Below this paragraph you’re looking at a significant advance in our securing content and information about production that’s run discreetly through video.Market7. The first modules in the application to feature access controls were collaborative script and resource management — in both of these people can be explicitly invited or excluded from access based on permission levels granted either to them personally & directly, or more indirectly through association of privilege with their roles. Roles in this context sort of act like tags. Thing is that until recently roles could be openly changed by anyone. So, if I’m locked out of a script I want to see, but I suspect the “crew” role (or of course some other one) does have access, then I can just expand my roles to include “crew”, and I’m in. We’re about to expand content security considerations to other parts of our service, so it’s become time to close the roles loophole, now done.
The above image is a project-owner’s perspective. This is the only person in a project who may determine which people in a project may assign roles. The red padlock towards upper-right indicates that some users are restricted from role assignment, and that button is only visible to the project owner who may press it to modify. When there are no restrictions set for any team member on role-setting, which is the default condition when a new project starts, the button is green instead of red, and reveals an open padlock. Then there’s the nearby floating rectangle containing text — it’s our new (& more on-screen persistent during mouse-over) style of text/information-revealing (aka tooltip). Looks nice, right? This message tells the project-owner about their being allowed to modify roles themselves, also indicated by the little, green, open padlock above the Team module’s Roles column, right by the pointer. When someone who’s denied role modification privileges by the project-owner looks at the Team module, the lock over that column is red and closed, the person can not add or modify (but CAN see) roles, and the tooltip includes identification & contact information for project-owner along with advice to contact that person for modification request.
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).
Thought it would be clever to pair the catch-phrase from Days Of Thunder at the start of this post with the catch-phrase from Talladega Nights at the end, but imdb reveals a different Tom Cruise vehicle as source of the line above: Top Gun, of course. My bad. Anyhow, that need, for speed: we’ve been feeling too, just like Maverick, and probably also Cole Trickle (name of lead character in Days Of Thunder — I had to look that up).
We love regularly adding modules and features which we know address real challenges and desires in production of media. The collection of all of these elements is an application suite on which people rely for vital activities of theirs. And delivering such an application suite, with its feature richness, over the internet, to browsers, presents performance challenges. The past couple of weeks have been one of our periodic times of assessing and implementing techniques for faster performance, and we are glad to already be hearing from users noticing the improvement. We come out of this release with a few more acceleration ideas that we’ll weave into our work going forward.
Besides being faster, one other significant initiative of this new release is that when people who already have video.Market7 log-in access, and are added to new projects, it’s automatic & instantaneous with no need for such new project members to accept invitations (although they do receive emails notifying them of being added). A few of our higher-project-volume customers have requested this, and we agree, so there it is & thanks for the correspondence.
Anyhow, like Ricky Bobby would say, do shake-n-bake some content in our faster video.Market7.
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.
A cool new feature area in our latest release is visual depiction of who’s available when, and what is nature of any conflicts, while events are being scheduled, demonstrated below. Last couple weeks have also included a good amount of behind-scenes work including architectural upgrade for our increasing usage, and some bug fixing (should you notice any, please let us know (info or support AT market7 email addresses), and we’ll get on it quickly). OK, here’s the visual availability functionality:
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:
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:
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.
Your entire production team will know more (about what is going on in your video production) as a result of our most current release. To start with, our Activity Feed was the recipient of a much needed makeover. Now, right from the project homepage, you can instantly see exactly what has been happening on your video projects.
Has the customer viewed the video? Find out!
Was the script updated? Find out!
Are they reading anything I am writing? It’s right there in the Project Activity Feed.
And if that wasn’t enough, the Event Management page now has an easy to read calendar view to ensure you don’t miss or double book over those important production meetings.
And finally, as a bonus, we added an rollover image viewer to allow you to preview images with their relevant data right within the list, accessible from the activity feed, main File Management page, or media column in the Collaborative Script (no more clicking and waiting to get a larger view).
Here we demonstrate the highlights of the new features:
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
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.
We have an entirely new module! Resource management takes advantage of the information we have about people and their activities within projects to assess overall time spent versus expectations and the financial impact. Like we recently blogged, it’s the start of our solution to the issue of video productions being particularly challenging projects for understanding costs. The module is called “resource management” and not “personnel time tracking” because we plan to expand it to include considerations like facilities, equipment and consumables for an even richer perspective on the business of making video. But for now we’re launching this and moving on to enhancing and introducing other aspects of video.Market7 about which we’ll blog in our next New Release post.
Here are demonstrated highlights of the new module:
2GB! We have doubled our maximum upload size, coincidentally around when YouTube makes the same move (next time it’ll be us out in front). Please note that we recommend using Flash 10 when uploading files above 1GB.
Logo!Our accounts from Line Producer level up have long allowed customers to displace our brand with your own, well now if you’re Producer Pro or higher (so upgrade already!) you can specify this branding at per-project granularity.
On-off switch!The account management page (“My Account” link in upper-right visible only to account holders (versus their admins or invited team members)) — anyhow, that page now includes de-/re-activate buttons and whenever a project’s deactivated its storage does not count towards the account.
Another on-off switch!Free Production Assistant accounts (upgrade already!) are still limited to five team members, but now members are not stuck there permanently but can be removed from projects (& also can be subsequently reinstated).
More acurate than ever!Our script running time estimation had been anchored on speech at 100 words-per-minute which is fine for drama and such when there are non-verbal passages mixed with dialog, but most videos are filled with speakers at a natural language pace so we’ve scaled up and now anchor on 125.
Coolest of all — four out of the six items listed above are based on ideas originally articulated by our users.
