At Framework, we believe the time has come for consumer electronics products that are designed to last. Founded in San Francisco in 2019, our mission is to empower you with great products you can easily customize, upgrade, and repair, increasing longevity and reducing e-waste in the process.
- Frame.io is a great tool for collaborating on video production. If you are happy with the video on Frame, you can download it by clicking the three dots in the upper right, then download, then choosing a size (I suggest the top option for size.) This will download the mov file to your hard drive (probably downloads folder.).
- Frame.io is a cloud-based collaboration platform that lets you share video projects with your team and clients for fast feedback and approval. Stay connected and in sync on video and image projects from anywhere on the planet. Thanks to a recent update, Frame.io's Zapier integration has three new actions: Create.
Multiple sources of user research and customer feedback are now consolidated and synthesized as part of the product planning processes. The resulting roadmap on Airtable becomes a live and collaborative source-of-truth for the product direction, increasing efficiency and alignment across the broader organization and enabling teams to drive deeper business value.
Scaling at the speed of innovation
Speed and innovation are what Frame.io is all about. The company's cloud-based platform allows anyone who works with video to view and share edits, create timecode-specific notes, communicate about projects, and share onscreen markups on-the-fly. Like many innovative tech companies, Frame.io's product is at its heart. Their product roadmap keeps their heart beating: it unites the whole company, and ultimately drives user-base growth and satisfaction. As the company grew, and more people worked on the product, it got harder to scale communication about roadmap changes across the Frame.io organization.
The challenge: Plenty of information, but no way to find it
The product roadmap developed organically through a combination of spreadsheets, Google Docs, and Google slides, which scattered and siloed key information. For example, user feedback—an essential input to product development—was abundant, but hard to find. With no systematic way to map customer anecdotes and pain points to product features and improvements, it was hard to share customer stories with the broader product organization.
User feedback was just one example of hard-to-find information. Because the roadmap lived in different documents and weekly updates, it often fell out of date, leaving GTM partners wondering what the product team was working on next. Beyond hindering their speed, this presented a challenge: how would Frame.io stay aligned between product and GTM to best deliver value to its customers?
The solution: A flexible, responsive roadmap — and team
When Sam Seely, Director of Product, joined the company as its third product hire, the team was still managing the roadmap in different presentations, documents, and spreadsheets—every quarter he and the team would try a new method to share product updates with the rest of the company. As the company grew, it became harder to keep everyone up to date through the methods that had worked in the past.
We were spending so much time trying to find information that by the time we found it, the opportunity had passed. — Tanya Smallwood, Director of Product Development
When Seely heard about Airtable's no-code app development platform, he thought it could make the roadmap an accessible, living document, and save product managers time by giving them a single source to update. He signed up for a free account and started migrating information into his first base. He quickly realized Airtable could do anything a prepackaged roadmap solution could do, but in an entirely non-prescriptive way. Using features like shared views and filters, and reporting and dashboards, teams could build the processes they needed without compromising or adapting to a workflow that didn't make sense to them. Best of all, the roadmap that the product team started living in every day was the same roadmap that was accessible to GTM teams within Frame.io—everyone was on the same page, in real-time.
At the same time, David Kong, Senior User Insight Manager, got to work on bringing Frame.io's customer research practices into Airtable. He used Airtable's API and 3rd party integrations to pull in information from the support team, the sales team, social media, and other sources of user feedback, giving them a real-time overview of everything customers were saying about Frame.io. Using triggers, he automated the data collection process, integrating creative solutions like a custom Slack emoji that automatically triggers a 'send to base' function when assigned to a comment.
Kong's user research app was a game-changer for the entire product development process. 'We're able to listen and learn from our customers more now than we ever could before in a much more systematic way,' Kong says. 'This makes us more agile and able to work more quickly.' Now, the company no longer has to make educated guesses about the most popular features users want—the data is clear, categorized, and sortable for everyone to use.
Airtable started to spread to other parts of the company too, like Sales. Every salesperson had their own way of collecting the marketing materials they needed, making it hard to systematize and scale sales efforts. Tanya Smallwood, Director of Sales Enablement, began working with Rahul Kothari, Senior Product Marketing Manager, to create a sales hub that streamlines operations and gives the team a deeper understanding of their entire sales process. It had a halo effect across the organization too, helping drive conversations, onboarding new employees, and giving the team a deeper understanding of their entire sales process.
