Monthly Montage: March 2024
everything (broken) everywhere all at once
When Things Get Ugly
Earlier this month our team found ourselves in the trenches, working through regressions and technical debt. It's usually not fun when things like this happen, but, as I like to say: "it adds to the plot".
For a few weeks, the platform felt difficult to use. Video playback was freezing up and cutting up clips was buggy.
Although frustrating, these challenges helped our team sharpen our approach to product development. We've since adopted a higher standard of testing practices as well as faster product cycles to ensure we're shipping early and often.
Just as how any good movie has it's fair share of plot twists and conflicts, the same is true with startups.
The Silver Lining
The number one takeaway from March was that as we build this tool, nothing is more important than stability.
Stability is what takes a video from an assortment of random clips to a story.
Stability is what allows teams to experience that "wow" moment when they watch the final cut.
Stability is what keeps the platform going with you during those late night editing sessions.
Fancy features are flashy, but having a stable platform is foundational for everything else. This is something our team has grown passionate about not just through building Sequence but also through our team's experience using existing editor tools in the past.
Everyone hates crashes and we're working hard to make Sequence the most stable video editing tool out there.
It's not going to be easy. It's going to take time. But your support as we build this has been a push forward for us to continue doing our best to make it happen.
Product Updates
✨ The inspector panel just got better
We've revamped the inspector panel to make working with clips more organized:
✂️ Trimming tooltips
When trimming clips in the timeline, editors can now see a tooltip above the trim handle that displays the amount of time being added or removed as well as the total clip length.
👀 Link importer is coming soon
By popular demand, we've been working on a way for editors in Sequence to import clips into their library via a YouTube link!
📋 Copy & paste is coming soon
For a while, copy & paste was an urban legend in Sequence but as of last week we now have a working prototype! The challenge with copy & paste is the need to preserve the exact alignment and settings of each clip that is selected and copied. This gets complicated especially as you introduce different layers and effects.
From The Studio
As a team that makes tools for storytellers, it would be a shame if we didn't tell some of our own! Check out some of our videos:
🎬 we spent a week building our startup on a haunted ship
🎬 if sequence were a movie, this is what it would be
🎬 the most important story we can tell as a company
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:
Dune 2 (2024) - this was a must-watch for the team, it even prompted Luke to re-read the book and Dune Messiah
Godzilla Minus One (2023) - a movie that Adam claims was better than Dune 2 and all the movies he's seen in the past year
Gattaca (1997) - a sci-fi/thriller that caught Miriam's eye through it's captivating use of color
Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023) - a rom-com directed by Rachel Lambert
Side by Side (2012) - a documentary on the history of digital and photochemical film creation
You Hurt My Feelings (2023) - a movie that Brian thinks anyone who likes a good character-driven dramedy should watch (but don't watch the trailer, it spoils the movie)
& if you're still craving more, Parker put together a list of tech-y movies that people on Twitter have been raving over.
Where We're Headed
As we enter into Q2 we're joined by two new cast members at Sequence: Jacob & Chethan 🎉 The team is continuing to grow alongside the platform and we're excited to start onboarding more early users soon.
To us, early users are those who are so excited about the idea of collaborative editing, they're willing to work through the occasional bugs and crashes to provide feedback that will help shape our product.
After last month's newsletter we got a large volume of responses from people interested in using Sequence. If you haven't yet heard back from someone on the team, you should be receiving an email follow-up sometime next week.
It's been a chaotic month for the team but every hurdle was necessary to bring us to a place now where the tool runs better than ever.
That's a wrap for this month's update, we hope to see you in the timeline soon!
Cheers,
Mylene & the cast & crew @ Sequence