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Content creators are at the heart of Zoom. Unlike asset management systems that are designed for general users such as most Digital Asset Management (DAM) or very technical Media asset management (MAM) systems designed for archivists & media managers, Zoom is aimed at creators such as graphics designers, motion graphics artists, video editors, layout designers.
This gives it an edge when it comes to handling challenging creative workflows, but does require a little bit more time to master than say using a MacOS Finder. This guide will lead you step-by-step through mapping your creative workflows with the features in the Zoom apps.
Terminology
Top 5 things you can do with Zoom as a Video Editor
Top 5 things you can do with Zoom as a Graphics Designer
Top 5 things you can do with Zoom as a Motion Graphics Artist
Top 5 things you can do with Zoom as an InDesign Layout Designer
Top 5 things you can do with Zoom as a Photographer
Top 5 things you can do with Zoom as a Sound Editor
| Term | Explanation | |
|---|---|---|
| Zoom Client or Desktop apps | Installed on a MacOS or Windows desktop, these apps include: Desktop Browser, Adobe Creative Cloud Plugins, Visual Asset Browser. Require a named license assigned to each desktop user. | |
| Adobe Creative Cloud Plugins | Zoom panels or extensions inside Adobe CC Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator | |
| Desktop User | A creative user in Zoom that takes up a desktop license. A desktop user can log in only from one computer at a time, cannot have multiple sessions. | |
| Web or Concurrent User | A general web user in Zoom that uses a concurrent license for the duration of their session. A Web user can login from multiple computers as long as there are sufficient concurrent licenses in the pool. | |
| Zoom Repository | Instance of a Zoom server that stores the users files in the cloud or on-premises. | |
| Role | A group of users with a specific set of permissions. | |
| Project Vault | A group of folders & files with a common set of permissions. | |
| Asset ID | Any file or folder stored in Zoom gets assigned a unique number, “Asset ID”. | |
| Check-in | Ingesting new files or new versions of existing assets to Zoom. | |
| Check-out | Copying an asset from the Zoom repository to a user’s workspace. | |
| Working Copy Root | A designated workspace (folder) for Zoom to copy assets into. Also called Project Store folder. | |
| Frontend Deduplication | Patented Zoom technology to update revisions compactly by just uploading the changes to the file. | |
| Revision | Modified version of an asset stored using Zoom’s patented de-duplication technology. | |
| High-res or External asset | Read-only raw media such as high-res audio/video clips or raw images that have a proxy stored in Zoom repository. | |
| Direct asset | Assets that have revisions such as images or project files. | |
| TPM | Third Party Mount Point Folder stores high-res media such as raw footage, uncompressed audio. It's also referred to as the Media Store Folder & is managed by Zoom. | |
| Sync | Sync is an action supported by the Zoom creative app plugins. It performs either a check-in if the user modified the project or updates the project from the Zoom server if there were changes by other users. |
Create your rough-cuts using a low-res proxy easily from our Adobe Premiere Pro plugin even before your high-res downloads complete.
You can use the Zoom S3 Hub to start downloading the high-res media in the background while continuing to edit in your NLE with the low-res proxy.
Smart Copy the 24GB project folder for Episode 1 into Episode 2. This creates a virtual folder for Episode 2 with just references to the original files. Your freelancer can start working on Episode 2 you shared with them, without first duplicating the entire 24GB project in the Zoom repository. That would save you 24GB in extra space!
Smart copy folders start out with 0-byte files that reference the original files from Episode 1. When the freelancers edits the Episode 2 files, only changes from Episode 1 are saved.
Without worrying about codecs or downloading the high-res, click on the thumbnail and hover scrub or stream a preview of any high-res video, audio or raw image.
Zoom AI analyzes your footage and automatically marks the in and out points with relevant moments using celebrity recognition, logo detection and many other inferencing rules.
Then using our AI data timelines, search for the key moments and insert a pre-cut sequence with markers into your project bin. Relevant footage will be linked to your sequence and all the cuts would be automated.
Receive time-coded notes & instructions from my producer directly into my Adobe premiere sequence without them emailing me or sending long spreadsheets with notes.
Using the Zoom Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator plugin you can search for any file you wish to link with in the Zoom repository. And then click, import link and Zoom plugin will detect if the app supports smart object. If it does, instead of embedding the image, Zoom will create a smart object link to it.
View all the Adobe CC projects that are dependent on an image or graphics, so that you can retouch the image and have all my projects updated at the same time.
