If you are a video editor, then you know what it's like to edit footage for a client and have to email them back and forth for hours to figure out what the client likes and doesn't like about the finished product.
Rendering out a video (compressing everything into one file) from your video editing program takes a long time and then having to upload the video to YouTube or Vimeo to show your client also takes a long time.
Then you get an email from your client saying that they would rather you use "this word" instead of that one for a text scene, or the song you used didn't match the mood of the scene, or the transition they wanted was a different one, or they wanted a fade in a certain area of the video. Then you have to go back and fix the video, render the entire video again and upload it again...Needless to say, this process can take hours, days, and weeks.
I've actually added up the amount of time I've spent using the above process over the course of six years and the number comes out to an absurd 5,500 hours. That's 5,500 hours of video editing and going back and forth with my clients to get the perfect finished product.
As Acclaim Co-Founder's Aksel Gungor and Andy showed at the February edition of Philly Tech Meetup, they have a solution for this time wasting problem. Acclaim is a nifty, web-based, video collaboration tool for video editors and their clients. Once you log into your personalized page you are directed to a project page where you can add a new project to collaborate with your client. Once you create your project you can then upload a video and add people via email to the project so that they can view it. This is all private so that no one else can see your footage and there is a commenting system on the project page directly.
For example, let's say that the client wanted a different transition at 1 minute 26 seconds, a white flash instead of a dissolve. Well they can simply post a comment at that particular frame by pausing the video and writing a comment in the box underneath the video. Acclaim will then immediately show the comment to the right of the video for you in the interface. Your clients can leave as many comments as they would like and it keeps showing the frames where this takes place on the video so that you can quickly find out what they are talking about instead of having to read long emails and try to figure out what they are talking about.
What I find impressive about the site, is how easy it is to use, and for clients this is key. Video editing is a tedious and difficult process, so the easier it is for the client to let the editor know what needs to be fixed, the better. Acclaim is in beta right now at and has only been developed for a couple of months so there are still some features that need to be tweaked and the interface could use a little work. But the developers are hard at work to make this a very clean and useful product. Overall it's very clean and if catches on it could very well be the number one video collaboration too for video editors and their clients.
If you want to try it out, just sign up on their launch page here.
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