Advice from engineer Fletcher Garrett on building a video production workflow
Church services are increasingly attended in living rooms as well as traditional venues. Well produced content can significantly increase the reach of a church and make services, events, and activities accessible to remote audiences.
From gathering in person to connecting online The ongoing global health emergency acted as a giant reset for many aspects of society. Churchgoers unable to attend services in person often found their local house of worship offered online programming of church services and other activities. Like most TV viewers, these online audiences have come to expect polished production values, easy to digest program segments, and ways to engage with the content.
Producing programs for both in-person and virtual congregations involves creating everything from full-length services to byte-sized segments. For this level of production, you need a media infrastructure that enables you to pay attention to lighting, sound, the number of cameras and their positioning, stagecraft, and editing.
Fletcher Garrett
Recommendations from a top house of worship video engineer For nearly 8 years, Fletcher Garret was the engineer in charge of TV operations at The Potter’s House Dallas. In that role, he was charged with setting the direction for technical innovation, and made it all work, under the pressure that will be familiar to anyone involved in live broadcasting.
The 10,000 capacity of The Potter’s House building is dwarfed by the 30,000 strong membership of the church, with a following many times that on social media. Essentially, The Potter’s House has a lot in common with broadcasters, except it produces all its own content.
We asked Fletcher what advice he’d give to churches, big and small, as they embrace TV production.
The importance of planning up front “I’d say it’s crucial for churches to plan their systems properly. They must plan for what they want to do and buy the systems that support the objective. Are you going to merely stream your “conventional” services? Or are you going to make the production more “theatrical”? The more complex your ambitions, the more consideration you need to give to the hardware and the software that are going to bring those experiences to life.”
Fletcher adds, “I have witnessed organizations blame the system for their workflow issues when in reality it was the lack of planning. The equipment has the potential to do what you need, but it’s the plan that enables that potential and makes your media infrastructure work for you!”
The media server is at the heart of your system set up A church typically purchases cameras, a switcher, and some storage. However, everything centers around your media and what ultimately matters is how you manage that content. A production media server is much more than a hard drive. It is the heart of the entire operation that allows you to manage the content and your video production workflow. If you just think of storage in terms of capacity, it’s like walking into a bookshop and saying, “I’d like a book, please”. The media server finds the right book for you and puts it in your hands immediately. You need a media server to effectively manage your media and maximize efficiency.
EditShare’s Mike Mahoney, The Potters House A. Ty Ayers Allen and Engineer Fletcher Garrett
Technical experience is important Also, there is a distinction between production staff, and engineers. Essentially, engineers assist in planning and make the technology work. The engineers keep it working, enabling the production staff to make programs. If churches don’t have an engineer on staff, there are good system integration companies out there that they can partner with. Experience matters when dealing with any system planning and engaging a good system integrator early on would be in your best interest.
Plan for ROI To get the best return on your investment, it’s absolutely essential to design your system and your workflow to make the type of material you have in mind but also do it efficiently. The more time you spend on planning, the more time you’ll have to make great programs. So, consider all the types of productions you want to deliver to your audience. Then, talk to EditShare. They’ll help and make sure you get the right system to achieve your goals.
The power of EditShare’s integrated media production platform for church productions While cameras, lighting, video switchers, and audio mixing desks might be the most visible parts of a TV production, it’s the “back-end” that makes it all work together. That back-end is EditShare’s EFS, a media-optimized shared storage solution. EFS connects to a high-speed network and is capable of moving very large files around quickly. It takes the place of tapes, external hard drives, “sneaker-net” and recording devices.
Combine EFS with FLOW, a clever media management solution, and you have an integrated platform for video production.
FLOW Panel for Resolve. FLOW integrates post-production into the workflow.
You can keep track of your files, always with frame accuracy. You can generate “proxies” – small versions of the original files that are still high quality but easy to move over even a broadband connection which are essential for remote working. You can convert files into multiple formats for distribution. The platform also allows multiple people to work on either the same or different projects at the same time, keeping track of permissions so that one editor doesn’t overwrite another editor’s work.
Most of all, EFS and FLOW keep complexity away from the users, and when technical administration is needed, it is highly optimized and easy to learn.
