…by kicking off our Monday morning with some antics.

Every Monday, we have a Market7 ritual.  We all gather either in person or over the phone, sometimes throw down a tune or two to set the mood, talk about the upcoming week, review the current development state of our software and almost always engage in some good-natured teasing of one another.

Here’s a little taste of a typical Monday morning.

Dynamic streaming improves quality of video, and quality of play experience, and more

As our base diversifies, including expanding use on bigger budget production projects that tend to involve longer footage, customers increasingly request that our player functionality be immediately and comprehensively available for any portion of small or large video files. Our initial player functionality has been based on progressive download, meaning that once a video is requested, it loads in timeline order, and later portions of the video aren’t immediately available until the download catches up. As part of our assessment, and after experiments with a few commercial streaming servers, we determined the best approach for us is to engineer and implement our own approach to dynamic streaming, which we’ve spent the past month or so developing, along with a few other cool annotative player features, demonstrated here:

To assure good customer experiences, and even though we’ve already extensively tested, we haven’t yet turned on the new dynamic streaming for everyone, and we’re asking for volunteers. If you would like us to turn on dynamic streaming for (a) particular project(s) of yours, please email support@market7.com or sales@market7.com letting us know which project(s) and we’ll do so. Once we confirm that video play and annotative interactivity works robustly across projects, video files and users, we’ll turn on dynamic streaming everywhere, which should occur during February 2010.

Dynamic streaming, like its name indicates, allows users to click anywhere within timeline of a video immediately upon load, and play of video from that requested point is immediately responsive. Also, in implementing the architecture we have also allowed for Flash (.flv) and H.264 (ex: .mp4, .m4v) videos to be in-the-clear in our player so they do not get transcoded, meaning that they are immediately available for play upon upload, and that they are played at full quality of the source content with no modification. Videos of other formats do still have to be transcoded to Flash for our player, although from the File Actions button in our player, the original states of those videos can be downloaded with full fidelity for file-transfer purposes including to see un-modified in a compatible player. One more change we made to our player is allowing j-k-l keyboard shortcut navigation back-play/pause-forward, and the same for left and right directional arrows and space-bar, with additional benefit of visual fast-forward and rewind by holding down the appropriate keys.

The player enhancements are demonstrated in the screen-capture video towards the top of this blog post. Other enhancements with this release include:

• Continuing last couple of months’ theme, we’ve made still more speed improvements, especially this time for loads of project home pages
• Improved layout and presentation on printouts of pages from Script, Task and Event modules
• Easier flow for inviting new members to projects
• Activity feed reflects the first time a new member logs into a project

And again, please do email to support@market7.com or sales@market7.com letting us know projects of yours you’d like us to move to dynamic streaming immediately so that you can try it out (and please let us know how it works for you).

We think it’s worth setting some time aside to take this full one in

Back in October, Tim Siglin of StreamingMedia and Braintrust Digital came out to our engineering offices in San Francisco to learn more about video.Market7 in preparation for an upcoming review. When he left to spend some time trying out the service on his own, he did more than just kick the tires – he took us apart and put us back together again! We should have expected no less after the meticulous in-person meeting.

We are pleased that this discriminating shopper seems to have overall liked what he saw. Like many video producers who try video.Market7, Tim seemed especially taken with the annotative player, which he notes, “might be the best thing to come along [last] year.”

A huge thanks to Tim and also to Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen over at StreamingMedia for taking the time to check us out. Check out the review online and in the Dec/Jan issue.

We’re Under The Hood

Extensive recent interaction with users reveals that value from our service can improve with better performance from our site, largely faster responsiveness on page loads and other user activities. This has been our primary focus the last couple of releases, and will continue to be our emphasis through year end. Like always, we have tons & tons of ideas for new features and entirely new modules, and we can hardly wait to get back to constructing those, but for now we’re prioritizing infrastructural upgrades. Some of the recent enhancements include implementing a new approach to load balancing for consistent service availability and tuning our JavaScript to reduce (/eliminate?) “slow script” warnings especially in Internet Explorer — our engineers will be posting soon to elaborate on the steps we’re taking.

Of course, we do have several neat, new features implemented in this release (click any of the images to enlarge):

Shadow-text in draft mode of scripts to clarify where character-name & spoken dialog go:

Script Shadow Text

Ability to click into & manually overwrite comment placement time in annotative player for precise placement:

Comment Time Overwrite

Feedback tab prominently available on every page to interact with us on questions comments etc.:

Feedback Tab

That last one is part of a broader initiative of ours for better communication with our users about their use of video.Market7 integrated within the service itself, on which Shannon will expand in upcoming blog posts.

