Frame.io
Undoing the Knots of Disarray

For Buzzfeed, a startup that publishes seventy five videos on YouTube and roughly a hundred videos on Facebook every week, the whole video production process was orchestrated by technicians, performers, editors, and producers. When several minds worked on individual projects, having cohesive and collaborative conversations and sharing media over e-mail was a major setback, both in time as well as comfort. “Creative people are going to need creative tools that actually help them express their creativity. Frame.io does that,” expresses Henry Goldman, Executive Producer at Buzzfeed, “Having something where I can write onto each frame—it’s really powerful.” With Frame.io in the picture, Buzzfeed was able to dissect, review, analyze, edit, and republish media in real-time, in multiple iterations. Frame.io allowed them to bring all these steps—previously managed by several different apps—onto a single collaborative platform made for video production.

Emery Wells, Co-founder and CEO at Frame.io, says that the product itself was the fruit of his own quandaries and frustrations experienced during his previous capacity as the owner of a post production company that produced commercials and digital clips. “We were having challenges collaborating on the videos that we were making— collaborating with vendors, clients, and just each other,” he reminisces. While most organizations looked to commercially available online file sharing services to store and shuttle large video files back and forth, it was not particularly a walk-in-the-park to view those videos online. Even consumer video sites like YouTube and Vimeo, that eliminated the preview difficulty, led the production team to another unsettling vexation—the entire communication and media-sharing was spread across a plethora of mails, texts, and platforms, making it an onerous task to corroborate the data of the whole video production schedule. Frame.io was initially designed to overcome these challenges and quickly became a separate entity in the market.

Frame.io recognizes each video on its platform as a private and secure project, accessed only by a defined set of collaborators, which can be expanded only by invitation.

Frame.io recognizes each video on its platform as a private and secure project, accessed only by a defined set of collaborators

What really helps Frame.io outperform the other video editing or other platforms is the review process itself. Time-stamped comments can be captured against each frame in real-time, which essentially keeps the whole review process lucid and concise for the editor. The file preview is made simple, with certain “magic moments” that stand out as key factors that drive adoption. Frame.io recognizes the subtle difficulties of video preview on a mobile device. If the editor wishes to see the frame against which a review was written, the review comment just needs to be clicked. The preview plays a window of four seconds—two seconds before and after the exact frame—and the comment highlights at the exact moment the frame appears. These “magic moments” paved the way for Frame.io to win the 2016 Apple Design Award for their iOS application.

Subtle, yet effective abilities of the application, coupled with seamless integrations with widely-used video editing platforms have helped Frame.io attain generous acceptance among video editors. “Yes, it is a phenomenal tool for video editors, but we’re actually building a product for the business of creating videos, which is much bigger,” reckons Wells. Frame.io brings together a broad and diverse set of individuals—producers, directors, copy writers, sound mixers, designers, marketers, vendors, and clients. Wells anchors the prospect for Frame.io, “Videos are becoming horizontal. It is the preferred way that people want to receive information on the internet. From sales and marketing to technology and education oriented companies, they all faced similar dilemmas with video production that Frame.io is built to combat.”