All storage appears as a single volume – a single storage space, even though it’s composed of potentially dozens of drives. Management software allows parts of the space to be allocated to individual users or groups. Security is built in.
EFS Active Directory gives users a familiar windows explorer view.
With so much storage, some of it is used to provide resilience against disk drive failure. If a drive fails, the overall system won’t even slow down while it is removed and replaced. It certainly won’t lose any material.
To sum up, the core of a “back-end” integrated video production system can:
Ingest multiple camera feeds and other files and media
Store the content centrally
Make this content available to authorized users (editors, etc) simultaneously
Allow editors to collaborate on stories
Make small versions of the media files (“proxies”) that can be used remotely
Allow editors to work anywhere
Take the place of tapes and portable disk drives
Look after your content security
Store media long term in an archive
Use AI to search for keywords and phrases making it easy to find relevant material, even from years ago
Keep this extremely advanced technology simple to use, reliable and productive in ways that would be impossible with previous-generation products
Streamlined layout: Shift is optimized to fit better on screens of all sizes. By grouping certain options and reducing excess space throughout the app, it’s easier to see more of your projects and files at once. The “New Folder” button is now located under the “Add New” options, and the delete button remains accessible by right-clicking any file.
Organize projects – your way: Hovering over a project or folder in the project tree now reveals an options menu, so you can quickly create subfolders and organize your content. To access your project tree, open any project and click the arrow button in the top-left corner of the screen.
Smoother, faster searches: The search menu makes it easier than ever to search using a single tag or multiple tags. Too many results? Narrow down your search by using the “is” and “is not” options. Your saved searches now appear in their own section at the bottom of the search menu.
Bug Fixes:
Review links now send properly when first copying the link before saving or sharing it.
Insights reports exact video views when a Spotlight is viewed on a mobile device.
Long titles no longer overlap with dates in Insights.
Asset thumbnails are displayed without an extra space when your thumbnail preferences are set to “fit.”
When you view a Spotlight, your video starts playing automatically if autoplay is enabled on the video or stage element.
When you share an asset that is protected by an email watermark, the “Create Link” button is disabled until you specify your link recipients.
The Media panel for adding files to a Review Link or a Spotlight now includes text to indicate the Projects menu is searchable.
Content creators put a lot of effort into presenting their work the way they’d like it to be seen, but what happens if the right people aren’t looking?
Add in the fact that your films, videos, creative assets, and pitch decks can be seen on mobile, laptops, tablets, and desktops and can be shared, streamed, and tagged, and it quickly becomes hard to track who is seeing what content where. And, perhaps most importantly, why some content trends more than others.
That’s why the team at MediaSilo has come together to create an all-in-one reporting dashboard to help you measure value, track consumption, and calculate ROI for all of your creative content.
The result?
MediaSilo’s Insights dashboard gives each member of your team the power to dissect data on specific content, weave together trends from across your portfolio, and paint a picture of who your audience is and the types of content they love to consume. Even better? You can customize the data you are looking for to see exactly what you need.
So what does deploying MediaSilo’s Insights mean for each of your teams, and how can they use it to drive next-level value?
Gain Insights for Every Team
From production and sales to editing and content security, Insights puts powerful reporting tools, filters, and analytics at your fingertips, giving every team member the ability to track, understand, and act on your content’s performance.
Use data to help sales and marketing educate, iterate, and win business.
Take a deep dive into your content’s viewership back to day one to see what is resonating with your audience, tagging content with filters and features that can be summarized to enlighten your team and fuel data-driven decisions about what and who to target next.
MediaSilo’s Insights can also help your team keep track of prospects and the types of content that is resonating with them, providing personalized data that can be used to facilitate new connections with potential buyers when they are most engaged.
Finally, step into your customer’s shoes during a sales pitch in real time with viewer-level reporting. Take the feedback to improve your sales pitch and present your most impactful content at the forefront.
Empower production to engage, track, and collaborate.
Looking for additional opportunities to streamline your production lifecycle and amplify the impact of each contribution?
Use Insights to track team viewership across the production lifecycle to develop a deeper understanding of internal engagement with your content to refine your workflows and identify choke points.
