In March, 2020, as COVID-19 hit, most game industry employees were sent home from the office. Companies scrambled to compensate for the loss of their central office spaces where workers could interact, ideate, and create together.
As the pandemic begins to diminish, it’s become clear that many workers – and even some employers – appreciate the benefits of working from home (WFH), while at the same time, still grappling with its challenges. A core challenge is the ability to maintain the culture and productivity altered by a remote or hybrid workforce.
Tools that seek to bridge physical and temporal distances between workers make remote work possible. But they also bring their own problems. According to Asana’s recent Anatomy of Work report, 60 percent of a person’s time at work is spent on “work about work” and not on skilled work. In other words, people are spending huge amounts of time on communications apps that don’t directly contribute to the worker’s actual function.
The report found that the average knowledge worker spends “103 hours in unnecessary meetings, 209 hours on duplicative work, and 352 hours talking about work.”
The games companies we spoke to invariably reported the same issues, with a tension growing between individual preferences for certain apps, how those apps were being used, and how much time and energy is going into unnecessary communications. Many reported confusion about which apps were best for the constant back-and-fro of creation and approval, as assets are shared, modified, and reshared.
In this report, we’ll dive into what the game industry has done to bridge this gap, some of the remaining issues leaders in the gaming industry face to balance productivity and culture, and tips on how to excel in the new hybrid world.
Disclaimer — We are grateful for the participation of the companies we spoke to, and their candid observations and insights. Their participation does not reflect any endorsement of MediaSilo.
Introduction
The game industry’s technical prowess and culture of innovation proved to be advantageous when the world faced lockdowns and other consequences of the pandemic. Mainly staffed by computer-sophisticates, game companies were able to continue their operations.
But video game companies also found many unexpected problems during COVID, often rooted in the game business’s cultural history, as well as the unique nature of video games as extremely complex artifacts of creation. A rising consumer demand for video game entertainment during the pandemic added pressure to unexpected pain points, as game companies failed to hit milestone targets, and release dates were shifted out of the most lucrative times of the year.
Gaming’s Cultural Singularity
All industries, including creative industries, were forced to cope with lockdowns. Many are now working their way into a future in which many workers are likely to opt for WFH, rather than attending an office every day, if practical and if offered the opportunity.
So why do the experiences of game companies differ from other similar businesses in the entertainment industry?
While it is certainly true that some games in the early years were made by individuals working from home, gaming’s creative culture rapidly morphed into an intensely in-person collaborative endeavor. In fact, game creation and promotion has traditionally relied heavily on multiple in-person teamwork.
Most game companies – whether developers, publishers or service providers – are formed by small teams of friends or colleagues who work closely together, constantly sharing each other’s work. Over-the-shoulder collaboration is central to how games are made.
When you read about the early days of a successful games company, the founders will almost always speak about how much time they spent together, bouncing ideas off one another, and critiquing each other’s work. They will invariably credit this approach to their success. Invariably, they seek to scale this dynamic as their employee base grows.
Any part of a game can be changed at any time during its development, right up to the game’s release, and even beyond (in the form of additional content, patches, modes etc). These alterations might range from a tiny, single sound effect, to the entirety of the lead character, to the very nature of the game itself. Sometimes, alterations can be made after feedback from early reviews to ensure the game delivers against massive expectations.
Venture capitalist Matthew Ball recently noted how much more content games companies offer compared with competitors in other entertainment industries. “Video games are a platform for multiplayer storytelling, rather than a linear narrative. Fortnite has only marginal changes each multi-month season, but the reliance on ‘your friends’ and unscripted narratives means that a player can spend dozens of hours satisfied. The Office is highly rewatchable, but over its nine-year run, it produced less than 75 hours of unique content. Game of Thrones ran for eight years and produced the same. ”
Late in their creation, mystery novels do not suddenly become comedies. Movies that make drastic late changes are assumed to be suffering from creative challenges, and expectations for commercial success are downgraded accordingly. But in games, radical and constant iteration is necessary to the process, and is viewed as financially advantageous.
Games are tactile. Their creators must touch them, in much the same way that a chef tastes a new dish.
Big changes must also be reflected in a game’s marketing, as emphases move from one innovation to another.
Games are tactile. Their creators must touch them, in much the same way that a chef tastes a new dish. Games are complicated amalgamations of processes and assets. But each ingredient can only be added by a specialist. All the other specialists are expected to ensure that any change works with their particular ingredient to the advantage of the whole. One change must necessarily lead to many other alterations.
