Zoom has become an indisputable fact in our lives ever since the pandemic took over and we moved our work from the office to various bedrooms, living rooms, and home offices across the world. 

However, while Zoom works great for team meetings and presentations, there’s another facet of the creative process that there’s no obvious native solution for in Zoom; live editing sessions.  

Trying to collaborate with your creative team members remotely while working on a project now means that you’re sending draft after draft back and forth, receiving multiple different sets of notes in your poor, overloaded inbox in seemingly random order. 

It’s no wonder that so many editors are looking to recreate the feeling of the editing room where everyone could gather together and look at the most recent edits in real-time, contributing notes and having a conversation about changes as they are happening. 

The most obvious solution to this in a remote-work world is to try to stream the editing workspace directly over Zoom, but with a processor-heavy program like After Effects, is this a realistic solution for motion graphics artists and animators? 

In this article, we’ll examine some common workarounds and see if they can meet the needs of modern editing teams, so you can stream your Adobe After Effects workspace in real-time while collaborating with your creative team. 

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The problem with streaming Adobe After Effects over Zoom

Any editor knows that After Effects is a program that demands a significant amount of CPU power, which becomes an immediate problem to streaming over Zoom. Zoom just isn’t designed to stream professional editing workspaces, and Zoom itself demands a significant amount of processing power as well. The focus of Zoom’s design is for basic conversations or screen-sharing web pages and documents. 

When Zoom has to compete for resources against other CPU and graphics-heavy programs like Adobe After Effects, it will attempt to balance the load by downgrading the quality of the stream on one or both ends. This not only can result in a loss of video quality, but can also lead to other issues like video lag and application crashes. 

All this aside, the benefit of Zoom is that it is so universal, so nearly everyone already has it installed on their computer and knows how to operate it. Because of that, it seems worthwhile to see if there are any workarounds that will allow you to stream your Adobe After Effects workspace over Zoom for a live editing session.

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Solutions to try

Stream Adobe After Effects with Evercast

Evercast is purpose-built to make streaming professional editing platforms like Adobe After Effects . The platform requires a simple one-time setup and requires no additional software to enjoy a seamless, real-time editing and collaboration session.  

Evercast allows you to stream your workspace in full HD with ultra-low latency (less than 150ms on average). This low latency is as close to natural conversation and editing as you can get. In addition to chatting in real-time, on-screen annotation and timestamped notes allow each participant to add their two cents while keeping everything organized and frame-accurate:

• Full HD with <150 millisecond delay (literally faster than the blink of an eye).
• Your team can video and audio chat at the same time they are watching, allowing for instant feedback.
• Ability to draw on screen for more detail.
• No special hardware needed, no “hacks” necessary.
• 24/7 white-glove support.
• Dedicated apps for macOS, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro.
• Supports up to 10-bit 4:4:4 color.
• 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound support.
• 4K/60fps streaming of any editing workflow via Premiere Pro, any other NLE or creative software, media files, and more.
• Encrypted video streams and two-factor authentication required to join secure rooms.
• Approved by ALL major studios and OTT content providers.

And for your less tech-savvy participants, they’ll be relieved to know that they don’t have to download any additional software to participate in a meeting. Just follow the link and join from any device, anywhere in the world. 

If you’re looking for a better way to bring your remote editing team closer together and collaborate more efficiently from a distance, check out Evercast. We believe collaboration is the magic behind the movies, and better collaboration starts with software that works with your team, not against it.