Melanie Ciotti,
Studio Network Solutions
Business agility has a whole new meaning these days.
I remember back in business school, professors would talk about “business agility” like it was a badge of honor reserved for the best, most innovative companies. Now, it’s a survival tactic—a flat-out necessity.
Why? For starters, COVID-conspired supply chain disruptions have wreaked havoc on industries from baby formula to semiconductors—and ours isn’t immune. But business agility runs deeper than supply chain management.
Consumers are growing increasingly less patient with inefficiency in their lives. If your product or service isn’t constantly adapting to and anticipating their needs, there’s no time for strikes—you’re just out.
So, how can media teams stay agile and adjust to current and future trends in real time? It starts with an agile production workflow.
An agile production workflow helps media teams respond quickly to new opportunities and mitigate threats
The Agile Production Workflow
Constantly uploading and downloading files off the server, passing hard drives from editor to editor, wasting creative resources on non-creative tasks—these are some of the obstacles that hold production companies back from business agility nirvana.
At SNS, we build solutions that enhance the post-production workflow so that media teams can create amazing content, faster, from anywhere. Here are some of the ways our solutions can help you build an agile production workflow for your media team.
Standardizing On-Prem And Remote Workflows Let’s not dwell on the events of 2020 for too long, but the pandemic spelled out in capital letters just how agile our industry was at the time. (If you read that as a negative or positive, you know which side of the coin you were on.) Standardizing your video production workflow for on-prem and remote collaborators minimizes the burden on editors in a hybrid environment. And that doesn’t mean compromising with egregious egress fees and latency issues.
The high-performance EVO shared storage solution includes several remote editing and cloud workflow tools to help creative teams find the optimal balance between high-speed online editing and flexible remote connectivity.
EVO’s remote cloud workflow solutions help media teams finish projects faster, from anywhere.
Creative collaboration powered by EVO blurs the line between your on-premise and at-home workflow. When connected to EVO remotely, your post-production team gains access not only to the media stored on the server, but also to the award-winning EVO Suite of software tools included: ShareBrowser for media asset management (MAM), Slingshot for workflow automations, and Nomad for remote editing.
EVO makes remote access easy with SNS Cloud VPN—the secure, convenient, and ultra-fast virtual private network (VPN) service exclusively for EVO. Setup in minutes and 2x-5x faster than traditional VPNs, this cloud solution gives creative teams access to everything they need for their remote video editing projects just as if they were in the studio.
With EVO’s remote/cloud workflow tools enabled, your on-prem and remote collaborators can:
● Search, find, and preview media in ShareBrowser
● Import media and metadata into their favorite NLEs
● Backup files to network-attached and cloud storage
● Automate file transfers, transcodes, and other data processing tasks
● Download edit-ready proxies for remote editorial
● Do all of the above, from anywhere
Automating Your Workflow
Content creators should spend the bulk of their time creating content. Unfortunately, non-creative tasks have a way of weighing down production workflows. Endlessly wading through files, manually transcoding media, and tying up workstations to run cloud backups translates to workflow inefficiency and low team morale.
Agile organizations don’t dedicate editors and workstations to data processing tasks. They automate these elements of their workflow, keeping creative resources in their creative mindset as much as possible. This is where Slingshot comes in.
Slingshot is EVO’s built-in automation engine and the soon-to-be most productive member of your production team. By automating your file transfers, media backups, transcode jobs, and more, Slingshot takes the busy work out of your workflow and off your team’s to-do list
ShareBrowser MAM features an AI connector for automatic metadata generation.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are fantastic agility boosters, especially when seamlessly integrated into your workflow. ShareBrowser’s AI connector, for example, can automatically add relevant tags to your footage with the click of a button, making it easier for team members to find the clips they need without spending their time logging those tags themselves.
Being open to new technologies that save time in your workflow enhances your team’s ability to react swiftly to emerging opportunities, trends, and threats. It’s the ultimate catalyst for an agile production workflow.
How Workflow Agility Breeds Opportunity
A truly agile workflow helps production companies identify, execute, and even monetize new business opportunities.
For example, Barbershop Films uses EVO and ShareBrowser as a client-facing media portal, adding more value to their footage beyond the final deliverable.
Barbershop Films’ post-production workflow is powered by EVO shared storage.
Jeremy Drummond, president at Barbershop Films, explained: “You spend $300,000 to shoot a 2-day commercial campaign, and that footage is great. It’s done, it’s got its 13-week run, it’s measurable. We did everything we’re supposed to. But now with EVO, we’ve unlocked all this value in those shots that didn’t make the cut—in the additional angles that are great in a social piece, or powerpoint, or a pitch deck. We can leverage that and offer it to our enterprise clients as additional value for their investment.”
When you remove the physical walls constraining where creative professionals can work, stop wasting creative resources on non-creative tasks, and invest in technology that breeds new opportunities for your team, you’ve mastered the agile production workflow.
Learn more about EVO shared storage and the included EVO Suite of workflow tools at snsevo.com
