Intelligent Gadgets (Dana Point, CA) has started shipping SyncVUE for Windows, the PC-compatible version of its online editorial collaboration software. Launched for Mac OS X earlier this year, SyncVUE leverages technology from Skype, the popular online-telephony program, to allow editors and their clients to view timecode-synchronized video simultaneously, all the while in a collaborative online environment.

“It’s designed for people like me,” Michael Buday, president of Intelligent Designs and a career editor, tells Film & Video. “I live 70 miles south of Los Angeles, so I’ve commuted since 1989. The genesis of this product was that I couldn’t take the commute any more – I had to move to L.A. or find another way to make a living.”

SyncVUE works as well as it does is because it’s not sending video back and forth. Once both the editor and client have the same file available locally, SyncVUE patches them through to each other via Skype, all the while sending data back and forth to make sure they’re looking at exactly the same images at the same time. That means bandwidth requirements are relatively low, though using Skype for voice communications raises them somewhat.

“Skype has an API to write to, so we used their communication tunnel to send data back and forth,” Buday explains. “People create a compressed movie in Windows Media or QuickTime format, and post that or podcast it or FTP it to their clients so they can view it. SyncVUE plays any QuickTime-wrapped file and becomes like a voice-conferencing system.” During playback, sync is accurate to “within a few frames,” Buday says. When the movie is stopped, the software updates all viewers to make sure they’re looking at exactly the same frame. All users can add metadata – text notes attached to frames, for example – or turn on a “virtual laser pointer” to highlight parts of the image while the movie is playing.

SyncVUE uses Skype’s buddy-list function to show a list of users online who are ready for a synchronized viewing session at any given time, checking to make sure they all have the same movie loaded on their player. “The creator of the call becomes, by default, the master,” says Buday. “He’s driving the transport controls and everybody is in lock with him. But rather than rely on a live, iChat type of highly compressed video window, you can send them a much higher quality file – 480p or 1080p, if you want. You may have somebody in Hollywood screening an uncompressed HD movie. You can lock that file to a director who’s following along, or even driving it, after you send him a compressed version of the same movie.” Buday says he likes to use 480p H.264-encoded files wrapped in QuickTime.

The system also checks to make sure all of the participants in a session are licensed to use SyncVUE. “We provide the software for free, with a floating licensing scheme,” Buday says. “If you purchase five licenses, you would get a login to the SyncVUE license matcheer that would show five slots. You can plug in the names of the people you want to use it for a period of time that you determine.” The licenses you purchase are permanent, and start at $189 for a single license and scale down to $115 per license when you purchase more than 25.

What about real-time editorial collaboration over the Internet, sharing not just timecode cues for playback, but EDLs allowing the edit to be changed as you go? “That requires a pretty good pipe between connected users,” Buday says. “You’ve got to have a robust connection just to get a compressed, small video window going back and forth. We have a future version, SyncVUE Stream, that will stream media live to the users. Next year.”

For more information: www.syncvue.com