In game development, iterations are a constant, and involve the agreement and participation of different people. From producers to gameplay designers, to artists and writers, to musicians and programmers, down to testers, this is often done in the moment, collaboratively.
Limitations of generic communications tools
Matt Casamassina is CEO of Rogue Games, a California-based publisher which employs around 20 people, most of whom he speaks to on a daily basis. His normal office routine is to do the rounds and check in on his team members, discussing the wide variety of development clients that the company handles. But when lockdown hit, he found himself having to use Slack as his primary conduit between himself and his staff.
While Slack is a useful tool, it is not a substitute for in-person communication. Many of the companies we spoke to said that its usefulness can be undermined when multiple channels are being created without much oversight, nested within one another, making navigation problematic.
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It is best understood as an asynchronous conversation. Casamassina learned this after fellow team members gently suggested to him that he was trying to use it as a live-chat device, and that he was too impatient and insistent for immediate responses.
“When you’re at home, sending an email or a slack out into the digital ether, I want a response right away. But sometimes I might not hear back for hours and I start to wonder, ‘hey, where’s my response?’.
“I learned that’s not good behavior from a leader. I’d worked in offices for a long time, and I was programmed for that environment. But those expectations don’t fit when you’re remote. I really had to address something that came across as me being unreasonable, while making sure that our workflow improved.
“So we talked with the team about how to create optimal communication practices, without too much rigidity. We put practices in place that allowed me to loosen up and unlearn those bad habits that I had to really grow out of. At the same time employees stepped up. We built a system together that everyone understands, and that has helped our workflow and our culture.”
Most of the companies we spoke to reported that their Slack usage has become more sophisticated and organized since lockdown, with a larger number of channels, generally serving hyper-specific purposes.
The future of feedback, approvals, and comments is likely to move away from generic solutions like Slack toward specific tools, like MediaSilo, which allows for on-screen annotations, frame-accurate comments, and one-click approvals for video and animated assets.
Most industries now make regular use of video meeting tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and Skype, and Discord to gather ad hoc input throughout the creative process according to a company’s needs.
“I might sometimes be in a [virtual] meeting and I’ll take a screencap from Discord and transfer it into Slack,” said one. “We’re mixing and matching according to the needs of the moment.”
Zhenghua “Z” Yang is founder of Serenity Forge, a Colorado-based developer and publisher. “Our Discord server is a digital office space,” he explained. “Each person on our team has their own voice channel and when you’re working, it’s assumed that you’re on your channel, but if you’re not, that’s okay, it’s just like someone not being at their desk because they went out to get a sandwich or something.
“You can mute Discord, but if you’re there, anyone can pop into your channel and say ‘hey, what’s up … you know like … did you finish that one thing?’ And Kevin can quickly unmute and say ‘oh yeah I just finished it’, and then ‘okay, all right, cool. I’ll see you later’.
While these collaboration tools fill in some of the gaps, they are not without issues. Different functional teams have different needs and levels of adoption for collaboration tools, leading to a disjointed collaborative workflow.
“I might sometimes be in a [virtual] meeting and I’ll take a screencap from Discord and transfer it into Slack,” said one. “We’re mixing and matching according to the needs of the moment.”
Security Protocol Changes
Game companies are notoriously secretive, and for good reason. Releases are highly visible, competition is fierce, ideas are premium, and assets are valuable. Partnerships rely on discretion. Most of the companies we spoke to talked about how they invested a great deal of time and energy into making sure their security was able to withstand entire teams suddenly logging in from home. For some, it took months to get to a situation where they felt comfortable.
Christina Seelye is founder and CEO of California-based publisher Maximum Games, which employs around 50 people. “Making sure that everyone can get into the VPN [Virtual Private Network] properly was an early priority,” she said. “Cybersecurity issues are really important for us. When people are working from home, they all have their own challenges, and it’s essential to talk those over, individually.
MediaSilo works with some of the most sensitive pre-release content on Earth, so security is paramount. We emphasize security from content protection to protecting our client’s Personal Identifiable Information.
“Sometimes it’s just little stuff like people who might let their kids play on the computer, or who have roommates. What is the right thing to do when you’re in a Zoom call and talking about something that isn’t publicly disclosed? So we had to make sure that we were being really careful about understanding that confidentiality and security practices, which work fine in the office, work differently at home. Security has become a major priority over the past year.”
