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Home » Should Digital Rebellion’s Kollaborate Become Your Cloud Platform for Post?

Should Digital Rebellion’s Kollaborate Become Your Cloud Platform for Post?

NAB 2015 had plenty of talk about the cloud and companies offering systems using cloud-based production solutions from the big names in the business.

But what if you want to work a little with a cloud platform to see how it might fit into your productions? Will you be ready to buy a license as in some setups that requires you to sink a lot of money in up front?

Digital Rebellion’s Kollaborate is worth a look. Setup is straight forward, and the buy in isn’t steep – the least expensive Freelance level sets you back only $160 for a yearlong subscription that enables up to five users per project.

But what is Kollaborate? Calling it a cloud workflow platform is a start. The technology works a little like Dropbox in that after you load footage to the Kollaborate server, it can be served to users wherever they are in the world as long as they have an Internet connection.

You can see the benefits right away: Easy collaboration and not worrying about the constant need for backups and security are two big reasons.

But just saying something is stored “in the cloud” isn’t new these days. It’s what you can do once your movies are posted there that makes Kollaborate interesting to someone in charge of a fast moving production.

Kollaborate gives you access clusters of computers to instantly render video, output it into multiple formats, and deliver it where you need to, whether its in town or the other side of the world. Again, the nice part is that you don’t have to invest in racks of equipment or worry about upgrades.

Kollaborate allows users to mark and comment on specific parts of an image.

As the name suggests, Kollaborate is about collaboration, so how does that work? Say you’re watching a video and something has to be changed. Type in the comment box and Kollaborate is smart enough to insert the comment at the timecode position you first started typing. You can set up the app so that it automatically pauses and resumes playback while making a comment. If you submit a comment, the system notifies project collaborators via email and alerts in the Dashboard area-.

There are lots of task management capabilities as you might imagine. If you delegate tasks to others, you can be automatically notified of their progress on the task. Your comment can be turned into a task as you create it, which means that co-workers are instantly notified and can begin work on the task before you’ve even finished watching the video. Neat indeed.

Kollaborate integrates with today’s top NLEs, no surprise, since editing video smartly is what the whole setup is about. Digital Rebellion also makes a number of other apps that either integrate with Kollaborate now or will in the future. A good majority of the apps are Mac-centric. But that’s no surprise if you go on set or visit many a production house – the Mac has had a good part of the editor’s attention for years.

There’s a lot more too the app, but instead of drilling through all that info – which is easily found on the Digital Rebellion website in any case – I decided to put questions to Jon Chappell, Digital Rebellion’s CEO and the creator of Kollaborate.

Dan Ochiva/NYCPPNEWS: Collaboration products aren’t new. Users can turn to simple and inexpensive apps like Wipster and Takeoff to more elaborate solutions like Aframe to handle review and approval at sophisticated levels. What makes Kollaborate different and better?

Jon Chappell: We feel Kollaborate has many advantages over its competitors including:
* Scalability ­ With features like department sandboxing, client­side encoding and the ability to host in­ house, Kollaborate works well in situations with large quantities of files or users.
* Roundtrip workflow ­ You can send directly from your NLE to the cloud, get feedback from your team, and then import the notes back into your timeline as markers.
* App ecosystem ­ No other company offers the same quantity and quality of helper apps. We took apps like Cut Notes and CinePlay that were already used on major movie and TV productions, and integrated them tightly with our cloud platform.
* Flexibility ­ Upload any type of file (not just video) and upload in whatever manner best fits your workflow, whether that’s using our transcoder, copying to a watch folder or uploading directly from your NLE.
* In house option ­ To the best of my knowledge, we are the only company offering users the choice of running our service in the cloud or in house on their own servers and storage.

NYCPPNEWS: The big NLE suppliers Adobe and Avid are also in the collaborative video production business. They offer solutions tightly integrated with their products. Again, why should someone consider Kollaborate?

JC: We offer far more features that the NLE manufacturers and in some cases one could argue that we’re more tightly integrated with some manufacturers’ products than they are themselves.
We also try to be as NLE agnostic as possible, which means that you’re never locked into a particular NLE, giving users a lot more freedom and choice. And if you buy Kollaborate Server you don’t have to worry about us going out of business, getting bought by another company or changing our prices or terms because you’ll still be able to access your files in house.

NYCPPNEWS: With Kollaborate, you offer many different pricing plans. What’s the benefit of that?

JC: Kollaborate can scale up to a large number of files or users so we offer pricing packages for both large and small productions.

NYCPPNEWS: Digital Rebellion also offers many different apps and resources that can be used with Kollaborate. Why is that approach useful?

JC: The main reason for this is flexibility. The apps can be aimed at specific audiences or use cases, allowing us to offer a wider range of features than our competitors while still keeping our user interfaces simple and optimized for the task at hand.

