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:

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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:

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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.

We’re Faster

After intense focus for a period on development of Resource Management as an entirely new module, we’ve dedicated the last several weeks to fixing bugs, sprucing up a few features, and improving performance throughout video.Market7.  This includes fulfillment of a number of requests that have been made on our Get Satisfaction site, so please keep up the questions and comments there.  We hope users are generally noticing quicker performance, fewer errors and clearer feature usage. Here’s some of what we’ve done lately:

• Enhancements to layout and presentation of data in new Resource Management module
• Inclusion of resource management data on the cross-project dashboard
• Ability for certain accounts to block content downloads — please let us know if you’d like us to turn this on for your account, although some of the work we’re doing right now will make this available with File-by-File granularity very soon
• Faster and more precise type-ahead suggestions when entering character names in Collaborative Script
• Streamlined and clearer process for inviting Team members

We are now embarking on a couple of ambitious projects that we expect will radically reinvent two of our existing modules, facilitating much more powerful usage. Stay tuned to these New Release posts to monitor what those are.