Video pros have another option for collaborative video review with Dropbox, which now allows users to annotate media files with time-stamped comments.
Time-based commenting is available on the Dropbox website as well as via the Dropbox app for iOS. (Android is coming soon, the company said.) Comments, which are stamped to the nearest second but are not frame-accurate, use @-mentions to quickly identify clients and other contacts for notification that new comments have been added.
It’s not just for video — Dropbox says more than 30 video and audio file types are supported, including QuickTime, MPEG-4, MXF and WAV.
Any Dropbox user can add time-based comments to files shared by users with paid Dropbox Professional, Business Advanced, Enterprise and Education accounts. A Dropbox Professional account starts at $22/month (or $199/year) and includes 2 TB of storage space and a 120-day version history.
Dropbox created this GIF to demonstrate its new time-based comments feature.
Dropbox
Time-based comments are just a toe in the post-production waters for Dropbox. They won’t make the service competitive with the highly developed review and approval workflows offered by the likes of Frame.io and Wipster, but they do introduce basic collaborative functionality to Dropbox’s extremely useful file-sharing service. In fact, “basic” may be the value proposition here — anyone who’s used Google Docs for collaboration will find Dropbox’s comment system to be similarly unfussy and intuitive.
