This month we caught up with Annie Normandin, a producer with Frame Studio located Montreal, Quebec. FRAME starting using Cozimo less than three months ago and it has quickly become an integral part of their production workflow.

Hi Annie. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Frame Studio.

FRAME is a motion design and VFX studio that produces animated content for all types of applications. We do animated work for commercials.  We do visual animations and broadcast packaging for TV shows or documentaries. We’ve also done a few big projects for live events that used animated projections.

What type of clients do you work with?

We work mainly for ad agencies or production houses. Some ad agencies come directly to us for certain small projects and if it requires a shoot we’ll work with production houses. That’s the nature of the industry – we’re often collaborating with many different companies and freelancers on any given project.

How have you been using Cozimo?

We have two facilities – one located here in Montreal and the other one in Quebec City. So we started off using Cozimo primarily to help us manage our internal production workflow and exchange feedback. It’s a great communication tool for dealing with digital media and pretty much everyone in our company is using it now on a daily basis.

Have you been using Cozimo for client reviews?

More and more. We recently completed a production where we were working with a freelance director who was on assignment in Toronto. We used Cozimo extensively to manage the feedback loop and to hold online production meetings with him and other consultants.

What was the response?

Since we were previously working with FTP and email, it took a bit of an adjustment at first but once we got started people got very excited about it. Being able to watch and work together on a video through a web browser is very cool. In fact, I understand that you’ll be picking up two or three new customers from this experience.

So has Cozimo proven to be a cost effective solution for you?

No question. We’re using Cozimo more and more and the gains in efficiency are immense. It has absolutely made our feedback process faster and it’s also helped  us avoid mistakes because we can communicate and discuss the content visually and interactively. In this economic climate we have to be careful to keep our costs under control and Cozimo has definitely been a big help in that regard.

Today we introduced a number of improvements to our branding functionality for customers at our Plus level plans (and higher). With our previous version, you were able to replace the Cozimo logo in the upper left corner of the workspace with a custom logo for each workgroup. You had the option of putting your company logo there or a logo to represent the client or project itself. We have now introduced an option for you to upload a default logo that will always be displayed in the top left corner unless you specifically provide one for an individual workgroup to override it. For instructions on how to set up all the branding options that are now available visit our Help page here.

We’re pleased to announce our partnership with Flypaper Studio. We met Flypaper last year when we both launched at Demo 08 and immediately saw the synergies that existed with our offerings. Flypaper produces an intuitive and robust desktop application for producing Flash content. Essentially it removes the complexity of the Flash platform and makes it accessible to non-technical content developers in an application that is as familiar as PowerPoint. This means that organizations can now affordably produce compelling interactive Flash presentations for marketing and training programs in-house. Their latest release of Flypaper introduces the “Flypaper Platform” enterprise solution that provides an integrated content management system for storing, distributing and tracking the progress of a project throughout its development.

Cozimo’s collaboration tools have been integrated into this system so that anyone involved with the project development (both within and external to the organization) can also review and annotate the content either independently or together in real-time. In recognizing the importance and value of a collaborative workflow, Flypaper has really set themselves apart and come up with a unique solution for flash content developers. It’s been great working with the Flypaper team on this project and we’re already looking ahead to future collaborations. To read the complete press release announcing the partnership, click here.

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An important goal we established when we first started Cozimo was to foster creative collaboration through many different forums. In developing the Cozimo system, we specifically designed it in an a modular fashion so that we could readily deploy and offer our real-time Image Collaboration Environment (what we call “ICE”) not just through our own applications, but also through the many different products, websites and services that could benefit from it.  Last year we worked with CGarchitect to enhance their showcase galleries with collaborative capabilities. Later in the year we introduce our WordPress plugin for integrating a collaborative image or video as part of a blog. And most recently we introduced our “Collaborate Now” tool and Firefox extension that allows people to instantly capture any web page and collaborate on it.

Over the past few months we’ve completed some significant upgrades to our backend collaboration server as well as enhancing our API so that we now have even greater functionality and flexibility to support these type of collaborative projects.  In the coming months you’ll be hearing more about a number of partnerships we’ve recently undertaken as well as new product options that will make this API available to individual companies wishing to enhance their existing CMS or intra/extranet.   If you have a specific project that you would like to pursue (commercial, educational or cultural), please feel free to contact us to discuss it. This is the type of collaboration we enjoy most!

If you’re involved in web site design and development, our new Firefox extension gives you a fast and convenient way to upload and collaborate on any web page. The extension, based on the Screengrab! extension by Andy Mutton, can be used with our “Collaborate Now” tool when you want instant feedback on individual pages, or with your Cozimo account when you want a more structured workgroup environment and have multiple pages you want reviewed together. (To learn about how to use the extension with “Collaborate Now” you can review the tutorial here.)

To use the extension with your Cozimo account follow these steps:

1. Using a Firefox browser, install the Cozimo extension by clicking here.

2. By default, the extension is set to work with the “Collaborate Now” tool. To use it with your Cozimo account, right click in the web browser and select Collaborate Now > Preferences. This will open the Preferences menu:
Click on Cozimo as the Destination. If desired, you can also provide the specific Cozimo subdomain you want to upload the data to (If you login through cozimo.com then leave this blank).

3. Before using the extension with your Cozimo account you have to login to it (make sure you login through the same subdomain indicated in the Preference menu).

4. After logging in, browse to the page you want to upload. Once displayed, right click on anywhere on the page and select the Cozimo Upload menu item (or click on the Cozimo logo in the status bar).

There are four options for uploading the page:

Image Only – Uploads only the image you are currently clicking on (note that this option will only be visible if you are clicking on an image or web element with a background image).
Complete Page/Frame – Uploads the entire page or frame including portions that are not visible in the current window.
Visible Portion – Uploads only what is visible in the current window.
Selection – Lets you drag out a rectangle to select a specific portion of the page you wish to capture and upload.

5. After making your selection, you will be redirected to a Cozimo page that shows a complete listing of your current workgroups and folders. Click on the folder you wish to upload the screen capture to.

6. Repeat from step 4 for any additional pages you want to upload.

The Cozimo extension is open source, licensed under GPLv2, and the source code can be found here here.