The Best Real-Time Collaborative Video Editor for Teams

September 2021

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8 min read

The Best Real-Time Collaborative Video Editor for Teams

Collaborative video editing is usually a complex process where people spend lots of time uploading, downloading, and sending large video files back and forth so each collaborator can make edits on their own desktop video editing software.

The most popular video editing software for post-production — like Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro — have options to store video files in the cloud (although the process can still be pretty difficult), but large files always need to be edited on a local drive. This makes it more difficult to work collaboratively on the same file.

Reduct improves video collaboration in two ways:

  1. Reduct is entirely web-based, and it lets users share videos and work on editing together in real-time. So you can upload your video files to Reduct, add other users to your projects, and keep track of each other's changes and progress.
  2. Reduct is also innovative in its approach to video editing because it lets you edit video by editing the text of the video"s transcript. This makes editing video transformatively easier, and lets anyone — even those not trained in complex video editing software — help out with editing.
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Paper Edits with a Play Button: A New Way to Collaborate

Those of you with documentary film-making experience may be familiar with a "paper edit" workflow. You get transcripts of raw footage, mark interesting sections in the text, pull in-and-out points, and then create a "paper edit" to start creating a storyline using that transcript.

This speeds up the process of working with a lot of materials but has a major drawback: what "works" on paper doesn't always work in video.

Reduct allows a similar workflow, with a game-changing improvement: you can click on any word on a transcript and playback video from exactly that moment!

This allows anyone involved in the project — story producers, editors, showrunners, even clients — to be involved in the collaborative editing process. They can search through footage to find great nuggets and clips, highlight and tag to log and categorize footage, and even put together storylines or paper edits by just working with text.

It's as easy as editing text, and as valuable as editing video. (Remember: You can click on any word in Reduct and hit play, and playback video from exactly that moment!)

Watch how video production teams use Reduct:

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In this article, we'll dive into Reduct's collaboration features in more detail to show how it lets teams edit video content together. Then, we'll look at how video editors can edit footage by making changes to the video's transcript.

Reduct is an entirely web-native video editor with tools that make video editing possible for everybody. Get a free trial of our collaborative video editor to get started creating impactful videos alongside your team.

How Team Collaboration Works in Reduct

Reduct is an online, word-based video editing tool, so it makes sharing videos easier and allows teams to do edits on the web instead of on their personal editing app. Reduct was designed to deliver speed and stability even when your team has to work simultaneously on large video archives.

In Reduct, you can store all of your videos within our platform and organize them into folders, so all of your other team members can find and edit the same video files in the same location. Plus, permissions let you decide exactly who gets access to each file and how they are allowed to work on it.

Let's talk more about storage, sharing, and video editing in Reduct.

Store All of Your Videos Online

Reduct lets you store all your raw video material (or proxies) online, rather than on your local hard drive. This makes collaboration really easy — all you need to do is provide a login to Reduct, and people can log in and access all of the footage. (As long as they have the right permissions; more on sharing and permissions below.)

Video Library

By improving video accessibility in this way, collaboration is automatically made easier because everyone who needs to work on the online video files can access them in the same location.

Organize Your Videos by Project

Rather than managing one large video library, in the Reduct platform, you can organize your videos by project in project-based folders. This improves collaboration because you can give specific team members access to an entire folder, instead of adding them to every single video file.

Project library

After they've been added, team members can view all the videos included in the project folder, as well as any that are added in the future.

Add Other Team Members to Your Video Projects & Control How They Can Contribute

User-based permissions let you control exactly how each team member is allowed to work on your video files. The user profiles in Reduct include:

RoleAccessCreate projectUpload recordingTag, Edit and Share videoHighlight and Comment
Team EditorAll team projects
Guest EditorSpecific projects by invitation onlyX
Team CommenterAll team projectsXXX
Guest CommenterSpecific projects by invitation onlyXXX

By giving team members "roles," you can quickly attribute a set of permissions to each user, rather than individually assigning permission for viewing, then commenting, then editing, etc.

How Reduct Makes Video Editing Easy for Everyone

Reduct simplifies the video editing process because it transcribes your videos and lets you edit them just by editing the transcript. Since you don't need any video editing background to use Reduct, anybody in your organization can pop into your video project and assist with edits.

Step 1: Receive Your Transcript

Reduct offers both computer and human transcription to kickstart the video editing process:

  1. Computer transcription: These transcripts are ready in just a few minutes after you upload your footage and are AI-generated. Computer transcripts are about 85% accurate; this transcription option is best when working with high-quality, clear audio.
  2. Human transcription : These transcripts are done by human transcribers and delivered back in 24 hours (but often much quicker than that). Human transcripts are about 99% accurate so they're good when you need a polished transcript to share with stakeholders or use for captioning in video projects. Human transcription is also recommended when working with poor quality audio (i.e., audio with background noise, several speakers, speakers with unclear accents, or speakers who use a lot of jargon).

We offer the most affordable overnight transcription service available — charging $1 per minute of audio — and we guarantee a 24-hour turnaround no matter the length of your audio file (without extra rush fees).

Whether you choose a human or computer transcript for your video project, we make all transcripts editable so you can modify speaker names or correct inaccuracies.

See our article for more in-depth information on video to text transcription services.

