. Autoversioning just enables you to upload further versions later without having to make a new project every time. It's going to say, "This is version two, this is version three" and so on.

Next you click Upload. Frame.io will launch Adobe Media Encoder in the background, and then it will automatically start encoding the video. As soon as it is done encoding it will upload the video to Frame.io's servers.

Once it's uploaded I'll then use the Share button shown in Figure 3 (below) to share it with whomever I want to be able to comment on this project. The video has now been uploaded and processed on Frame's server and it's ready for me to share it with the individuals that I want to comment on it. By clicking Share I can turn on sharing if it's not already, and copy a private link that's unique and share it with whoever I want to.

Figure 3. Sharing the video

As you can see in Figure 4 (below), I've opened my Frame account in the browser. From here, I'll be able to see when people start commenting on the video. I can watch the video, I can make comments myself, I can respond to whatever comments are made down here below as they start coming in. This is your account, this is where you'd make all your changes, set up payments, change preferences, and you can change different options of the video itself.

Figure 4. Frame.io running in the browser. Click the image to see it at full size.

Grayscale mode will work kind of like those who really like grayscale only in their viewfinders, it eliminates the color from being distracting. You can have the timeline scroll while you play, and of course you can turn the comments on or off while you're watching it. Depending on your viewing environment and exactly how you want to tailor it, you can do that here. The other things you can do in this window are share the video with more people and decide whether they can download it.

You can see in Figure 4 that my wife made a comment on the video. If I click on the comment, Frame.io takes me to that time and it shows me what she's referring to. She says, "What do you think about shortening the sequence?" at 0:27, so I know she's referring to the middle section. I can then reply to her and say, "No way, I'm the editor here." She will immediately be notified about my snarky comment.