Create multiple revisions of your Photoshop or Illustrator project, and save them quickly using our unique front-end deduplication technology.
You are able to view nested layers or compositions in Zoom Desktop app without even opening Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, InDesign saving time figuring out changes your or your team mates have made.
Save loads of time by previewing and commenting directly on a Photoshop or Illustrator file just like you would an image, on a mobile device or web browser without first converting them to a web format!
Use our fully featured Adobe After Effects & Cinema 4D plugins to manage links to elements, your motion graphics projects, 3D models or animations. You can even view 3D OBJ models using our 3D viewer!
Treat hi-res image sequences as a single sequence object in Zoom, saving you the trouble of looking at 1000s of frames versus 1 sequence object when browsing or searching.
This also allow you to directly restore or link with all the associated frames by just 1-click import of a sequence object in Zoom in After Effects.
You are able to view nested AE compositions in Zoom Desktop app without even opening Adobe After Effects saving time figuring out changes your team mates have made. Single click a linked layer to navigate to its actual file! Track relationships between layer comp objects and their source file such as vector or raster graphics (Illustrator SVG, Photoshop etc)
Zoom allow you to lock a project file when you are editing it, so no conflicts arise. Team mates can see who is editing the file. Changes made by you and fellow editors are captured in the version history.
Switch between the low-res proxy and high-rev version of a linked video, for projects involving video clips or footage in After Effects.
Exported revisions of your compositions can be added to a Collection for review with our 1-Click Export feature. Your collaborators easily compare exported animation versions by playing them back simultaneously on the Desktop or Web Client.
Comments on your exports, flow straight from our responsive web apps into After Effects panel. In-app notifications alert you whenever a comment is added or any of your linked files are modified by your collaborators.
Evolphin Zoom Plugins track project links with unique asset IDs. A linked file rename, folder move, editing across Windows & MacOS paths, or even changing the drive mount will never throw a link offline unlike with InDesign & other Adobe CC apps.
Using the Zoom Sync & Resolve Links feature, offline links will be resolved even if it means fetching the offline file from the Zoom cloud server automatically.
If you collaborate with remote editors with a mix of Mac and Windows, you know that the links can get messed up. Not so, with our Resolve Links button in the InDesign plugin that can fix an InDesign catalog with 1000+ offline links easily.
Export catalog or layouts created in InDesign as PDF with 1-click using the Zoom InDesign Plugin. The export panel automatically pulls up your InDesign export settings. The exported PDF file will automatically be synced to the Zoom cloud service for review & approval.
Reviewing print quality PDF exported out of InDesign can be a challenge on a Web Browser. Evolphin Zoom ships with a purpose build PDF viewer designed with overcoming this challenge. Whether you are reviewing a long web page mockup or a 200 page catalog, the Zoom PDF viewer and commenting tool has you covered.
Comments on individual pages from the Web app flow straight into our InDesign panel, where the in-app bell icon notifies you of new feedback on your InDesign document. Clicking the alert opens up the correct page in the plugin to review the comments.
Using the Zoom InDesign plugin you can search for any graphics you wish to link to from the Zoom repository. And then click import link and Zoom plugin will automatically download the elements, and most importantly switch to the place object mode inside the InDesign window. This allows you to resize the links.
If you have an image placeholder already selected in the InDesign document, Zoom can resize and place the link directly within the placeholder bounding box.
Bring all your end-users under one umbrella with Evolphin’s built-in collaboration panels in all our Adobe CC plugins including InDesign. Your business owners do not need to learn how to use different proofing tools for video, images & design files.
Layout & catalog designers can collaborate with their art directors or business owners in the Evolphin unified repository.
Batch ingest entire photoshoots of your camera raw images while automatically extracting embedded XMP metadata such as EXIF, IPTC.
Zoom can even create low-resolution JPEG proxies from your high-res image formats including CR2, NEF, DNG. If your camera card capture software such as Adobe Lightroom or Capture One has already created thumbnails & low-re proxies, Zoom can automatically attach these proxies to your raw images in the repository.
If you are a photographer in the field, uploading your photoshoots is easy with the the Zoom Web Client. Just drag-n-drop your camera card folder and let Zoom ingest your images. This way rest of your team can preview and download your selects without jumping through hoops. You do not need to configure an FTP client or depend upon a 3rd party service for your remote ingests.
Zoom is used to manage million of images and media files. If your computer drives or traditional DAM are struggling to index your images to search through them, Zoom’s search indexer can get rid of the slowdowns. Whether you have 100K images or 10 million, you can expect to quickly search in constant time your files based off your folder names, file names, XMP metadata or manually applied tags in Zoom.