Customers Pick The Turns On Market7 Roadmap

While initially building video.Market7 we presumed that a typical production would involve sharing of a few cuts of footage towards the final product plus occasional collection of some integrated assets like graphics that appear within video. So we built our Files module to be a single, simple repository for everything assembled within a project, thinking that just sorting the list according to certain criteria would be sufficient to organize and find. In fact our customers are using projects in our service to collect much more content including storyboard elements, headshots of actors & scouting shots of locations, b-roll & other footage to be integrated into production, and various planning & organizational documents. Several have asked for better capabilities to work with larger amounts of documents and media typically assembled in a project so we are in the midst of enhancing our files capabilities, the latest aspect of which is folder-based organization:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Another point that’s come up more than once from our users is that awaiting review, feedback and approval about content is a frequent source of anxiety. So we’ve included viewing of video, files and published scripts as activity feed generating items, whether or not the viewer makes comments. And instead of having to constantly log into a project to check its activity feed, we now allow users to subscribe to projects’ feeds by email, including control over which modules they want to follow and how frequently emails should go out:

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

There are a couple other new features in this release, also responsive to customer requests. Uploading content now includes availability of an “alternative uploader”, based on HTML instead of Flash, that may prove more robust for large files (like 1-2 GB). We are working towards bringing such robustness to our Flash uploader too but there are a few current challenges for that in  industry practice,  acknowledged and under consideration by the relevant technical community. Also, video.Makret7 project-owners now have the ability to edit other team members’ comments in our Annotative Player which could be used to clean up clutter of comments after decisions have been made or to resynchronize comments if a file’s been replaced with a newer version that has timeline alterations.

Convenience or Quality: A False Choice

“The Good Enough Revolution” in Wired Magazine‘s September issue has sparked a meme. I have recently noticed people increasingly touting the merits of cheap prices, minimalist functionality, and straightforward usage as key attributes to get into users’ hands. We contend that just as important as feeling intuitive upon immediate usage, great products should also not feel limiting with more usage.

Above is an image of the Annotative Player module of video.Market7.com. This is our environment for collecting, presenting and assessing feedback about video footage during editing and post production. Most people find its usage easy to comprehend even though from first glance it’s clearly more than simply a video player or a messaging system. Largely that is because it fundamentally and clearly incorporates elements of both with attributes like conventional play control, timeline and volume settings in the expected places of a video player; and familiar messaging presentation like temporal stacking of comments along with the commenters’ avatars, names and relevant metadata such as when comment occurred. With dominance of these familiar motifs, more sophisticated data can be secondarily incorporated, like the fact that the top comment of the stack shown here has attachments indicated by a recognizable file folder icon, or that the comment currently highlighted, through which the playhead is passing, emphasizes a portion of the screen with a rectangle much like seen in photos on Facebook or Flickr.

When first timers use our Annotative Player they generally don’t pay mind to those more advanced features but naturally identify how to play video and watch the comments scroll. And when the thought of leaving one’s own comment enters the mind, we’ve tried to make that immediately accessible through the generous and bold “Add a comment” area, with “type comment here” shadow font in the player’s lower-right. Clicking that pauses the video and expands the lower right area to what’s magnified below. The user gets a blinking cursor in a teal-highlighted space and the most clear thing is to start typing a comment. The eyeball naturally proceeds down to OK or cancel the comment. If curious, or perhaps upon a subsequent use of the module, a user may notice some buttons above, which avail the more sophisticated additions comments can get such as the highlight rectangle, free-hand drawing and file attachment. Availability of these becomes even more clear if one mouses above the area of typing the comment and gets those buttons’ tooltip instructions.

Back when he was a consultant to us and before becoming a full-time employee, Shannon famously (at least in Market7′s corporate lore) advocated that we should endeavor to provide users with a small pond of infinite depth. The perspective of a swimmer surveying such a pond’s surface is that it’s a manageably sized area in which to wade. But once in the water and ready to check out something new, this swimmer realizes that there’s as much water to cover as desired for exploration. Similarly at Market7 we try to provide the most basic features in ways that they’re easily accessed first and have more sophisticated tools put into positions where a little more exploration reveals them, with all leveraging established motifs for quick learning curves.

During the past week I demonstrated the annotative player to a new customer after which I was asked if it wasn’t too much functionality to provide out of the box to users. After explaining our approach to how our software presents itself I received some tentative head nods, but a few days later can gladly report that this particular customer is confirming that all new users are able to be productive with video.Market7 immediately, while the most constant users are getting even more mileage by familiarizing themselves with more sophisticated features. The right presentation of functionality can reveal the apparent dilemma between ease and sophistication to be a false choice. Pick both and do better than “good enough”.

As this blog hopefully conveys, Market7 prioritizes input from users to determine our development efforts. That inspiration is right now driving a suite of features that diversify how users can communicate within video.Market7.

Our most universally popular module is the Annotative Player that allows teammates on a video production project to share feedback about footage, which guides the editing process. Until recently, the sole method of annotating in the player was the same I’m using now — text from fingers fluttering over keyboard. Video pros have requested various alternative ways to express themselves. One animation studio asked to annotate with drawings in the frame, over the video image, which we recently released.

Above is a screen-capture I just created, with an ugly red cloud in the upper-left, to illustrate our on-screen drawing functionality. It’s a terrible example because of my very crude artistic skills. But its being terrible underscores the point of this blog post. Drawing is not for me. Ever since working for a magazine I’ve been most comfortable writing. I like assembling words in front of me, considering how they flow, and refining in a few edit passes.