MediaSilo security director, Simon Lamprell, believes that security is crucial internally and externally. “We work with some of the most sensitive pre-release content on Earth, so security is paramount. We emphasize security from content protection to protecting our client’s Personal Identifiable Information (PII). Also, whenever we engage with a new vendor or third party we perform a full security assessment and review their protocols and practices around PII to ensure they meet our security standards.”
Protect and Share the Build
Part of game company security is managing the latest build, or version of a game, or of the various assets that make up the game. Allowing employees to access the most recent version of the game means they need very fast internet connections, while the company must ensure that the build is both easily accessible by the right people and protected from the wrong people.
Many companies use their own servers, or version-control cloud depository services like Perforce. Some use online retail portals like Steam, where they can upload new builds every day which are easily downloaded by team-members. Many use a combination of resources that make sure that every version of the build is protected.
“As a producer I can look at all the graphs and all the data points in the world, but the real progress is the game itself,” said Kerry Whalen, production manager at Piranha Games, which is best known for its Mechwarrior action games.
“We spend a lot of our time looking at the game and playing the game and talking about the version of the game that we’re working with. When lockdown hit, we tried to [play the game] via remote desktop, but that’s no good if you’re at home with a laptop on the kitchen table and a terrible internet connection.
“So we resolved that problem by putting our games on Steam. We set up all kinds of different beta branches and delivery systems so people can access anything securely, play it, and give their feedback.”
Control Meeting Madness
When they were forced into social separation, many companies overcompensated by instigating too many video meetings. Partly, this was driven by a well-meaning anxiety that employees might not be coping with isolation. Another reason cited by interviewees was a concern that, outside the milieu of the office, people might not all be on the same page. Information gaps might start to appear, hampering progress.
“We believe in the creative energy and the synergy of being physically together,” said EA Motive’s Patrik Klaus. “When we’re apart, we message each other when it’s needed. We’ve come a long way in getting better at that, but it remains a challenge to find the right cadence of meetings. Having a tool like Zoom is awesome, but Zoom fatigue is a real thing.”
Having a tool like Zoom is awesome, but Zoom fatigue is a real thing.
Zach Truscott at ArenaNet said: “We’re very used to having hallway conversations in the office, instead of meetings. But when you’re remote, they’re gone. So we set up meetings instead, and what we found is we went from a moderate amount of meetings to so many meetings that nobody was getting any work done. We were overbooking ourselves with meetings.”
Truscott said that the company is resolving the problem by creating working pods which have a responsibility to keep stakeholders informed, while minimizing the amount of time spent in meetings. This is leading to more efficient means of noting and disseminating action points.
“Communication is an important part of game development,” said Farah Coculuzzi, producer at Capy Games, a Canadian developer, currently enjoying success with mobile hit Grindstone. “We want to make sure that everyone has the capacity to do what they need to do [for work] and also to take care of their home life.”
“A big thing for us is the realization that stand-ups don’t always have to be at the same time every day. A few days of the week they’re in the mornings and a few days they’re in the afternoons. If someone regularly misses one or two because of other commitments, that’s just part of how we do things.”
Respect Camera Anxiety
On-screen meetings are now a normal part of office life, but some people dislike being on camera. This can cause friction between managers who want to literally see how their people are doing, and employees who are either naturally shy, or who wish to protect their own privacy.
Joel Burgees at Capy Games said: “One of the great things about Capy is we don’t have a lot of braggadocio and peacock energy in the studio. But we do have some really soft-spoken folks on the team who are introverted. They are mega-talented, big-brains-big-hearts types of people and it’s very rare that they will put their cameras on [during meetings].
“The people who are comfortable having their cameras on are more likely to be social and outgoing and it’s very easy to hear their ideas because they are broadcasting it.
I have to give people space to be heard, especially if they don’t want to be seen.
I have to be more proactive about making sure that the quiet people whose faces we can’t see are encouraged to speak, without feeling like they have to turn on their camera. I have to give people space to be heard, especially if they don’t want to be seen.”
Respecting each employee’s camera sensitivities while still wanting and respecting their feedback during creative sessions is something that can be solved asynchronously through shared collaboration platforms.
MediaSilo provides a simple review and approval process letting stakeholders provide feedback without the hustle and anxiety of live, camera-on sessions.