Your team can then use the data to remove barriers, hold team members accountable for meeting their timelines, and consolidate engagement and feedback data whether they’re sitting in the office or participating in remote collaboration across the globe.
Waiting for feedback from colleagues or collaborators? Use Insights to discover who is reviewing which assets and who might need a reminder.
Understand, optimize, and evolve content security.
With team members on the go and using a range of platforms, security has never been so critical.
Leverage the power of Insights to validate your security controls to confirm that your content stays in the hands of your intended audience and know the exact point when data began to flow outside of your area of trust, complete with viewer locations on an interactive map.
Seeing content behavior that you don’t like? Pivot your content security on the fly by editing expiration dates, password protection, or presentation and link settings in the dashboard.
Take Production to the Next Level with MediaSilo
Your team works hard to make the best creative content possible for your customers, clients, and audience to enjoy.
Every word, image, and frame has been carefully crafted to be impactful and engaging, so why would you depend on your best guess as to what will strike a chord with your viewers?
When it comes to taking your content to the next level, don’t guess. Drive an intelligent content strategy with Insights.
No two creative teams are the same, so it’s not efficient to force them to use the same collaboration and digital asset management tools. Given that the review and approval process varies by team and content type, a versatile platform capable of meeting a team’s needs without sacrificing visibility and structure is essential.
With MediaSilo’s customized and flexible asset-based commenting feature, teams can implement the processes that work best for their specific needs while providing different options required by other teams.
MediaSilo’s Flexible Digital Asset Management
No matter the file type—including documents, images, and videos—or stage of development, MediaSilo makes it easy for teams to collaborate on content, wherever and whenever your reviewers choose to do their work.
With the digital asset already in your MediaSilo workspace, the process can get started with a click of the “Review Mode” button. You are then presented with a history of past comments, and users have the ability to add their own feedback.
Collaborate directly on an asset.
Whether it is one large piece of content or a broad portfolio MediaSilo makes it easy to collaborate with a larger group.
As comments and feedback are made, team members can review, respond, and track the history of an edit. Using MediaSilo means all comments are consolidated in one place, making communication seamless and transparent and allowing constructive dialogue to flow all in one forum.
Find a resolution to a comment or want to make a specific suggestion? Mark the comment as resolved or make an edit. These comments can then be hidden to help streamline the review process.
Once the feedback period closes, everyone will be on the same page, and your team will spend less time tracking down edits and more time reviewing and approving the next steps.
Provide specific asset feedback.
MediaSilo even allows team members to comment on a specific section or portion of an asset.
Just select the area of the asset with the built-in toolbar and record the comment. As team members review the feedback, the relevant area of the media will be highlighted along with the comment.
Collaborate with review links.
Need to reach beyond your team for feedback and input? MediaSilo makes that easy too.
You can quickly generate and send a private review link to a target audience, easily bringing them into the loop while still maintaining the peace of mind that comes with knowing that your content is for certain eyes only.
To get started, select the files you want to share, enter the email addresses of your collaborators, and hit “Share.” If you want the feedback to stay within that group, select “Limit comments to this link” before sharing.
After the review period, access to the asset can be quickly turned off, but the comments or annotations will remain directly tied to the file itself, allowing the entire team to review feedback together.
Take the Next Step
With a constantly evolving design and digital asset management workflow, you need a platform that is able to evolve and flex with your team.
With features like Review Mode, your team is free to work in whatever way is best for them all while staying on the same page.
Ready to learn more about the MediaSilo platform and other innovative ways to enhance how your team manages digital content? Set up a time to chat with one of our experts.
You can now leave comments on an asset directly from your Shift project. Simply go to the asset and click the “Review Mode” button to access your commenting and annotation tools. Your feedback will be visible to all collaborators with access to the asset. This mode also displays the comments made in review links, providing you with one centralized place to view all your feedback.
If your workflow requires a private review session, where comments are only visible to the people with a link, you can still create a Review Link and turn on the toggle “Limit comments to this link.”
Whether you need Review Link commenting or in-project commenting, our newest tools let you choose the best way to gather feedback on your content.
We’ve updated our video player to improve your viewing experience. The arrow button next to the timecode now opens a menu, so you can choose your preferred timecode format. You can also click “Show duration” to display the video’s duration alongside the timecode.
