Hi, I hope you all are well during these crazy times.
Speaking of these crazy times, one thing that’s being used even more then usual at our facility is the Client review site, for obvious reasons.
I’m wondering if there are any plans on revamping the client review site? I know that there were some updates a couple of months back, but especially now, I feel like there are some features that are missing like:
Per user approval - I’m sure that we’re not the only ones missing this feature
A “Download all” button. We have heard this from clients multiple times, and especially now during these times.
Something that would be really awesome as well is a more cinesync-like workflow within Shotgun, I get that this is a bigger topic but I would love to see something like that in the future.
I’ve submitted feature requests before about these things, but wanted to hear if there are any plans like these in the roadmap for the client review site. Or what the roadmap for the client review site looks like in general. It’s great, but it also feels like it can be improved.
Hope things are well with you, great to hear from you as there is not much chance of bumping into you at conferences right now.
There are some decent changes coming to the Creative Collaboration area of SG (which CRS is a part of) some of which will affect the CRS such as the transcoder and there is an internal roadmap looking at a lot of features to do with creative review. I’m not seeing specifics for the features you mentioned, but as this part of the product is seeing some changes, I will definitely make the team aware of these ideas as it’s not the first we have heard of it, like you say, you have already put in those feature requests.
With it being Forum Friday, I’ll try and wrangle one of the PM’s from CC to get back to this thread directly (once they are online).
Have a great Friday and stay safe with us too!
-David
Hi guys!
Great to hear that you will bring our ideas up with the dev-team David.
The CRS is used a lot in daily production and appreciated by clients. With some additions it could be even better!
Like Jonas wrote we have recipients hitting approved not understanding that it’s a global approval for the shot and not just that client users approval. It would be great to find a solution to have per user approval and actually mark which users even get the approval option and which users are only spectators.
There is another issue that we have constantly that is super easy to fix. When an invite to a new playlist in their e-mail they think that they should already have a pwd and that they didn’t recieve it from us when they are in fact promted to create a new pwd for their personal client user. I don’t understand why they don’t just hit “view playlist” but almost all clients don’t get it. They mail us “hey, I didn’t get a pwd”. So the phrasing needs to be clearified which should be an easy fix.
The ability to download all QT’s in one go would also be an easy fix but incredibly handy. The QT’s in the playlistv are to heavily compressed so it’s essential to download a better version but doing that on 20+ shots is tedious. It would be awesome for everyone to prepare a session by first hitting download all and then join on a call.
A Cinesync clone would be awesome and I’m surprised SG has not done it as it seems a very natural addition to the CRS. There was a way of doing it within RV but a bit fiddly. The basic function of Cinesync is great but it’s old and could be done much better. Integrated as a function within CRS it would kick ass!
Another thing that would be great would be to mark the slides with thumbnails so that you can easily spot which versions actually got notes from clients and new notes as well. Looking at the client view is great to get an overview and have a chat with clients about versions but it’s hard to keep track which of many version actually got a note.
And marking the slides with the shot name would also make it much faster to navigate in the playlist.
Those are some improvements of the top of my head. I hope you can get some of them in to CRS. That would be awesome!
Welcome to the forums! Wow, thanks for all the detailed notes, I’ll see what I can address here.
User specific approvals; Hoping the CC team will feedback on this, but I do suggest like @jonas.lindfors you can add it as a feature request in productboard @ https://www.shotgunsoftware.com/roadmap/ to help get it pushed up the list.
I see what you mean, maybe the workflow could be looked at here, or at least made more clear? One way to help with clients who may not get it is that you can set the password for them in the Client Users page (if you are an admin) and share it that way?
There might be some changes to the transcodes coming in the future so hoping that this might not be too much of an issue going forward?
Noted, nice idea, would be worth another feature request I recon.
Like above, this sounds like a good polish ticket, I guess if you don’t have straps or a slate on the media it can be a bit confusing if you have Version names that are not congruent with the linked entity.
Hopefully this answers some of your questions, will see what our CC product team can say too.
Have a great Friday!
-David
Its great to see that Client Review Site is getting some love, we have been having issues with the sorting of media, where the media app does not honor the sorting which comes from the playlist and only admin’s have the ability to sort the media in the media app.
It would be great this gets some attention.
Hi David,
Did you get any response from the CC product team on the questions we had in April?
I just convinced a really demanding director to try out the Client Review Site on his new show after years of pushing for it. Unfortunately it failed immediately due to the lack of some of the points we brought up in April and some additional shortcomings.
I did make a tutorial to the director of how to log in correctly creating a new pwd to get him past point #2 from my list in April where the log in is unclear that you are promted to create a NEW pwd and not be supplied with one. It worked!. One down.
But then point #3 from my list in April, No ability to Download all versions included in a playlist option was thrown back at me. Having to hit download on each of the versions in a review set instead of Download ALL was to slow. If we had access to CRS we could implement that function ourselves but we don’t and need your help. It can’t be a big request, can it? Directors do want to download versions even if the transcoding on the site will become better. They want to be able to playback in a player they are used to, zoom in, use JKL-shortcuts to spot errors at double speed or reverse etc.
The next thing highlighted by the director was the lack of proper TC-count display for the version matching the cut. I told him to change from frames to TC but boy was I surprised when all that showed was a “TC” starting at 00:00 for each version?!.. I tried inserting values in all SG TC fields but those are apparently not called upon. The TC display seems to be a dummy display starting at 00:00 no matter what TC you have on the shot in SG or am I missing something?
The fact that older notes on previous versions are not accessible in the playlist was considered a big no. I can’t just keep adding versions to the one playlist to keep old versions and notes. That playlist would become huge… The best would be to be able to review older versions compared to the latest version. But at least the function like the “Review notes app” has where one can see notes in text on previous versions stacked on top of each other like open notes would help a lot. Can that be implemented?
Approve button. He wondered how someone other than the director is allowed to approve a shot? Agreeing who approves versions in the playlist should be set to director or producer depending on the show. This should be pretty easy to fix. When creating the playlist the option to set who of the invited client users has the approval right could be set. The option of stripping viewing rights and therefore the ability to see the approval button that I read somewhere in the forum is not a fix for this. All invited client users should be able to see and in my mind write notes. But only one designated client user should have the option to approve.
This is the response I got sofar. If these and other suggestions of improving the CRS is implemented I might hopefully have a shot with this director again but for now I thought it was a good real life example to show you the shortcomings of the CRS at the moment.
Please show this to the CC team and let me know their response.
Adding our +1 for a download all feature. It’s very cumbersome with lots of Versions to review to click one at a time. Instead, we have to create a separate delivery with the files, which is a lot of double-handling.
+1 for downloading all media in Client Review Site. I can understand if this is a passive security measure, but unfortunately it only provides limited security at the cost of high inconvenience. Many reviewers like to give draw over notes directly in photoshop. They like to download jpgs to do this. PS - I don’t think I can see the feature request you’ve submitted, Astrid. What is it called?
and there is an internal roadmap looking at a lot of features to do with creative review. I’m not seeing specifics for the features you mentioned, but as this part of the product is seeing some changes, I will definitely make the team aware of these ideas as it’s not the first we have heard of it, like you say, you have already put in those feature requests.