Meeting in the Middle
A constant refrain from our interviews was the sense that the last 18 months have been a sharp learning curve for everyone, and that business leaders were no more prepared for the shock of the pandemic than anyone else.
The lessons that have been learned did not come from managerial theorists, or from super-bosses, but from trial and error. Most important of all is that physical isolation has only intensified a growing sense in the game industry that companies that try to dictate policy to employees will likely find it difficult to maintain a healthy working culture, and will struggle to retain and to hire talent.
The lessons that have been learned did not come from managerial theorists, or from super-bosses, but from trial and error.
EA Motive’s Patrick Klaus summed up this thinking: “Our evolution during this time has been relatively organic, and I think we’ve succeeded because it was always super important for us to be listening to our teams, and being flexible in our approach.
“The situation needed a bottom-up approach and not a top-down approach. We talked. We listened and we figured the best way forward by meeting in the middle. One of the biggest things that I’ve seen is just an intense level of collaboration and communication at all levels.”
Electronic Arts employs more than 10,000 people around the world, while the Motive studio is around one hundred strong. Klaus said that this presents a challenge, but that a local approach is essential.
“We had some great support coming from the head office but we’ve also been empowered to make our own decisions and to create our own destiny in terms of how we do things. We have found guiding principles that are applied to the whole company but then there is a flexibility built in at a local level.”
Conclusions
In some industries, WFH is leading to anxiety that workers might take advantage of the situation, and decrease their commitment to work. In a competitive, passionate, creative industry like gaming, that is not an issue.
Those leaders we spoke to who are looking forward to “getting back to the office” are all working on plans to allow employees to work from home for either part, or all of the week. Creativity is at its peak in a person-to-person setting and it’s a simple fact that some people prefer to work in a social environment.
There is also a common notion that when a game is in its conceptual, brainstorming stage, stakeholders work better in-person. On the other hand, the specific productivity of content creation – art assets, programming, music, level design, trailers – can just as easily be done from home, if that’s the worker’s preference.
All that explains why gaming is likely to move to a hybrid model in the years ahead. How that happens will be a continuing evolution of best practices, and of useful tools.
Every interview in the report mentioned multiple tools that they were using more extensively when they were away from the office, than when they were in the office. Most of these are familiar to us all, such as Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Trello, Asana, and Google Docs. But there are plenty of other tools that are either especially suitable for the game industry, or are coming to the fore as particularly good for specific, essential tasks.
We at MediaSilo work with some of the biggest names in gaming to bring the power of visual feedback to life. MediaSilo brings together assets and minds for in-progress creative projects. For example, concept artists use MediaSilo as a place to manage and share files, and marketing teams collaborate and approve campaign assets on their way to promoting highly anticipated titles.
As evidenced in the feedback and insights provided throughout this report, bringing collaboration out of non-stop meetings and chat clients allows for a cleaner feedback loop where everyone can participate. Please contact us to see how MediaSilo can take your workflow to the next level.
Latest Improvements:
The newest release makes some of the most common functions you perform in Shift even faster and more streamlined than before, from typing-ahead recipients’ names to sorting your projects.
You can quickly add auto-suggested users to a Recipients field by hitting the comma, enter, space, or tab keys. This applies to the Distribution List and Share windows.
When you open an options menu by clicking the three dots on a project or asset tile, no need to carefully move your cursor to stay inside the box – the menu will stay open until you either select an option or click outside the menu.
Find what you’re looking for faster. You can now sort your projects according to size. On the Projects landing page, click the filter icon in the top right, and select Sort by > Size. Or, if you’re using list view, just click “Size” in the Size column.
The search menu has been updated to display your newly created asset tags.
Love it or hate it, one of the most inescapable software tools in all of TV, film and video production is the ubiquitous spreadsheet. Studios, crews, agencies and teams of all types and sizes track their schedules, gear, assignments, call sheets, and locations using the infinite rows, columns and cells of a trusty pivot table.
But when it comes to the media assets that are vital to delivering productions for your business, it’s time to lift the spell of the spreadsheet and shine the light on real insights instead.
Fact #1: Spreadsheets are notorious for errors
From the age-old report that 88% of spreadsheets contain errors, to more recent studies showing that 20% of genetics scientific papers contain errors caused by spreadsheets, it’s commonly known that trusting your important stats to Excel is far from reliable. Even if the data itself isn’t complicated, tiny mistakes – whether from repetitive manual user input, imports of incorrectly formatted data into existing files, or simple miscalculations in formulas – can all make spreadsheets prone to errors.