Step 2: Highlight Key Moments from Your Footage to Create Video Clips

All of the transcripts in Reduct are interactive: When you click or highlight a specific word or phrase, Reduct takes you to the exact moment it is said in the video and plays it back to you from that point. This makes it easier to review your video footage and playback specific sections of video.

Transcript

As you review your transcript, use your cursor to highlight important parts of the transcript; Reduct will automatically pull the video clips as "Highlights" — no more manually marking in-and-out points or trawling through time stamps — so you can reference them later on or use them in your video projects.

Familiar with video logging? This makes video logging as simple as highlighting text.

Highlighted Video

Your transcript is also easily searchable thanks to Fuzzy Search. Our "Fuzzy Search" search functionality analyzes your content by theme so you can find any video clip from your footage without remembering exactly what was said. This makes it easy to quickly find any moment you want to Highlight or include in the video content you are putting together.

Fuzzy Search

At this step, you may also want to have conversations relating to certain clips: You may want to surface an interesting nugget for a collaborator or get input on whether a clip conveys the right message and tone. Reduct allows you to comment directly on the transcript — just like in a Google Doc — so your team can stay aligned throughout the editing process.

Comment

Step 3: Combine Your Highlights to Build a Meaningful Narrative

By combining all your transcript highlights and their corresponding video clips into Highlight Reels, you can tell a more complex story with your video content. To do this, drag and drop the video clips into a HIghlight Reel and arrange them into the order you want them.

Reels are like paper edits with a play button, so you can instantly see if a certain flow works or not.

Highlight Reel

Once you've pinned down the right sequence for your video, you can also add text or image slides between clips to add extra information and context for viewers. These can include the names and titles of speakers, or allow you to create placeholders for B-roll or other material to be brought in later in your process.

Captions

Videos created in Reduct use transcripts to include accurately-positioned captions by default, making the viewing and reading experience as smooth as possible. Our captions can make videos more accessible and improve engagement (but captions can also be disabled if you prefer).

Step 4: Use Strikethrough Editing to Polish Up Your Video Files & Edit Out Everything You Don't Need

To edit out sections of video in Reduct, just strikethrough the appropriate section in the text. This makes it easy to edit down long videos and cut out tangents or filler words from your video content.

Strikethrough

Word-based video editing is particularly useful for people who need to distill a large volume of video (content creators, documentary filmmakers, qualitative market researchers, and more) because it allows them to edit video in a way they're already familiar with, by editing the transcript. As a result, video editing is much easier and can get done much faster: In our experience, Reduct makes the video editing process up to 12 times faster compared to traditional editing methods.

Step 5: Get Feedback, Make Suggestions, and Iterate!

While creative work is often presented as a linear process, it's anything but. Any creative process is filled with lots of ideas, feedback, iteration, searching for the right way to make the story flow, more feedback, and more iteration.

This is where having a web-based video editor and repository accessible to the whole team really shines. A fellow storyteller can take a storyline you're working on, duplicate it, and propose a slightly different flow that makes it work better. The interviewer can remember that one quote that helps the story flow, search for it, and surface it to you with an @message. Or you can simply just share an early edit with a teammate, get notes, and even incorporate some of their ideas in real-time, by striking through a few words or restoring some others.

Learn more about how Reduct makes video editing as easy as editing text.

Share Your Edited Videos with Outside Collaborators & Other Stakeholders for Feedback

Reduct assigns Highlight Reels unique share links so you can send your videos with outside collaborators, such as freelancers and stakeholders to get their feedback.

To share your edited file, just copy and paste the video's share link.

Strikethrough

Our share links work across email platforms, messenger apps, and workplacecollaboration tools. They take users to the Reduct platform where they can view your video alongside an interactive transcript that lets them skip ahead, search the transcript for what they're interested in, change playback speeds, or switch between reading and watching; so end users can review in a way that's most convenient to them.

You can also turn on commenting access for guest viewers so they can conduct video reviews and leave feedback directly on your video files. We offer free unlimited viewers and annotations so you can share and collaborate with anyone without worrying about share limits or extra fees.

Import to Premiere in A Few Clicks

Once you are ready to turn your Reduct reels into a highly polished video asset, you can easily import the reels and storylines you created in Reduct to Adobe Premiere Pro. The Reduct extension to Premiere not only allows you to import your Reduct reels, but it also allows you to re-link footage, including multi-cam sequences. This allows you to upload proxies of your raw footage to Reduct, create highlights & reels, and then import those reels into Premiere and work with high-resolution multi-camera footage in Premiere.

Reduct: The Fastest and Most Intuitive Video Editing Collaboration Platform

By making video files as easy to edit as text, Reduct speeds up your video editing workflow and production processes so you can put together a ready-to-share video in a fraction of the time it takes using traditional video editing tools.

Our platform, which hosts all your video editing projects online, makes it so team members don't have to waste time uploading and downloading multiple versions of video files or work on video edits from their own desktop. Reduct's cloud video storage, user-based permissions, and word-based video editing tools allow for easy collaboration between all team members in real-time. Plus, our platform integrates with more advanced video production and editing tools so you can do the bulk of your editing in Reduct and then polish off videos in other apps with ease.

Reduct removes the pain of working with video.

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