We have been hard at work over the last year upgrading our infrastructure to stay current with the latest security and stability features of our platform. Its been a lot of work to show very little – kind of like a skeleton transplant – but we are managing to include a couple of cool new features when we release the new version.

The first is bulk edit for tasks. This makes editing lots of tasks easier by letting you select multiple tasks from the index page, and then doing a ‘bulk edit’ on them to make changes all at once. You can see it working in this video:

Bulk Edit for Tasks Video on Vimeo

Also the task index can now be grouped by ‘production week’ (weeks numbered since the start of the project).

Finally, we have added Monthly and Weekly calendars. The Calendars show task start and due dates for now, and have filters that let you turn on/off tasks for specific users and task statuses.

In an industry as varied as post-production, coming up with plans and pricing that everyone is happy with is tricky. Honestly it would be easier to be paid in good-will alone, but alas, servers and programmers cost money, so I continue to tweak things.

I’ve added a new Director plan that fits right between the Indie and Producer plans, dropped the price of the Solo and Studio plans, and raised the project and user counts for the Producer and Studio plans. Here is the new plan lineup, with changes in red:

Keep in mind that the project and user counts are active projects and users. There is no limit to the number of closed projects you can keep and you can always temporarily suspend user accounts.

I hope you like the updated pricing, and please contact me if your situation is unique or you need project-based or yearly billing.

We have been working a bit on the performance of the application and just pushed a release that appears to be up to 3x faster on some pages!

For video file attachments, the video preview is working again in Chrome, and we now extract and store a lot more metadata about the video file.

We fixed a bug with our multiple file uploader running in Chrome.

Finally, the Python API now runs over SSL for better security. Now all API conversations are encrypted. We have also turned on SSL encryption for all plans—encryption was originally a feature of just the “Studio” plan as there are additional costs associated with running SSL, but security is important, and we are getting to the point where we can just offer it to everyone.

If you haven’t checked them out already, I really encourage everyone to visit the support articles. Start with the First Steps section, which includes the New User Orientation article. Please direct your new users to: What should I do first as a new user?.

That’s all for now. Please write with comments or questions, and be sure to check out the Support Site.

Cheers, Cameron

Sorry about not making these blog posts more frequent—it just seems like there is never enough time to stop, breathe and reflect!

First, an update on our April move to the new cloud-based platform: basically, it has exceeded all expectations. I’m extremely pleased with the performance, stability and security of the new platform. Users in both the USA and in Europe reported faster page load times almost immediately. We also now have the ability to scale out as large as we need to go.

The file security was taken up a notch as well. All files are now stored and served from secured cloud storage. The files can only be accessed by valid ShotRunner project members, are sent over SSL, and the links are only valid for a short period of time. We feel this is quite secure, but it means that you can no longer post URLs to files stored in ShotRunner.

The new platform also allowed us to do something I’ve been wanting for a long time: video previews and video thumbnails. We’ve always let you upload videos to ShotRunner, but all you got was an icon for your trouble. Now, we both generate an H.264 quick preview, and we generate video thumbnails! We can handle darn near any kind of video, including Blackmagic, Cinepak, DNxHD, Flash FLV, all the MPEGs, On2 VPx, Windows Media and many, many more.

When you upload a video, we transcode it in the background to an H.264 preview scaled to the height that you specify in the project preferences. It takes only about 30 seconds for the thumbnails to appear.

Today, video previews require the QuickTime plugin — but we hope to have standard HTML5 video playback available soon.

Finally, we have switched over to a new payments processor. I never really liked being in the credit card processing business, keeping up with the changing requirements was a major hassle, it was expensive, and it really limited the kinds of payments we could accept. As of last Friday, our payments are now securely handled through Amazon Payments, providing many more flexible payment options, and a trusted name in eCommerce.

That’s all for now. Please write with comments or questions, and be sure to check out the support site: http://support.shotrunner.com

Cheers, Cameron

We have taken a little break from feature development to concentrate on improving our infrastructure. We are currently getting ready to move the system over to a larger cloud-based hosting platform. With this new platform, we’ll be able to rapidly scale up to any amount of capacity we need, with professional 24×7 monitoring.

Its amazing how many moving parts are behind a commercial-grade application. There have been a lot of behind-the-scenes changes needed to get us ready to make the move. Just to name a few of the subsystems that have been revamped:

• File management—all files are now on secured cloud storage, and its possible to attach the same file to multiple project objects.
• Outbound email—notifications now go through a third-party sender to keep them from being marked as spam.
• Monitoring—more complete monitoring of all sub-systems. We actually have three different kinds of monitoring: errors, traffic patterns, and performance metrics. This allows us to proactively deal with any performance problems and react to errors even if no one reports a problem.
• Backups—improving the backup system to allow rapid restoration of individual accounts, and let account administrators manage their own backups.
• Content Delivery—all static page content (like javascripts, style sheets, etc.) has been placed on a worldwide CDN to help pages load faster.

Some of our feature development is “stuck” behind this release—for example, we’ve greatly simplified the way you attach thumbnails to shots, elements, etc. This and other improvements will be seen once we do the cutover, which is currently scheduled for the weekend of April 17th.

If you haven’t done so already, please check out the help articles and FAQs at the support site: http://support.shotrunner.com

Cheers, Cameron