Fact #2: Spreadsheets require expertise
Unless you and your stakeholders are professional data wranglers, spreadsheets can be difficult to analyze. Why? Because on one hand, rows upon rows of raw data are hard to gain insights from without the necessary filtering, graphing, and sorting it takes to really discern their importance. And on the other hand, although many software tools have visualization features built-in, it’s too easy for anyone to use them to interpret data incorrectly.
Whether you send out a spreadsheet nightly, weekly, or quarterly, it’s outdated the moment you hit “export.”
Fact #3: Spreadsheets are stale
How often do you have to update a dashboard, create a report, or provide analytics on your shared media files? Whether you send out a spreadsheet nightly, weekly, or quarterly, it’s outdated the moment you hit “export.” And that means the knowledge your stakeholders gain from the data may no longer apply – introducing potentially costly delays, and making important decisions too late. Without real-time data, your perfectly formatted, color-coded spreadsheets are simply not actionable.
A better way to track your content
There’s no trick to tracking your shared media assets with Insights, the media analytics engine within MediaSilo.
Insights is accurate.
There’s no mistaking the accuracy of analytics on your project, assets, and viewers; all the data comes directly from your MediaSilo system, not a separate software tool. How much is the file being viewed? Who is viewing the file? When are these people viewing the file? And how often are files being viewed vs. downloaded? No matter how granular you need the data, you never need to create a separate tab, formula, or file. From an entire project, right down to a single asset.
Insights is confusion-free.
The Insights dashboard is designed to answer questions about your assets, regardless of how you ask them. Want to see where your videos are being viewed? No need to create a graph from scratch — the IP address map will show you. Wonder when a video was viewed the most? Look at the timeline view. Happy that twenty people watched the clip, but you want to know which twenty? See them for yourself. Insights gives you easy access to visualize your data, with tools that can’t be tricked.
Insights is actionable.
One of the most important uses of your data will be in helping your business make quick decisions about your media assets — and better ones, too. You can gain intel, for instance, about how far into clips a viewer gets before viewership drops off, and have your team make changes to the content. Even more immediately, if you notice content activity in locations you don’t recognize, you can pivot your security on the fly by editing expiration dates, password protection, or presentation and link settings in the dashboard. With Insights, media security is like a crystal ball in your hands.
Break the spell
Media assets are the backbone of a studio’s or agency’s intellectual property. So when it comes to quickly tracking, analyzing, and reporting on them, it’s important to avoid the demons that plague spreadsheets. Make your sharing, reviewing and usage data more accurate, more understandable, and more actionable – instantly – using Insights in MediaSilo.
Tour De Force Born out of sheer determination and passion, 3P Studio has earned its place in Australia’s creative landscape as one of the industry’s hardest working boutique post-production houses. Founded and led by artisan Haley McDonald, 3P Studio’s eclectic portfolio of post-production work includes desirable commercial brands such as Subway, Allianz, Isuzu Motor Company as well as iconic and defining shows like Sesame Street.
“There are a few projects that we are particularly proud of at 3P Studio and one that stands out is the work we did with Brisbane-based advertising agency, Carbon Creative, for the Australian Department of Premier and Cabinet’s ‘Stop the Hurting: End Domestic Violence’ campaign,” comments McDonald. “It was the first large-scale national campaign that we undertook in the studio; it was an honor that they selected 3P to work on such an important campaign.” A testament to their quality and influence, 3P Studio was recognized for their outstanding work on the “Stop the Hurting” campaign, receiving a silver medal in the Brisbane Advertising and Design Awards.
Humble Beginnings Leads to a Local First With almost two decades of experience in the media and entertainment industry, McDonald has worked for some of Australia’s largest post facilities. Passionate about her craft, McDonald always knew that working as a creative storyteller was her true path. “I got my love of TV from my late father. I never had a bedtime as a child and he used to let me watch TV with him whenever I wanted. This led to a lifelong obsession of working with media and creatively telling stories. On the flip side, I got my work ethic off my mum, who worked in a hospital laundry for 30 years. I grew up in a housing commission until I moved to Brisbane when I was 18 and worked in a supermarket there until I saved enough money to go university and study film.” Drive and passion work hand in hand and proved to be incredible assets to McDonald as she forged her own path in a male-dominated industry.
