For media producers, the venue for creative group collaboration is moving away from the cozy oval conference table and toward a wider circle of networked contributors. To facilitate this long-distance idea sharing, emotion Inc. has developed CreativePartner, a distribution system for video, sound, text, and graphics.
CreativePartner is a networking solution for people who think visually and communicate best by pausing a videotape and gesticulating around a TV monitor or scribbling across a project storyboard. Now, instead of faxing your producer the fifth-generation copies of your sixth revisions, you can draw or comment over a QuickTime movie and send it quickly to the dispersed creative team for review.
Bouncing Ideas Around
Using emotion Inc.’s CreativeNote annotation system, CreativePartner cleverly stores comments in a separate overlay file, making it unnecessary to send the original movie file after every round of changes. The product also logs all information exchanges for easy tracking, schedules delivery times, groups recipients for batch transfers, and even copes well with the imperfections of network transmission. When a connection is broken, CreativePartner reestablishes the connection and resumes transmitting data from the point of interruption — something that will appeal to anyone who has tried to transmit a 200MB file and had to resend everything from scratch after a last-second glitch. Last, I must laud how efficiently data is packeted and processed. The session-layer interface for AppleTalk has been optimized for large files, resulting in transfer rates that are two to three times as fast as unenhanced AppleTalk.
Not the Full Nine Yards
This is all extraordinarily nifty, but the product loses some luster when you stop to consider its price. The distribution and reviewing systems are useful, but for the price, I expect more from software claiming to be my partner. Often there is no way to establish the viability of an idea other than to try it out — and let’s face it, CreativePartner is partly competing against my ability to make some media revisions and throw them on an optical disk or VHS tape and courier them to other members of my team. CreativePartner’s annotation tools convey basic feedback, but I’d like to see additional tools that would enable you to better visualize effects, compositing, or rough edits without manipulating the movHe in a complicated stand-alone program. It would also be useful to have simple scripting functions so someone could send various visual samples and have them play in a specified sequence without having to spend time editing the pieces together.
The Last Word
It’s hard not to get excited about a product that shows me a glimpse of how I’m likely to work in the near future. And in my enthusiasm to embrace this future I can cheerfully ignore some of the version 1.0 annoyances, such as the inability to send a folder of data, or how the interface makes it easy to overlook the “label” (CreativePartner’s version of a cover page). For high-end production outfits that have already invested in a hefty ATM bandwidth, the price of CreativePartner licenses might seem a pittance, and such users may find the significant improvement in network transmission speed alone worth the price.
However, I can’t help thinking that the product should either be more modestly priced or have a more generous feature set. At this point, CreativePartner feels more like a CreativeAssociate and shouldn’t be given a partner’s salary.
Hoffer, Avi. (July 1995). CreativePartner. Macworld. (pg. 69).
Emotion Incorporated.
Applications
out of 10 (0 vote)
9 / 
2014-04-14 / 
fc2de7e012d5076717e622d749db699618b91976 / 
/ 
creativepartner.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
