New facilities boost remote and collaborative production and post for booming Latin American market
Boston, MA – May 31, 2022 –EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, today announced that it is providing powerful media storage and workflow facilities to Administración Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (Antel), the national telecoms business in Uruguay. The service provides a strong and reliable remote and collaborative post environment for users like leading audiovisual production hub REDUCTO, using Antel’s extensive high-speed internet connectivity.
Housed in Antel’s Tier III data center is the EditShare storage system, built on EFS 450 and EFS SSD solid state storage appliances. Total capacity at present is 300 TB, and the connection between the Antel data center and REDUCTO runs across two redundant, geographically diverse 10 gigabit fibers.
The storage is complemented by EditShare FLOW automation and media management to track content, maintain secure redundancy and enable creative users at REDUCTO to track projects. FLOW also allows individual users to work with their preference in edit workstations and other creative tools, with no impact on workflows or storage and archiving.
REDUCTO is an audiovisual production hub with an international reputation. In its Montevideo headquarters, across the city from the Antel data center, it has two production studios and it is the home of 2 post-production facilities, Colour and Boat. The partnership with Antel provides scalable and flexible access to the best editing and colour grading tools, giving it a powerful offering and advantage.
“Latin America is a booming region for video production, and we can provide the connectivity to allow producers to work with the high-quality facilities at REDUCTO from any part of the continent,” said Gustavo Andrés Arbiza Mattos, Telecommunications Engineer at Antel. “EditShare and its innovative storage and workflow architectures enabled us to create a compelling business case for hosting video services. The ability to support very high bandwidth services like uncompressed digital cinematography and Ultra HD, and good scalability both on premise and in the cloud, means that we can respond in an agile way to the growth of the market.”
Thanks to the high-speed connectivity from Antel, REDUCTO is now able to serve the broadcast and media market across the whole of Latin America from its central location. The latest additions to the EditShare environment support resolutions up to 8k, meaning it can deliver services for the movie and events industry as well as broadcast.
Producers can be granted access to the shared storage to view progress without the need to travel to Uruguay. EditShare FLOW provides the security functionality for protected tenancies, allowing REDUCTO to host productions for multiple clients simultaneously and in time, for Antel to offer the same hosting and connectivity service to other media clients.
Mateo Musitelli, Project Manager RC&C at REDUCTO added “Prestige productions demand secure and flexible facilities. EditShare gives us native tools for remote production, fast and intuitive workflows, and the knowledge that the content entrusted to us is always secure and always available. It is a key element in our continuing expansion plans as a leader in the media industry across the region.”
EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
Flexible, cloud-enabled workflows facilitate remote working and transform creative story telling
Boston, MA – May 25, 2022 –EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, is using its presence at Broadcast Asia (1 – 3 June, Singapore Expo, stand 5F3-01) to highlight its latest enhancements for production and post production. Headlining the stand will be the new suite of FLEX software solutions for cloud and hybrid workflows.
FLEX reflects the powerful business trends in post today, including the migration to a “work anywhere” environment, with ready access to content wherever the creative staff need to be. In adopting cloud broadcast media storage and processing, it also meets the move towards an OpEx financial model, with the cloud hosting and storage fees flexing to reflect the level of business.
“The Asia Pacific region is an important territory to EditShare and we can’t wait to attend the show in person and meet with our local customers and partners face-to-face once again,” comments Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer at EditShare. “We’re especially looking forward to demonstrating how FLEX can greatly simplify how teams may choose to work and the benefits that this can bring.”
Broadcast Asia will provide an opportunity for visitors to see the latest developments following their launch at NAB 2022. These are all aimed at simplifying the creative experience while providing even greater content security and availability.
A great example of workflow streamlining is the enhanced project synchronization with NLEs, including Media Composer, Adobe® Premiere® Pro and DaVinci Resolve. This allows complex projects to be readily moved between EditShare FLOW media management and the NLE environment.
Also added to FLOW is the ability to support the latest RAW format updates for RED and Blackmagic Design camera systems, and impose LUTs in real time, both on full resolution material and on proxies.
FLOW can now also ingest NDI contribution feeds and immediately present them for editing, ideal for news and sports fast turnaround editing. To make the workflows as slick as possible, EditShare has been collaborating with MoovIT on its Helmut 4 orchestration platform, and will demonstrate how they work together to make Adobe and EditShare the perfect environment for high pressure operations.
Content security and availability is vital to professional users, and EditShare is adding new hardware and software in this area. The EFS 60NL is a new device, aimed at nearline storage, and providing 60 drive bays in 4U of rack space. Within the EditShare environment, nearline storage is ideal for content which is needed but not being immediately worked on, ready to be transferred to the online servers with virtually no delay.
