• Emily Best

A snapshot of Frame.io's great demo video

Hey folks!

I have met some more cool companies in my recent travels that I think you'll want to keep on your radar for all the imaginative ways you're reaching out to your audiences and simplifying your filmmaking process. We're so, so lucky to live in a time when so many polymathic filmmakers are building incredible tech tools to bring down the price of production and broaden the possibilties of reach for distribution.

2ndLine.tv is a digital screening room for filmmakers to share their work online with live director commentary. You can schedule a pay-per-view screening of your film, market your work, and engage your viewers in real time while they watch your film. You can easily build a custom page for your film (see https://2ndline.tv/augustusgladstone for an example), sell tickets right from your film’s custom page, and chat with viewers in the attractive, ephemeral chat tool (don’t worry, users can turn off chat to focus on the film if they prefer). Best of all, it’s not just free for filmmakers to use, but you will get the lion’s share of the PPV revenues from your screening. (That's what matters most to us at S&S, of course.)

We see 2ndLine as a great place to hold a sneak preview online, share the film festival screening experience with broader audiences, generate publicity for a theatrical release, or breathe new life into an old film. There are so many cool possibilities!

The Diamond Brothers turned me on to Frame.io (beautiful landing page!) which proposes to solve MANY challenges in media management that filmmakers face. When I asked what's the easiest way to communicate what problems they're solving, they sent me this unintentional poem:

"Managing 100 Vimeo passwords is never fun.

Your clients cryptic feedback of “that brown thing around 12 seconds” will now actually makes sense.

Trudging through your email to find that download link from that person for that file. Ugh.

It’s 10PM and you don’t know if your edit is approved (or even viewed).

It’s 11PM and now you have to export and compress your edit in 25 different formats."

(Whatever, it's better than James Franco's collection.)http://www.amazon.com/Directing-Herbert-White-James-Franco/dp/1555976735#

They're combining cloud storage, client review, transcoding, and light asset management into one seamless app. My favorite tool they provide for video is time-based comments and annotation so you can draw directly on video frames. They've got version control and comparison tools built in so you can see what’s changed over time. It's built for teams, can manage permissions, and even has a social component so that each action is tied to an individual profile and can be tracked.

It also looks super sweet. We'll be tracking their progress for sure!

Endcrawl is a web-based tool for creating scrolling end credits for feature films - it's super simple to use! Users can collaborate on their list of credits in a central Google doc, and preview the layout in real time through Endcrawl's simple and extremely flexible web app.

Beta customers receive unlimited half-res (1k) renders free, and for a flat $500 rate, receive full-res (2k) renders, which are also unlimited. This comes in really handy when your film makes a sale months into its festival run and you suddenly have to add three more names. The project is always live. 1k renders are delivered in minutes, 2k renders in less than one hour. Endcrawl has been used on over 100 feature films so far, including 10 films in Sundance 2014. They are actively seeking new customers who have feature films in post production.

If these are useful to you, let us know in the comments. We'll keep updating our growing list of cool companies to watch!