Do you miss sitting in a decked-out editing suite with your team members and poring over the tiny details in a new cut? Shifting to remote work has brought on a sense of nostalgia for many editors. 

Getting feedback and aligning on the best version was as easy as walking down the hall. Now you’re stuck in a time-consuming, frustrating editing loop that takes endless rounds of revisions to close over Zoom. 

Whether your production company is new to remote collaboration or you’ve got an experienced remote-work post-production team and are looking for new tools to make the process feel less, well, remote, you’re in luck. 

There are plenty of tools that are compatible with Media Composer and will enable your team to stay in sync from the first cut to the last. 

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Does Media Composer offer a native collaboration feature?

Avid has a remote, cloud-based collaboration tool called (unsurprisingly) Cloud Remote. This tool was designed to give teams the ability to upload footage from anywhere in the world while editors continuously edit. 

Pros and cons of Cloud Remote

Pros: 

• Integrates directly with Media Composer
• Allows editors to work with footage as it’s being uploaded
• Affordable
• Allows users to write comments to accompany each change to add context
  

Cons:

• One of the major limiting factors is you need to apply changes before your teammates can see what you’ve changed.
• There’s no “live chat” feature to communicate with your team, only comments you can view after they apply changes.
  

This integrated cloud collaboration feature is a huge step forward for remote video editing teams and makes it easy and affordable for even small indie teams to integrate source control into their workflow. 
Now, if you want to take your collaboration to the next level, there are some additional collaboration platforms that provide even more features that allow your team to work together seamlessly within Avid Media Composer. 

Tools that can help your team collaborate in Media Composer

Tool #1: Evercast

Evercast is a video streaming and communication platform specifically built for creative teams that need to stream professional creation workspaces while chatting with their team. 

With Evercast, you and your team can be working inside of Cloud Remote while your team lead streams their workspace to the whole team. Not only that, you can talk face-to-face while you edit, creating a virtual editing suite that anyone you choose can dial into.   

Pros:

• Ultra-low latency (less than 150ms on average) means that you’ll be able to chat in as close to real-time as possible.
• On-screen annotation and timestamped notes help you keep project notes organized and frame accurate. 
• The platform allows for simultaneous video chatting, text chatting/note-taking, and workstation streaming, all under one clean interface.
• No additional software is required for participants just joining a meeting; they simply need to follow a link to join.
• It not only works with Media Composer but any and all creative software. 
  

Cons:

• Requires some setup time and configuration for editors who want to stream their workstations (this is just a one-time setup).
  

Learn more about Evercast here.