Monthly Montage: February 2024

the quest to build a collaborative video editor continues 📽

Feb 28, 2024

It's the last Wednesday of the month meaning it's time for another monthly update on how the quest to build a collaborative, cloud-based video editing tool has been unfolding!

Sequence Takes Long Beach

Earlier this month our team met up for five days in Long Beach, CA for our third Sequencers Retreat. As a team that is currently fully remote, these retreats are one of our traditions as a way for us to jam in-person & geek out over what we want to build next together.

Unlike the retreats I & II, this retreat consisted of a cast of now *6* characters, a big milestone coming from the one-man show in 2021 back when Sequence was a mere idea in Luke's head. We shot lots of film, all while co-working out of a historical haunted ship. Similar to the the previous retreats, this one happened to fall on the same dates as the stormy Pineapple Express, contributing to our streak of experiencing poor weather during get togethers.

Some things we're most excited about post-retreat:

Our next big production release
Editing & sharing with you some of the content we filmed during the trip
Getting our Kodak Super 8 film roll developed
Getting our first few users into the Sequence timeline
Our new team headshots taken by our in-house Polaroid-fanatics, Luke & Parker

Peaks & Valleys: The Startup Rollercoaster

As one might expect, building a startup is hard but building collaborative cloud-based video editing software is even harder. As fun as our retreat was, during that time we also uncovered a handful of bugs & regressions in our platform. Resolving these issues slowed the team down in the short term but were necessary as we move forward.

After weeks of grinding & cycling through new bugs & new fixes, Sequence is now at a state that is even better than before.

Recent Bug Fixes:

Improved: playhead scrubber getting stuck when starting playback
Fixed: potential crashes when switching between timelines & library items
Fixed: audio adjustments not applying consistently to clips
Fixed: unable to connect to video preview stream in Safari

Building With Intention

February was a good reminder to our team that when it comes to building the best collaborative video editor, you must first start with building a great video editor. Fancy new features are cool and all but nothing beats having a reliable, smooth experience in the timeline— a solid foundation to build even better capabilities on top of.

Our approach to building has always placed a heavy emphasis on the editor experience & this is something we continually strive to focus on as we build this tool.

From The Studio

As a team that makes tools for storytellers, here are some new videos from the Sequence Studio:

🎬 A Funky Sequence Retreat Montage

🎬 Parker's take on our philosophy for building at Sequence

Movies We're Obsessed With

We don't just want to make movies, we love watching them too 👀. Our team has a Slack channel called #movies, here's a roundup of some of the films we've been raving over:

Perfect Days - a 2023 film by Wim Wenders about a janitor living in Japan
Tenet (but the 70mm IMAX re-release in particular)

All of Us Strangers - a 2023 film rated 5 stars by Parker
One Day - not a movie but a series that made Mylene want to ugly cry
After Hours - a film directed by Martin Scoresese in 1985

Gravity - Parker watched this on the moon in his new Apple Vision Pro

Join Us in The Timeline: Sequence Early Access

During the latter half of February, the team spent the month onboarding new users onto the platform. As we continue into Q1, we're looking to get a few more projects & teams onto Sequence to provide feedback & act as design partners as we continue to build.

If you have an upcoming video project that you'd like to try editing in Sequence solo or with your team, shoot us a reply to this email & a member of our team will reach out to see how we can get you started in Sequence!

Aaaand that's a wrap! If you're just as excited to see collaborative video editing become a mainstream thing as we are, stick around for more monthly updates to come.

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Cheers,
Mylene & the cast & crew @ Sequence