Market7
It’s time to let the cat out of the proverbial bag and discuss what I consider one of the most interesting and potentially useful new production tools available today.
Market7 bills itself as a video production collaboration tool and I’ve had a chance to sit down with CEO Seth Kenvin and Director of Creative Development Shannon Newton to get a closer look at its baby.
What Is Market7?
Market7.com sums up its product as follows:
“The Market7 online environment improves the collaboration necessary to produce video.
With video.Market7.com you can assemble teams, define projects, develop content, securely share files, and communicate clearly. The environment’s modules are organized by project stages: pre-production, production, and post-production.”
My own take-away is that Market7 is a online-based collaboration tool that allows video editors to visually communicate and interact with clients and other production team members. I am not getting paid by Market7 for this review so what follows are my own thoughts based on the walk-through with Kevin and Shannon.
Log In and Collaborate
While I call Market7 software you don’t actually have to install anything. Market7 and all its tools are completely online.
You have a user account at Market7.com. You log in (see screen shot above) and have all those tools available. Equally important, so does your client, other production members, or anyone you wish. You can assign roles to other people to make sure they only have access and are able to make changes to what they should. No worries about one person screwing up your entire project.
Here is Market7’s demo video on how to work with multiple team members.
Define your Project
Communication is key with every video project and one of the features I can see myself use quite a bit is Market7’s Production Brief.
This section allows Producers and Clients define what exactly the project is supposed to be. No more “Oh I thought you wanted X, Mr Client”. You or others can make up your own questions and anyone on the team, provided they have the appropriate access, can add or change any part of the Production Brief.
How long should the video be? What formats does the client want it in? Those types of essential questions are what the Production Brief section is meant to help answer. Ah clarity - ’tis a beautiful thing.
The Annotative Player – Draw stuff, make notes
Editors can upload a version of the movie, and show the client. The client can then make notes to each frame and each part of the video, and even mark specific parts of a video frame to discuss further.
Everything is based on Market7’s secure servers, something the more paranoid among editors and production members will appreciate.
In the example screen shot below you’ll see how the client drew a square and noted to the editor to make changes to this specific portion of the video.
Can’t get any more clear and specific than that – I simply loved this feature.
In my own experience there isn’t much more frustrating than trying to read the clients’ mind when reviewing your video project. “Take out that thing there, after, you know, that one guy comes in, not that one but the other one.” just doesn’t make for a very efficient cutting job.
Market7 really shines in that area and when Shannon and Seth showed me how easy it was to annotate any part of the video and put down notes for any frame I thought this feature alone would be priceless.
Adobe Premiere Pro CS2 introduced introduced a fairly similar concept called Clip Notes. While a good idea on paper, I personally never liked Premiere Pro’s Clip Notes work flow and found to have more problems with it than I felt was worth the trouble.
Market7’s annotation system is a whole ‘nother ball game and definitely worth a very close look, particularly if you work with or for clients or other third parties that give input on your edits.
But wait – there’s (a lot) more!
Market7, Scripts, Footage, and You
Market7 goes well above allowing collaborating on small video projects. Even if you are working on a full length feature film with a script Market7 makes things quite a bit easier on you and the rest of your overworked partners.
The Collaborative Script section of your Market7 account breaks the script into its Visual and Audio components. If you want to upload additional story board drawings, notes, or video clips to help the script along, you can.
If you want to make different versions of your script and compare them you can – and all your versions remain stored so you can always revert back to older versions if you or your clients wish.
For a more visual explanation of how the Collaborative Script section works check out this video.
Teams, Collaboration, File Management – Oh My!
Market7’s biggest focus is definitely on all things management - from creating entire team profiles where you could track and make notes about actors, production members, or customers, to all sorts of potentially very useful tools to get a handle on all those video and audio files and countless other assets typically required to produce a large movie project, Market7 lets you work more efficiently and with a paper trail to help organize your thoughts.
Check out each of the section to the right here to learn more about the different organizational tools.
How Well Does Market7 Work?
Market7 is a fairly new product. According to Seth, Market7 has been officially available since July 2007, with some upgrades and improvements, often based on customer feedback, implemented since.
Before we got started with the walk-through, Shannon pointed out that the Market7 development team greatly appreciates customer feedback and in fact works a lot of suggestions into future versions.
That’s always good to hear as we all know that no tool or application in the world couldn’t be improved upon. Market7 agrees on this.
That said, I found some minor flaws in Market7’s current offering. For example I found the storage amounts allocated to each users’ account to be a bit on the low side. Currently Market7’s highest level of membership allows your uploaded videos to be no larger than 1 Gig in size.
That’s more than adequate for music videos, commercials, and short films, particularly because you’ll be uploading a lower resolution for your client’s evaluation. But for those editors and production team members working on long feature films with different versions (think alternate endings or outtakes) one Gigabyte may not be enough.
I brought this up to Seth and Shannon and they hinted on possibly increasing the allowance in future versions.
Also keep in mind that you are still required to upload your video footage via FTP (Market7 does have its own intuitive FTP uploader) so you are still dependent on your internet connection speed.
I long for the day when editors can stream video directly from our computers to the client with ease. Until that day, Market7’s way of doing things is probably the fastest, most efficient way.
(Note: yes I am aware of possible ways of doing that streaming thing I mentioned using VLC and other third party apps. The problem is that most clients simply don’t have the technological aptitude or interest in getting this to work on their end. Market7 on the other hand doesn’t require technical skills – just a browser and the ability to read and write. )
Summary
I found Market7 to be one of the most promising and useful tools any production company, no matter how large or small, could possibly get their hands on.
There are a lot of features I didn’t mention here and not all of them will be useful to everybody. Use what you like, skip what you don’t.
Any professional video/film editor working with third party clients and most production houses without their own custom software would be well advised to take a serious look at Market7.
Oh and the price? Much less than you may think. One of the big surprises was the pricing structure Seth revealed to me toward the end of our session. If you can afford your daily Starbucks latte you can afford Market7.