Airtable was brought in to solve redundancies and lack of clarity around a product roadmap, but in the end, it grew to impact the whole company. Yes, they did fix their roadmap problem, but they had also unexpectedly found the key to cross department collaboration.
What's next for Airtable and Frame.io
Since the day Frame.io began building the product roadmap in Airtable, they haven't looked back. Usage spread throughout the organization like wildfire, convincing Frame.io to upgrade to an enterprise account so they could make Airtable a centralized platform for the whole company. Every day, Frame.io is discovering new ways that Airtable can make their workflow smarter and their product better.
Multiple sources of user research and customer feedback are now consolidated and synthesized as part of the product planning processes. The resulting roadmap on Airtable becomes a live and collaborative source-of-truth for the product direction, increasing efficiency and alignment across the broader organization and enabling teams to drive deeper business value.
Scaling at the speed of innovation
Speed and innovation are what Frame.io is all about. The company's cloud-based platform allows anyone who works with video to view and share edits, create timecode-specific notes, communicate about projects, and share onscreen markups on-the-fly. Like many innovative tech companies, Frame.io's product is at its heart. Their product roadmap keeps their heart beating: it unites the whole company, and ultimately drives user-base growth and satisfaction. As the company grew, and more people worked on the product, it got harder to scale communication about roadmap changes across the Frame.io organization.
The challenge: Plenty of information, but no way to find it
The product roadmap developed organically through a combination of spreadsheets, Google Docs, and Google slides, which scattered and siloed key information. For example, user feedback—an essential input to product development—was abundant, but hard to find. With no systematic way to map customer anecdotes and pain points to product features and improvements, it was hard to share customer stories with the broader product organization.
User feedback was just one example of hard-to-find information. Because the roadmap lived in different documents and weekly updates, it often fell out of date, leaving GTM partners wondering what the product team was working on next. Beyond hindering their speed, this presented a challenge: how would Frame.io stay aligned between product and GTM to best deliver value to its customers?
The solution: A flexible, responsive roadmap — and team
When Sam Seely, Director of Product, joined the company as its third product hire, the team was still managing the roadmap in different presentations, documents, and spreadsheets—every quarter he and the team would try a new method to share product updates with the rest of the company. As the company grew, it became harder to keep everyone up to date through the methods that had worked in the past.
We were spending so much time trying to find information that by the time we found it, the opportunity had passed. — Tanya Smallwood, Director of Product Development
When Seely heard about Airtable's no-code app development platform, he thought it could make the roadmap an accessible, living document, and save product managers time by giving them a single source to update. He signed up for a free account and started migrating information into his first base. He quickly realized Airtable could do anything a prepackaged roadmap solution could do, but in an entirely non-prescriptive way. Using features like shared views and filters, and reporting and dashboards, teams could build the processes they needed without compromising or adapting to a workflow that didn't make sense to them. Best of all, the roadmap that the product team started living in every day was the same roadmap that was accessible to GTM teams within Frame.io—everyone was on the same page, in real-time.
At the same time, David Kong, Senior User Insight Manager, got to work on bringing Frame.io's customer research practices into Airtable. He used Airtable's API and 3rd party integrations to pull in information from the support team, the sales team, social media, and other sources of user feedback, giving them a real-time overview of everything customers were saying about Frame.io. Using triggers, he automated the data collection process, integrating creative solutions like a custom Slack emoji that automatically triggers a 'send to base' function when assigned to a comment.
Kong's user research app was a game-changer for the entire product development process. 'We're able to listen and learn from our customers more now than we ever could before in a much more systematic way,' Kong says. 'This makes us more agile and able to work more quickly.' Now, the company no longer has to make educated guesses about the most popular features users want—the data is clear, categorized, and sortable for everyone to use.
Airtable started to spread to other parts of the company too, like Sales. Every salesperson had their own way of collecting the marketing materials they needed, making it hard to systematize and scale sales efforts. Tanya Smallwood, Director of Sales Enablement, began working with Rahul Kothari, Senior Product Marketing Manager, to create a sales hub that streamlines operations and gives the team a deeper understanding of their entire sales process. It had a halo effect across the organization too, helping drive conversations, onboarding new employees, and giving the team a deeper understanding of their entire sales process.
