
Show HN: Remotion – quick video chat for remote teams, via desktop selfies - potatoarecool
https://www.remotion.com
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aejae
Hey HN, cofounder Alexander here. Seeing Remotion in action is the best way to
grok it so you have 3 mins, check out
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ0GITPcMAY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ0GITPcMAY).

Backstory & problem: Charley and I started working remotely when he moved to
Chicago. Immediately our work felt slower. The async-first remote work best
practices espoused by larger companies—GitLab & co—didn’t work for us. Frankly
we think they’re better for getting many people to execute known work well
together, but if you want energy & creativity on a smaller team, you need more
face to face chats.

Remotion helps teams quickly chat over video. Unlike most of the space, we
aren’t innovating on the in-meeting experience—keeping that lightweight.
Instead, we’re innovating on _how_ you start video chats.

Remotion puts selfies of your team on your desktop so you can see who’s free
and jump into quick video chats. Hope it’s useful for you all. Looking forward
to feedback.

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potatoarecool
Hey Everyone! Founder here. Remotion is a native macOS (not electron!) app
that allows teams to get into quick video chats with their team. The app shows
team selfies in the foreground, so that you can feel connected with your team
and get into quick chats without leaving your work!

I first built this product with my cofounder, aejae, when I moved away from
the SF Bay and found that we weren't collaborating as closely with each other.
I hope hn finds our product as exciting as we do!

Feel free to shoot questions about our product!

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npunt
Love the more presence-oriented take on video conferencing. Co-workers and I
have often joked it'd be great to have a traffic light type signal above our
workstations at work to know whether it was ok to initiate convo, and Remotion
basically has that. Lower friction to have happenstance conversations if you
want them, and an easy signal when you don't.

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raywu
One of the teams I know well has been using Remotion for a while. From the
team:

> As a remote team I want to still feel connected in real time to my
> colleagues. I had thought about just having everyone join a Zoom meeting
> every day with audio off. But video on all the time is actually pretty
> invasive for some people, and the tool will only work if everyone adopts it.
> So they’ve struck a nice balance with the selfies and the ability to pull
> people into little video chats. It replicates the feeling of presence,
> without being too invasive.

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mikesholiu
Congrats on the launch. Really excited to start using Remotion with my team.
Folks have been considering switching from Slack to Discord to have a better
sense for who’s available for a synchronous voice/video chat, but this is a
much lighter and better way of solving that problem without changing our
workflow.

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aejae
Thanks mikesholiu, would love to hear how that goes for you!

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randylubin
I've been helping the team in the run up to launch and I've loved using
Remotion. It removes all the friction of quick calls which has significantly
accelerated the pace of collaboration.

If your team is all on Mac and remote, I highly recommend trying it out.

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cjmb
Looks pretty cool. The friction of scheduling and joining remote calls is
underrated.

I wonder what size teams this product works best for? Presumably seeing 45
faces on the sidebar would get a bit much...

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aejae
Thanks, founder here. Remotion is designed for teams of people that
collaborate closely. Usually that's the "2-pizza" team of 4-10 people, even if
you're at a 1000-person company.

The way this works in Remotion is you choose who you want to add to your
Desktop Shortlist, and those are the people you see on your desktop.

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nardux
One of the Remotion developers here! Our goal is to create a great experience
for remote work. We are open to hear any suggestions or feedback you might
have. Please let us know!

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anvisha
Tried this out and love it. Waiting for Linux support so that everyone on my
team can use it.

~~~
aejae
Thanks! Absolutely planning on having multi-platform support in the near
future.

