New Feature – Video Review and Collaboration

 

With the exploding popularity of video, driven by websites like You Tube, there’s a growing demand for tools that give people fast and easy ways to put their shows together. One of the most exciting recent features of Cozimo is its support for video collaboration that lets any team of people review and markup a video clip together online. This feature has been raising some eyebrows and was recently discussed on David Strom’s Web Informant blog.

The way the video collaboration works is very straightforward. First, you upload any Quicktime, avi, Flash or windows media file to a collaboration folder. After upload you can invite people in your workgroup to review it just as you would any other item. A reviewer can play the video, stop at any frame and leave annotations and notes. As you play the video any drawings or notes will fade in and out as the frame passes. Annotated frames are also “bookmarked” in the scrub bar and can be easily jumped to using the “next” or “previous” annotation arrows in the control panel.

If you want to hold a group review, simply get everyone together on the same page (just post a message to the people you want). Then activate “Presenter Mode” and start playing the video. The video will start playing for all the participants and will be synchronized to the same frame. If you jump ahead or pause on a frame, every participant will end up on the same frame. Then you can start your discussion or chat while drawing on the frame together to clarify the points that are being made. All the notes will be maintained on the video and can later be referenced or printed out for making revisions to the original.

Distributing, reviewing and obtaining feedback has always been one of the toughest challenges for video producers (much tougher than for static images). Cozimo makes it easy with this powerful new feature. Try it out and let us know what you think.