Kylee Wall: Why I Switched From Vimeo to ScreenLight For Collaboration on Post

Screenlight by Kylee Wall

I shouldn't have to wait 6 hours to upload and share a trailer cut with a director.

That's what I said to myself at 2AM, while I was waiting for Vimeo to process my file. I wanted to pass my editor's cut to Josh before I went to bed because his schedule would allow him to provide feedback while I was asleep. We wanted to get the trailer out as soon as possible. This wasn't helping.

The trailer was for The Impersonators, a comedy feature film directed by Joshua Hull. It had wrapped a couple weeks earlier, and I had turned around a teaser in time for Labor Day Weekend. Still being early in the process, there were things in the post workflow that were being worked out. One of those things was sending screeners and previews to Josh for feedback. While we're both in Indiana, he's close to an hour away from my apartment. He was also on an opposite work schedule from me, and I was cutting at night anyway. There simply wasn't much, if any, time to get together for reviews. I was uploading previews to him, and he would be watching them mostly on mobile devices -- Android phone, iPhone, iPad. Rarely a desktop.

So I tried Vimeo a couple of times. I liked that I could password protect it. Even though it was optimized for their player, the playback was terrible on his end, particularly on the Android phone. He had to wait to watch until he could find an iOS device. And this was if Vimeo even bothered to upload the file.

I dabbled with YouTube as a last resort. It works, but it ain't pretty. I don't like the ambiguous Big Brother terms of service YouTube offers either. And a private video is almost certainly out of the question. Josh is tech savvy enough, but adding him as a YouTube contact and all the junk that goes along with that was more trouble than it's worth. All his devices would need to be logged in, too. So I used an unlisted link. Luckily Josh understood that an unlisted link on YouTube is not public, but it feels so close to the edge of public that it makes me uncomfortable to use it on anything important. Most of my clients would not be cool with unlisted YouTube links. It doesn't' feel legitimate read more...