Understandably, people whose profession is video production tend to have more visual and dynamic preferences for means of communication than just text. The animation studio requested drawing, and others have asked to express themselves with richer media, and within a week we’ll have some more ways to share thoughts about video, and that will expand even further in another release soon to follow.

As this blog will make explicit in our next few New Release posts, Market7 is expanding the range of voices users of our software can exercise. And we appreciate their voicing desires to us, so we can best equip them.

For those of you who missed Seth’s interview on Digital Production Buzz, there is the full interview below. Dig Prod Buzz had a great setup this year interviewing thousands of people about cool stuff happening at NAB (I don’t know if it was actually thousands but it sounds so much better). In the interview Seth talks about our newest features released for NAB, the ability to export comments directly into Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere. Seth talks about other exciting things, most of it is true…ENJOY!

Market7 on DigProdBuzz @ NAB

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MARKET7 INTEGRATES VIDEO COLLABORATION SERVICES WITH
APPLE FINAL CUT PRO AND ADOBE PREMIERE PRO CS4

NAB demonstration of better efficiency, communication by exporting comments and on-screen
mark-ups from Annotative Player module of video.Market7 directly into leading video edit suites

NAB SHOW, LAS VEGAS, April 20, 2009 – Market7, Inc., a provider of web services for collaboration in the development and management of creative content, today introduces a set of enhancements to the Annotative Player module of the company’s flagship video.Market7^SM service for online video collaboration. This module presents uploaded video with capabilities for reviewers to provide feedback and drive towards consensus on editing and post production. New features include capability for free-hand on-screen drawing over footage, and XML-based export of comments and on-screen mark-ups from the Annotative Player module to be opened in the leading Apple® Final Cut Pro® and Adobe® Premiere Pro® CS4 video editing suites.

These capabilities are available immediately and being demonstrated by Market7 here at the NAB Show in the Final Cut Pro Users’ Group (FCPUG) SuperBooth, #SL10129 on the lower level of the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

“Integrating video.Market7 with the leading video edit suites from Apple and Adobe rounds out our vision for comprehensive collaboration in the video production process,” says Seth Kenvin, CEO of Market7. “At NAB, the most important event for video editing and production, Market7 is empowering professionals in the field to select actionable feedback from reviewers and integrate it directly into their edit suites as a singular environment for clear comprehension and efficient execution on client edit decisions.”

The Annotative Player module of video.Market7 displays video that can be uploaded from practically any popular digital format. In addition to normal video player controls, this module also provides messaging features that can include specificity as to corresponding points or spans on the video’s timelines, as well as highlights of particular, pertinent portions of the screen. Reviewers can see and reply to each other’s comments. Tags can also be applied to particular comments to designate them for filtering as the ultimate edit decisions. The latest enhancements, available now and demonstrated at NAB, include extending commenting capabilities to on-screen, free-hand drawing, and exporting of either all comments or filtered comments, with on-screen mark-ups, through the XML protocol. These exports can be opened and displayed as timeline-based markers with onscreen overlay channels in Apple Final Cut Pro versions 5 or 6 and in Adobe Premiere Pro 4.0.1, which is part of Adobe Creative Suite® 4.

Market7 is exhibiting the entire video.Market7 service, including the new Annotative Player capabilities, at the FCPUG SuperBooth throughout NAB exhibit hours. The company is also delivering presentations of its web service at the ProMAX Systems Digital Lounge in the Venetian / Palazzo Hotel on Tuesday April 21 at 6:00 PM and at the demonstration area of the FCPUG SuperBooth on Thursday April 23 at 10:00 AM.

About Market7, Inc.

Market7 addresses needs of corporations and other organizations as they expand use of video for marketing, recruiting, support, training, content commercialization and other purposes, but often find the production processes to be confusing, inefficient and expensive. The company’s online environments are for all of the collaboration between video producers, their clients and any other parties involved in the process. This includes features for overall project management, conceptualization, script development and footage review. These aspects of video.Market7 web services have been used by dozens of organizations for hundreds of production projects. More information is available at www.market7.com.

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Exciting stuff going on here at Market7 this week to coincide with our visit to NAB in Las Vegas. We have improved our player functionality and usefulness. The most exciting of which is our ability to export comments left in Market7 directly into either Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere via XML. Our fantastic group of customers love our annotative player for commenting and feedback but we have often heard the same feedback: “Once we collect all of the feedback, how do we integrate that with the post-production workflow?” Now you can go straight from client feedback to the editor’s suite. By integrating the feedback directly, post-production is faster, more efficient and less error-prone.

And if that wasn’t enough, we have also added a freehand drawing tool as a companion to our highlight box. Now you can draw any shape or illustration to help make your point within a comment. We hope you enjoy the new features and keep the requests coming!

On top of the new features we have also addressed some site speed and usage scalability issues due to our growing customer base and encoding reliability and speed as well. We hope you notice overall performance improvemente throughout the service. We are continuing emphasis along these lines with goals to continue getting faster and more reliable.

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