Additional features are now accessible by clicking the gear icon next to the volume button. For example, select “QC Mask” to apply an aspect-ratio overlay to the video, or select “Keyboard Shortcuts” for a list of time-saving shortcuts.
The comment bar below the video player also includes a checkbox, so you can choose to leave a timecode-specific comment or a general comment. All comments appear in the right-side drawer, which you can open and close by clicking the speech-bubbles icon. This section now includes search and filtering options to easily find and display the comments you’re looking for. Once a comment has been addressed, click the blank circle on the right to mark the comment as “resolved.” You can still access resolved comments by selecting “Show resolved” from the filters menu.
Insights is the new hub for analytics on all your links, viewers, and assets. See how your content is performing by clicking the Insights icon in the navigation bar.
The left side of the Insights page provides a summary of your activity, including the number of visits to your links, the number of unique visitors, and the date of last activity. Click “All Activity” to display a map with your viewers’ locations, or select “Graph” to track viewer engagement over a period of time. Use the search bar along the top of the page if you are looking for analytics on a particular link, viewer, or asset.
You can select any item on the left side of the page to display more information in the right column. This section contains details on your viewers’ activity, including the specific assets they viewed or downloaded and the video percentage watched.
To learn more about the ways Insights tracks activity, please visit our support article.
You can share content with a group of people without entering their email addresses every time. In addition to distribution lists, you can now enter a user tag to add multiple tagged users to a share. When you create a new share, start typing a user tag in the recipients field. Then, select a user tag to add all the tagged users at once.
User tags can also be used to easily filter or search for groups of users throughout the application. You can tag existing users on the Administration page by selecting “Add tags” from the Actions menu, or during the “Add Users” process for new users. User tags are listed along the left side of the Administration page.
The Administration page now offers more ways to create, manage, and share distribution lists with other users.
To add people to a distribution list, click the checkbox next to their names. Then, click the Actions menu on the right, and select “Add users to a Distribution List.” You can select an existing distribution list, or click “Create New” to add them to a new list.
When you create or edit a distribution list, you can now share the list with specific workspace users or make the list accessible to your entire workspace. You can still create a private list that is only accessible to you by selecting “Just me” from the sharing options.
To edit a distribution list, click the More menu on the Administration page, and select “Manage Distribution Lists.” This opens a window where you can review and make changes to your lists, such as adding or removing members and choosing a different sharing option.
In addition to emails and names, you can now enter user tags to add multiple tagged users to a distribution list. For example, if five different users are tagged with “marketing,” start typing “marketing” to add all five of these users at the same time.
Adding new users to distribution lists
When you add new users to your workspace, you can now easily include them on existing distribution lists.
Start by clicking the blue “Add Users” button on the Administration page. Then, enter the users’ email addresses and choose their project assignments. Next, you can select a distribution list to add these new users to the list. For example, add new employees to an “All Employees” distribution list as they join your team.
In our previous entry in the Journey to the Cloud series, we reviewed virtual workstations. In that article we covered the advantages and concerns of using cloud-based workstations as non-linear video editing machines. For teams that are shifting their video production away from on-premise environments, it is important to consider how these workstations are managed, operationalized, and costs are controlled. That is what we will discuss in this article.
Virtual Workstation Recap In a video production environment, a virtual workstation is an on-demand compute server running applications for editing, ingesting, and other functions of a video workflow. These workstations are appropriately sized to the tasks at hand – which in this case will be non-linear video editing. Offered with a variety of CPU speeds and cores, along with memory and video graphics acceleration, they can be right-sized for the needs of the codecs being processed and edited.
An important consideration in virtual workstation usage is managing the uptime of that workstation properly. In an ideal world, this would be similar to simply powering on the system when in use and then remembering to shut it down when no longer in use. In a cloud environment that process is not straight-forward. For one, users may not always be diligent about shutting down their computers, and if they were diligent they may find the process of spinning workstations up and down more complicated than a power button. Often it’s necessary to have access, and training, to operate the cloud management console where this operation is controlled. Alternatively the IT cloud team needs to get involved manually or write scripts to perform this operation. This is not a simple process, but it is perhaps the most important step in controlling cloud costs. Because of this, a need for workstation management tools has emerged.