It was after the birth of McDonald’s son in 2013 that life took an unexpected change and really challenged her commitment to being an artist. “I had left for maternity leave in 2013 to have my first child, Dash, who is now eight. When I came back to work after six months, my position had been made redundant and I no longer had a job to return to.” While most would see this as a devastating blow, McDonald turned it into the opportunity of a lifetime. “For some time I had wanted to open my own shop. But, like most people, I had a mortgage, daycare and other bills. So, venturing off on my own was just too risky, but with no job in hand, I had nothing to lose. It was my chance to follow a dream and I gave it everything I had.” Starting out as a freelance editor and designer, McDonald took every job that came her way. “I would never say ‘no’ to a job. I would never say I was booked. I would just say, ‘Yes, no problem, I can do that.’ Even if I had three jobs in one day, I would just take them and work out how I was going to deliver. Eventually, I started hiring people to help as I took on more demanding projects. Since I had been in the industry and was so well connected, I was able to get projects out the door with a very high degree of quality thanks to very talented colleagues. This, of course, translated to very happy clients and exceptional word of mouth marketing.”
Working 7 days a week, McDonald transformed the busy freelance business into one of Brisbane’s few woman-led post-production houses. “I bought my office in 2016 and took six months to fit it out. On Christmas Eve 2016, they handed me the keys to the office and they went, ‘There you go.’ And as 1st of January 2017, 3P Studio was officially in business.”
Purpose Built for Business and Creative Content McDonald built the stunning boutique facility from the ground up. And the chic design took into account installing an EditShare shared-storage solution in late 2017. “When we were wiring the office I made sure I had the cable runs and all the infrastructure shared down the track. I always knew that I wanted to install EditShare because I had used it before, and I really liked the way it supported the content flow. We just needed to save for the investment.” For the first six months, the team worked off the old hard drive system where they had RAIDs that were backing up to other RAIDs overnight and doing mirroring for redundancy. “So, we’d put a project in motion and eventually come to the point where someone would say, ‘Oh, that operator needs to use the project on that,’ meanwhile someone else also needed to use it too, then we’d copy off the data onto another drive and it just became unmanageable so we made the leap to EditShare.”
McDonald quips that she could have purchased other gear, but the EditShare scale-out shared storage nodes were the solution to power her successful business. “I could have gone out and purchased a Mac Pro and hooked it up to a couple of hard drives. Would it have done the same thing? To a certain degree, but it hasn’t been tried and tested like in EditShare. After talking with the guys at EditShare and getting the rundown of the specs and performance reports, investing in EditShare gave me the peace of mind I needed. In addition, my previous experience with using EditShare on very demanding projects assured us that this system would take a beating and keep performing.”
3P Studio installed an EFS 200 single node scale out shared storage solution connecting 10 creative Mac and PC-based workstations over 10-GB Ethernet comprising a mix of Adobe® Premiere® Pro and After Effects®, The Foundry’s NUKE, Maxon’s Cinema-4d, Autodesk Maya, 3D Studio Max, DaVinci Resolve for grading and the premium hero suite, Autodesk Flame Premium while Avid Pro tools is utilized to provide audio post production. With advanced support for project and media sharing, EditShare features helped tremendously with the boutique’s retail clients who, more often than not, required an incredibly fast turnaround. It allowed the team to work simultaneously on projects with one person recording voice-overs while another artist works on the graphics and another edits. “Because the EditShare system is designed for content sharing, it makes the workflow as fast and as collaborative as possible. This means higher quality projects completed on time and of course most importantly, happier clients.”
A Business in Overdrive The successful post-production company tripled its staff between the years of 2017 and 2021, requiring an expanded media infrastructure. Upgrading to EFS 450 and adding FLOW and AirFLOW, the team was able to facilitate traditional editorial campaigns and the growing number of fast-turn projects targeted for social, digital, and other marketing channels. McDonald adds, “More and more client requests are project-specific rather than a campaign. While the content still needs to be delivered across all channels, it has a short-shelf life and smaller budget. The pace from start to finish is accelerated. With our expanded EditShare installation, we have a content factory workflow that gives our clients a first-class post-production experience meeting both their tight timeline and budget requirements.”