About Dan Ochiva

New York City-based journalist and NYCPPNEWS founder Dan Ochiva writes and consults on film, video, and digital media technology.

Community & Partner Links

How Sony’s New Virtual Sound Technology Can Change How We Hear Films

Kami Asgar and Jessica Parks are post-production heavyweights who work with major studios, namely Sony. As a sound designer (Asgar) and as a post executive (Parks), their collective resume touches on everything from Apocalypto to Grandma’s Boy to Venom.

Parks has recently shifted her focus from supervisor to hands-on sound design, and we talk about how it’s never too late to pivot on your career path and find the thing you love doing wherever you are in life.

Click on this link to read the rest of the article on No Film School’s site.

NJ – Governor Murphy signs $14B Incentive Program Bill – the NJ Economic Recovery Act of 2020

 Film tax credits — amending existing programs to include provisions for so-called New Jersey film partners and New Jersey film-lease partners and allowing an additional $200 million of tax credits annually over 13 years.

Click this link if you want to read the full article on the Lexology site. http://bit.ly/35NtDx6

Film Commish announces date for production restart

In her December 18, 2020 news update, MOME Commissioner Anne del Castillo announced that the Film Office is now accepting permit applications for production activity that begins on July 27th.

She also announced awards now (Awkwafina) and more. To read all of the Film Commish’s bloggy sort of news column, click here.

Stimulus Offers $15 Billion in Relief for Struggling Arts Venues

The coronavirus relief package that Congressional leaders agreed to this week includes grant money that many small proprietors described as a last hope for survival.

For the music venue owners, theater producers and cultural institutions that have suffered through the pandemic with no business, the coronavirus relief package that Congress passed on Monday night offers the prospect of aid at last.

To read the full article on The New York Times’ site, click here.

If you want to start production, here’s the latest news from the Mayor’s Office

Phase 4 production guidance is available on the Film Permit website. All production activity, whether it requires a Film Permit or not, must comply with New York Forward Industry Guidance.

For more information see, please refer to the State Department of Health’s Interim Guidance for Media Production During the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. Please review the guidelines and FAQ before submitting permit applications. The Film Office is operating remotely, so please allow additional time for Film Permit processing.

The above paragraphs contain links to the various FAQ – just mouse over the relevant words.

Nikon to Stop Making Cameras in Japan

Nikon has fallen on hard times as of late as its camera sales have cratered, and now there’s a new indicator of how dire its financial situation is: the company is reportedly pulling the plug on making cameras in Japan after over 70 years of doing so.

To read the full article on Petapixel’s site, click here.

NVIDIA Uses AI to Slash Bandwidth on Video Calls

NVIDIA Research has invented a way to use AI to dramatically reduce video call bandwidth while simultaneously improving quality

What the researchers have achieved has remarkable results: by replacing the traditional h.264 video codec with a neural network, they have managed to reduce the required bandwidth for a video call by an order of magnitude. In one example, the required data rate fell from 97.28 KB/frame to a measly 0.1165 KB/frame – a reduction to 0.1% of required bandwidth.

To read the rest of this article on Petapixel, click this link.

 

 

 

Union Health Plan Dodges Film Workers’ Suit Over Virus Relief

Law360 (October 9, 2020, 5:22 PM EDT) — The Motion Picture Industry Health Plan’s board can’t be sued under ERISA for allegedly flouting its duties when it relaxed plan rules in response to COVID-19, a California federal judge has ruled, nixing a proposed class action filed by two cinematographers who still couldn’t qualify for benefits.

In an order entered Thursday, U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner granted the board of directors’ motion to dismiss Greg Endries and Dee Nichols’ Employee Retirement Income Security Act suit accusing board members of breaching their duty to treat all plan participants fairly.

Endries and Nichols, members of Local 600 of the International Cinematographers Guild, said in July that the board left them and others “out in the cold” in its attempts to address the problems COVID-19 caused for plan participants.

But Judge Klausner agreed with the board’s contention that the case, which alleged a fiduciary breach, should be tossed because plan administrators don’t act as fiduciaries when they amend health care plans.

Read the full article on the Law360 site by clicking here.

Russo Brothers Received Close to $50 Million From Saudi Bank

Anthony Russo and Joseph Russo photographed at the PMC Studio in Los Angeles for the Variety Playback Podcast.

The Russo brothers, directors of the all-time top grossing film “Avengers: Endgame,” quietly secured a roughly $50 million cash infusion for their production company AGBO from Saudi Arabia earlier this year, multiple sources tell Variety.

In a deal brokered and closed at the beginning of the pandemic, the Russos received the investment from an undisclosed Saudi bank in exchange for a minority stake in the brothers’ Los Angeles-based shop.

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