Adobe intros completely rewritten and massively expanded next gen Frame.io V4

“You will not find a single pixel in version four that exists in our current product,” says Frame.io co-founder, Emery Wells, as Frame.io V4 expands its remit to cover every stage of the creative process.

Emery Wells, Co-Founder of Frame.io, and now VP, Creative Product Group at Adobe, says that Frame.io V4 has been completely rewritten from the ground up in a lengthy process that stretches all the way back to 2020.

“We went to the to the whiteboard,” he says, “and we asked ourselves the question, what if we were to take everything that we've learned over the past several years of being in market, all the thousands and thousands of conversations we've had with customers and we gave ourselves complete and total freedom, a blank sheet design? What would we build?

“We went through that design exercise,” he continues, “and at the end of it, we were so compelled by what we came up with we said, ‘Well, we have to build that’, and that's what we've been building for the past few years. [Frame.io V4] is a complete reimagination of Frame.io from the ground up. It's a complete redesign. It's a complete rebuild. It really is a brand new product. Frame.io V4 is still a great end to end unit approval system for video, but it's also a fantastic dailies review and distribution tool. It's a task based workflow management platform. It's a high speed File Transfer tool, and it's an asset manager that can sit across the entire creative pipeline.”

In other words, this really is an all-singing, all-dancing update that takes Frame.io from its reviews and approvals niche and spreads it over the entire creative workflow. No wonder it took four years to put together.

Here are some of the main new areas it’s hitting:

Workflow Management

V4 offers an all-new metadata framework, transforming how users interact with assets: Instead of relying solely on a rigid folder structure, users can now tag, organize and view their media based on how their teams work. 

V4 also introduces (and is making a big deal of) Collections, a flexible, real-time and saved view of assets that allows users to dynamically select, filter, group and sort their media using metadata.

Additionally, later this year, Frame.io will be natively integrated with Workfront, enabling a new unified review and approval workflow that can streamline collaboration between cross-functional teams.

Adobe handily has also provided a bit of an insight into some of the ways this will help users. For Casting & Auditions it will allow you to group audition tapes by character, filtered by selects, while displaying metadata such as agency, agent content and availability. When it comes to Location Scouting, you will be able to manage location searches; compare potential sites, organize scouting reports, and handle logistical arrangements for optimal shooting settings. For Daily Footage Reviews, users can manage video dailies, ensuring talent and executives see only material relevant to them. Actors can receive Collections with only their takes, updated daily, while studio execs access dynamically updated Collections organized by shooting day, scene and selected takes. And for Marketing Campaign Management, you can manage review and approval for all creative assets in a marketing campaign, organized by distribution channel, and grouped by asset type, while displaying metadata such as specs and media spend.

Creative Review and Approval

V4 features a unified and redesigned player architecture to deliver a ‘beautiful’ immersive media viewing experience, with consistent controls across multiple file types. Users

will experience more and better ways to share feedback, including an entirely overhauled commenting system that includes over a dozen new features.

Sharing and Presentation

V4 consolidates sharing and presentation workflows, delivering a more fluid experience for users to browse, preview and customize – all from a single view.

Adobe reckons Frame.io has over four million users at the moment, and is looking to expand that number as well. It is currently integrated with Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects and will be available in Adobe Photoshop for Creative Cloud Enterprise customers beginning in May. Support for more Creative Cloud tools and customer segments is coming later this year.

To learn more about other innovations available with Frame.io V4, have a look at the always readable Frame.io blog here.

Frame.io V4 will begin to roll out today in beta for Free and Pro customers across the web, iPhone, and iPad, arriving in stages throughout 2024. V4 is planned to launch for Team and Enterprise customers later this year.