What Will Workstation Management Do For Me? There are a number of capabilities that workstation management solutions provide to make users’ lives easier, help them save money, and maintain control of their cloud environments. Let’s walk through a few of them.
Workstation Scheduling: Ideally, a workstation manager will allow team administrators to control the uptime of their virtual workstation environments. That’s as simple as turning them on in the morning and turning them off in the evening. The primary advantage here is cost savings. Instead of running a GPU assisted compute node 24×7, a workstation management system can control the overall uptime and usage schedule. The savings is straightforward here – there are approximately 722 hours in a month, yet typically only 173 working hours. Providing a simple scheduling management function can result in a 76% savings against your cloud bill.
Now there are solutions, such as AWS Instance Scheduler, that can provide similar functions, but will require the user to have the IT and programming skills to implement them. For video production teams, a simpler solution is almost always preferred.
Connection Management: This element of workstation management orchestrates the connection of users to virtual workstations and watches over the use of those connections. When logging in, a connection manager will find an idle workstation and connect that user to their new environment for the duration of that session. This element also has the ability to monitor the workstation usage. If the environment goes idle the connection manager will sense this and shutdown the workstation in order to minimize costs. Typically this idle period can be set to find that right balance of idle time acceptable to users.
To ensure productivity within a team, when users are disconnected from their virtual workstations, the compute instance is also suspended. This suspended mode often means that the storage associated with this workstation is maintained, not deleted. However, the compute instance is released and is no longer incurring a cost. The storage is maintained separately but these fees are relatively small, for example, AWS Elastic Block storage for a 200 GB volume will only be around $8-16/month. Once that user comes back online, that storage volume is connected to a new virtual workstation and users can become productive again.
Authentication: An important element is the ability to ensure only authorized users can access workstations. A workstation management solution will integrate smartly into your company’s security solutions and map to the correct policies set by your information security team.
Provisioning and Management: The ability to provision new workstations into your workstation pool is an important element of workstation management. For example, you may have 20 workstations available to your team, but find yourself facing a new project which will require an extra 5 workstations. The administrator of the workstation management system will have the rights to provision these new workstations, and later delete them when no longer in use. Similarly new video production workloads may arise requiring workstations capable of editing very high resolution video. These higher-end workstations can be created and provisioned specifically for these requirements, and then deleted when no longer in use.
Cost Insights: In a video production environment, workstations used for editing or ingest may be among the most costly cloud elements in use. The ability to have visibility into these costs will allow teams to maintain controls on their spend, well ahead of any surprise bills. In addition, this capability can make it much simpler for production groups to easily shift to an OpEx model where revenues from projects can be tightly aligned with the costs associated with that work.
The advantages of virtual video productions have become more compelling to teams as cloud costs plummet and bandwidth increases. However, as this world has emerged it has required a new set of skills and oversight that differs from on-premise solutions. For some organizations, tracking on-going costs can be more challenging than the analysis behind a CapEx investment of new equipment. A workstation management solution with visibility into costs can help manage this concern and provide clear visibility into spend.
Operationalizing Cloud Virtual Video Production Moving to a cloud environment today may require team members to become familiar with a cloud vendor’s console administration, operations, coding, and cost calculators. Not exactly a set of skills a creative department may want to invest in. Some market solutions address this complexity with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, allowing users to subscribe to a video production environment of fixed sizes and capabilities. This can sound compelling but it also eliminates the advantages of a scalable cloud approach, and requires customers to pay staggering fees as the SaaS vendor must over-provision their cloud infrastructure to account for worst case usage models.
EditShare’s approach has been to truly embrace the cloud offering a scalable solution which its customers can use cost-effectively in their cloud account. This ensures our customers receive the best pricing possible for their cloud infrastructure uses and allows them to maintain control and oversight. To provide further operational and cost oversight we have partnered with workstation management vendors such as 7FiveFive, and together we can provide the end to end solution that is manageable and operationally controlled by our customers. The entire environment – performant storage, asset management, archiving and ingest all operationalized in the cloud with full control over usage and cost management.