The addition of EditShare’s remote media management solution, AirFLOW, to the workflow allowed 3P to offer a “content warehouse” service to its clients. Clients can log in from anywhere, browse through content at their convenience, review work-in-progress and submit project changes. The service removes the burden of clients needing to maintain their own drives or storage servers as all content is stored on the EFS storage platform, maintained by 3P. It also enabled remote collaboration, which was key during the pandemic restrictions.
McDonald notes of the growth, “Our business has reached a point where we need to utilize advanced tools to refine our service offering and delivery. EditShare workflow solutions and creative tools like Adobe have enabled us to make those advancements across our business and deliver a superior level of service.”
Setting a Great Example As a woman-run and owned post facility, Haley is in a very rare category. “I am very proud to be a female post house owner and can definitely say there is room for more of us to take the lead! Running my own shop has given me the opportunity to work with female directors, producers and operators and I take great pleasure in collaborating with them in my studio. In addition, I also have the support of a fantastic group of young men who are sound designers, VFX artists, animators and videographers and I am very lucky to have them. I also have the support of loyal clients that have been with me since I started and most of my work comes from word of mouth which is nice.” As for EditShare, we are very proud to be a part of this success story.
EFS, FLOW, and AirFLOW and Adobe integrations support workflow demands and enable new client service offerings
Boston, MA – October 26, 2021 – EditShare®, a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows for storytellers, today announced that Brisbane’s leading post-production facility, 3P Studio (3P) has expanded its investment in EditShare’s FLOW media management and EFS storage solutions to manage its growing editorial business. The full-service post-production house, which produces creative content for top brands like Isuzu Motor Company, Subway, and Allianz, has tripled its team over the past three years to support the rise in client projects and campaigns across broadcast, digital, and social channels.
“Our business has reached a point where we need to utilize advanced tools to refine our service offering and delivery,” states Haley McDonald, Founder and Managing Director, 3P Studio. “EditShare workflow solutions and Adobe creative tools have enabled us to make those advancements across our business and deliver a superior level of service.”
3P upgraded their EditShare environment to facilitate traditional editorial campaigns and the growing number of fast-turn projects targeted for social, digital, and other marketing channels. The EditShare media foundation connects the facility’s premium creative tools which include Adobe® Premiere® Pro and After Effects®, Avid Pro Tools, Autodesk Maya and Flame, DaVinci Resolve, NUKE, and Maxon’s Cinema 4D, creating a well-integrated ecosystem that optimizes post-production workflows. The talented 3P team of compositors, editors, and color graders can seamlessly collaborate on projects utilizing FLOW and EFS to manage the nuances of file sharing, asset tracking, file formats, and package delivery for multiple channels.
McDonald adds, “More and more client requests are project-specific rather than a campaign. While the content still needs to be delivered across all channels, it has a short-shelf life and smaller budget. The pace from start to finish is accelerated. With our expanded EditShare installation, we have a content factory workflow that gives our clients a first-class post-production experience meeting both their tight timeline and budget requirements.”
The addition of EditShare’s remote media management solution, AirFLOW, to the workflow allowed 3P to offer a “content warehouse” service to its clients. Clients can log in from anywhere, browse through content at their convenience, review work-in-progress and submit project changes. The service removes the burden of clients needing to maintain their own drives or storage servers as all content is stored on the EFS storage platform, maintained by 3P. It also enabled remote collaboration, which was key during the pandemic restrictions.
“EditShare is designed to make it easier for customers like 3P to collaborate with their clients from anywhere,” Paul Hayes, Regional Sales Manager for Asia, EditShare “Rather than having clients send in individual drives to work with, 3P houses all of their content and clients simply log in, browse, and give direction. EditShare speeds up the entire workflow enabling 3P to create space and scale their business in new directions while creating a more personalized service for their clients.”
“We love seeing studios such as 3P tap into the power of our Adobe Creative Cloud apps, like Premiere Pro and After Effects,” said Sue Skidmore, head of partner relations for Adobe video. “EditShare takes advantage of Adobe panel APIs and other integration features that bring media management right into the creative applications, enabling users to pivot their productions and deliver high-quality content quickly.”
About EditShare EditShare is a technology leader in networked shared storage and smart workflow solutions for the production, post-production, new media, sports, and education markets. Whether you need on-prem, cloud, or hybrid solutions, our products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include media optimized high-performance shared storage, archiving and backup software, a suite of media management tools and a robust set of open APIs that enable integration throughout the workflow. Customer and partner success are at the heart of EditShare’s core values ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none.
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.