Airtable was brought in to solve redundancies and lack of clarity around a product roadmap, but in the end, it grew to impact the whole company. Yes, they did fix their roadmap problem, but they had also unexpectedly found the key to cross department collaboration.
What's next for Airtable and Frame.io
Since the day Frame.io began building the product roadmap in Airtable, they haven't looked back. Usage spread throughout the organization like wildfire, convincing Frame.io to upgrade to an enterprise account so they could make Airtable a centralized platform for the whole company. Every day, Frame.io is discovering new ways that Airtable can make their workflow smarter and their product better.
'I'm a huge advocate,' says Rahul. 'The amount of time I've been able to save with Airtable has been immeasurable, and the more we've worked with it, the more applications we've found. Now when a problem comes up, the first question I ask is ‘How do we Airtable this?''
Cover image via
Frame.io could save you hours on your next project and become an indispensable tool in your post-production pipeline. Let's take a hands-on look.
Normally when you're working with clients or a team on a video project, the workflow goes something like this:
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- Upload the video to Vimeo (or another video hosting platform)
- Email the video link to collaborators
- Receive critiques via email
- Repeat
It's a headache. It's often difficult to understand your client's notes…'Did they mean fix the color in this frame or that one?' Additionally, you've got a sea of links floating around, leading to disorganization and confusion…'Wait, which is the latest version of the project?'
Up to this point there hasn't been a good alternative. Enter: Frame.io.
Frame.io is an online collaboration tool that streamlines the video review process by organizing comments, video assets, and file versions all in one place. The app has been making waves over the last few months with love from TechCrunch, NoFilmSchool and FXGuide. In the words of the Frame.io founders:
We replace the hodgepodge of Dropbox for file sharing, Vimeo for video review and email for communication, but that's just a start…
When I initially created an account and dove in, I was surprised at how easy Frame.io was to use. Simply create a project then upload your files. The app allows you to add comments via text or outline certain areas of any frame by ‘drawing' on the video. In this regard, Frame.io beats the heck out of marker comments in NLEs. This overview video from Frame.io gives a quick look into how the software works.
Frame.io currently supports hundreds of file formats including video, audio, images, and PDFs.
What I Like Most About Frame.io
Top of the list, Frame.io is easy to use. Unlike other convoluted file sharing platforms, the app approaches video collaboration with a minimalist user interface, but is packed with the features you need for collaboration and video review. The app's modern design puts the review process first. If you're asking a client to jump into an app to review work, it's important that the learning curve is nonexistent. They nailed it there.
It's the first app that makes video review feel like you're watching and discussing the video in the same room… even if you're a world away. I love the fact that comments show up real time, as they are added, similar in fashion to Google Docs.
Additionally, the app utlizes keyboard shortcuts. For example, you can playback the video using the J,K,L keys on your computer. Double-tap them to double the speed. In a similar fashion to the rating system found in Adobe Bridge or Lightroom, users can give files a star rating to highlight their favorite shots. This is especially useful when uploading dailies and picking selects. Speaking of dailies…
Frame.io FCPX Integration
Frame.io recently launched an integration directly with Apple's Final Cut Pro X editing app. Send all the clips in your project (dailies), selected clips, or your entire timeline to Frame.io with one click inside FCPX. The integration is free from the App Store, so this is a no-brainer for any video editors that use FCPX as their primary NLE. Take a peek:
Is Frame.io Right for You?
Frame.io is an app that every video professional needs, even if they may not know it… yet. Professionals have long needed a solution for seamless collaboration – both with other editors and clients.
Frame Io Transfer App
Surprisingly, getting started with Frame.io doesn't have to cost you a penny. The free version, which allows you to work on a single project, offers uploads of up to 2GB of video files and collaboration with 5 users. Of course, this won't cut it if you're wanting to work on multiple projects or use Frame.io as a large-file storage service, but it's certainly enough to get your feet wet with the app before moving into one of their paid plans.
Blog Frame Io Download
What do you think of Frame.io? Have you had a chance to try it out? Share your experiences in the comments below.
