Kapwing’s Studio is a free image, video and GIF editor designed for modern creators. People can do simple tasks quickly and make digital media to share, teach, or entertain others. We started two years ago with the goal of making multimedia storytelling as accessible, simple, and collaborative as other cloud-based software we love.

This week, Kapwing launched Collaborative Workspaces, a shared space where creators can work together on video, image, and design projects. This iteration of the Studio allows people to collaborate on multimedia projects in real time, making it the internet’s first free video, audio, and GIF editor with synchronous collaboration.

Offline Headaches

We built Collaborative Workspaces to address problems that we experienced ourselves as students, office workers, and casual creators. On a team, group members are forced to huddle around a shared laptop or phone instead of contributing remotely. At companies, creators and designers find themselves sending emails back and forth with unlisted YouTube links or large video files attached, files with names like “FINAL_final_project3.mp4.” They have to re-download, export, and upload assets just to make minor edits and get feedback.

Trying to make, share, and get feedback on short-form video projects

Agencies and design teams waste hours on menial tasks like cropping, fixing typos, and adding subtitles because clients cannot make these post-production tweaks themselves. Versions of one video draft can take up gigabytes of space and processing power. Teachers have told us that they keep legacy Macs even after their school’s transition to Chromebooks, just so their students can use iMovie for multimedia projects. Today’s most popular video editors also don’t leverage internet-connected technology. Version control, smart tools, and file visibility are rare or nonexistent.

Modern professionals have started demanding collaborative software in other productivity verticals. They use cross-device, user-friendly products that were designed for teams: Airtable for project management, Figma for design, Slack for chat, Notion for note taking. But video creation has been stuck behind the real-time collaboration curve, and creators working remotely continue to send bulky files and clog their computers with project drafts.

The rise of remote teams and multi-device workflows necessitates the accessibility and availability of the cloud. With Kapwing’s Studio 2.0, creative teams can get their work done faster and with fewer headaches. It’s a collaborative alternative to Photoshop, Final Cut, Premiere, and a slew of mobile-only apps for solo creators.

Create Together

This week, Kapwing launched real-time collaboration for projects in the Kapwing Studio. Like Google Docs, Kapwing now allows creators to edit video, image, and GIF projects at the same time using different devices. All of the edits are tied to the Project’s URL, so everyone on the team automatically stays up-to-date. Creators can share their Projects with anyone without needing to download and transfer large files. Just click “Share” from the editor page to invite collaborators to your Kapwing Project.

In a Shared Workspaces, creative groups can access, download, and edit each other’s Projects. Any small creator – podcasters, political campaign organizers, YouTubers, etc – can invite peers to a Workspace to add to, iterate on, download, and make changes to each other’s projects.

Collaboration makes it possible for all teams and groups to make videos, design graphics, and animate together:

• Marketing teams can polish their assets and materials from home, the field, or the office
• Students can work together on group projects
• Online communities can co-create with a global audience
• Managers can give feedback on in-progress projects
• Remote teams can cut out asynchronous feedback lag

Creators can join a Kapwing Workspace for free or can upgrade a Workspace to Kapwing Pro for unlimited storage, higher upload limits, privacy, and certain professional tools. Kapwing Pro Workspaces cost $20/person/month.

When we started Kapwing, we built a dozen separate one-off tools each optimized for its own task. In the process, we learned that transferring large files across systems leads to version control mess, storage problems, and workflow interruption. The Studio 2.0 and now the Workspace unify the tools where it makes sense and simplifies the pain of sharing, collaborating, and iterating on video projects. Check it out and let us know what you think!