If you are a photographer you love to shoot for new projects. You don’t want to spend time fielding time consuming requests from your user base to crop your images, add a text layer, convert them to web formats. This is where the basic editing tools built into the Zoom Web client come in handy. Your user base can self-serve themselves with these common tasks without bothering you with mundane routine requests.
You can use the AI Hub in Zoom, to train our AI engines to recognize the faces or objects of interest with your custom names or labels.
Zoom AI Hub also allows your to extract text & numbers in images such as sport team names or jersey number, identify inappropriate content, recognize places or celebrities in your photos.
Once you turn on our AI Hub, it takes care of converting your images to AI suitable formats, training & inferencing with your photos and then tagging them for easy searching using any of the Zoom client apps.
While Zoom does not have a panel inside the most commonly used audio apps: Pro Tools & Audition, you can use the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer Zoom plugin to check-in an entire Avid Pro Tool session, Adobe Audition project or an Apple Logic Pro project into the unified Zoom repository.
This ensures your video editors or collaborators can automatically sync your changes into their projects using Zoom’s revision control features, even when working from home.
And you get the benefit of savings revisions of your audio project files. If you need to go back to a previous revision of your audio project, the Zoom Desktop app will be able to do that in a few clicks.
As a sound editor you often need to add audio from your sound library or you need to edit a voice over stored in a central Zoom repository.
Instead of spending hours hunting down the files on a network drive or manually downloading them from a cloud storage such as DropBox or Google Drive, you can use the powerful AI & metadata based search in Zoom to find your audio assets, and then drag-n-drop the files into any audio editing app including Audition or Pro Tools.
As a sound editor its extremely useful to know where the silence or breaks are in an audio file, where the good stuff starts without needing to listen or scrub through the actual audio. Zoom will automatically create an audio waveform on ingest. Using our desktop or web app when you preview an audio you not only can listen to the stream but can see the waveform.
The audio player in Zoom also allows you to speed through your audio by using the playback speed control.
Not just video editors, but you as a sound editor too can take advantage of the data timeline features in Zoom to add markers on any clip within your audio file.
Data timeline is one of the most powerful feature of Zoom that allows producers to select sub-clips within an audio and add tags or description to it. It also works with our clipping editor to create new assets or sequences from your audio sub-clip selections.
Comments on audio timeline flow through the desktop app from our web apps. This mean feedback from your business owners can be easily viewed and replied to within your audio timeline.
You can send any audio file including hours long uncompressed voice overs to the Zoom AI Hub for speech to text transcription. Once the transcription is generated, you can search within an audio timeline for the spoken words.
Using the clip editor in Zoom, you can even export audio sub-clips based on the matching terms in AI speech to text data timeline or if you have manually logged the tags on an audio timeline, those too can be used to automate the export of sub clips.
Closed caption editors can download the transcriptions in a text format like SRT or Avid Captions to insert into their video projects.
Learn how to install desktop browser, Adobe CC plugins & more »
Learn how to manage content, metadata, users roles & much more »
Learn how Zoom helps Business Owners track job approvals, generate reports »
Collaborate with Clients, Review & Approvals
Producer-Editor collaboration, repurpose finished content
Trends, Analytics in Real-time from your Content Repository
Zoom user adoption process, Return on investment
Learn how Zoom helps Media Managers acquire, manage & administer their content »
Migrate archives, Ingest New Media Every Day
Folders, Working Copies, Smart Links Change Thumbnail
Manage Users & Roles, Protect On-premises Storage
Transcoding, Digital Rights, Cleanup, Previews
Configure Cloud Archives, LTO, Auto Tiering Policies
KPI Trends, Periodic Reports, Export CSV
Zapier, REST API, Search & Execute Actions
Download Media, Cloud to Cloud Transfers Links
Context Indexing, Configure, Logs, Monitor
Learn how Zoom helps Content Creators, Editors & Artists speed up their workflows »
Create New Project, Clone Existing Project
Ingest & Link with Images, High-res Media, Graphics
Folders, Working Copies, Smart Links, Change Thumbnail
Ingest & Link with Images, High-res Media, Graphics
Check-out files, Lock, Sync Projects & links, Check-in Revisions
Collaborate with Business Owners, Review & Approvals
Work from home, Remote Ingest, Edit with Low-res Proxies
Export Projects, Render, Final Conform to High-res media
Search using AI, Automatically Create Video Sequences