Adding to the security and sharing concept, EFS Multi-Site allows users with multiple locations to leverage built-in file acceleration to synchronize project storage between EFS clusters in different facilities. This ensures that users have ready access to content, wherever they choose to work. Cloud Sync extends the capabilities of Multi-Site to cloud storage, providing added flexibility in access as well as security in archiving.
EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
In the post industry, the biggest pressure today – aside from the usual need to control costs and boost productivity – is the need to support a “work anywhere” environment. Creative staff want the flexibility to work their preferred hours, from a location of their choosing. It reduces or eliminates the commute to an office, which has real environmental benefits as well as reducing stress for the editor.
EditShare led the industry in developing cloud solutions. It took existing, successful products and concepts and added the open-ness, interoperability and scalability that the cloud offers.
All of this experience is now brought together in EditShare FLEX, which offers a highly tailored environment for all the major tasks from remote editing to secure archiving. Most importantly, FLEX is designed in such a way that it is simple to implement and intuitive to manage. It does not require IT expertise to get the best of the system, nor to ensure security and reliability.
Migrating to the cloud gives businesses the obvious advantage that they do not need to physically host the hardware on which their work depends. This reduces the space they need, the power they consume, the air conditioning demands and the downtime and staff to ensure that the hardware is maintained and updated as required.
Conversely, the creative team will be accustomed to their preferred software and know how it should respond. Forcing a change of edit software, for example, would be simply unacceptable. Equally, making the system less responsive to key presses or mouse clicks would be unsettling and cause slow down workflows and become a stumbling block in adoption.
The guiding principle of EditShare FLEX is that you should carry on using your preferred tools in exactly the way you are used to. Cloud and remote working means there is an abstraction between the operator and the physical workstation, but that cannot be any sort of obstacle: it must be completely transparent.
To make this possible, EditShare has collaborated with industry leaders. FLEX uses the popular and widely recognised Teradici software to provide remote access from anywhere to virtual workstations. And if you are new to cloud connectivity and do not have an established fast file transfer process we can integrate CloudDat software from Data Expedition Inc.
Even more important, the FLEX virtual workstations in the cloud support whatever NLE software you currently use: it is completely agnostic. Indeed, if you have some editors who prefer Premiere Pro, some who are Avid fans and others who are most comfortable on DaVinci Resolve, you can support all of them, simultaneously and completely transparently.
There are two main bundles of the FLEX offering at present, with more to come in the future. FLEX Cloud Edit does what the name suggests: allows your editors to sit wherever they like and edit on virtual machines in the AWS cloud. Customers can take this bundle a step further with FLEX Cloud Edit+ which adds workstation management and file transfer acceleration, providing video production teams with an end-to-end video studio suite virtualized in the cloud.
The second bundle is FLEX Sync, which synchronizes between local EFS storage and cloud-based archives. It can be set to be completely automatic and it eliminates the need for LTO tape libraries, another continuing cost for space, maintenance, tapes and upgrades. By moving your archive or DR backup to the cloud, you also gain massive resilience. Once your archive is available in the cloud it unlock opportunities to utilize it for other cloud solutions, including FLEX Cloud Edit.
There are options in each service so you can tailor your system to precisely your requirements. If you do not have the necessary IT and engineering skills in house, then EditShare’s professional services team can provide the system design and scoping.
The great advantage of FLEX, though, is that you maintain full control over your working environment. Your talented and creative team will notice few changes, and will be able to work as productively as before, if not more so.
It delivers against the key concerns. It provides secure and efficient remote working, alongside edit-in-the-cloud, with all the CapEx savings and OpEx control that implies. And you maintain full control over your working environment and, most important, the security of the content entrusted to you.
New installations in Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt and Turkey increase the presence of EditShare open solutions in the region
Boston, MA – May 18, 2022 –EditShare®, the leading supplier of creative and collaborative media workflows for storytellers, continues to deliver powerful solutions for major projects in the Middle East. The company is proud to have been involved in an installation at Expo 2020 Dubai, which won the prestigious “Innovative Project of the Year” trophy at the 2021 Broadcast Pro awards, and has also delivered solutions to customers in Saudi Arabia and Sharjah.
EditShare has provided its broadcast media storage and workflow tools to one of the largest smart cities in Saudi Arabia. And in Sharjah, the Government Media Bureau has also invested to support its production of a broad range of video content and delivery over multiple platforms.
Each system sees EditShare FLOW media management and EFS storage solutions providing streamlined editorial workflows. With its completely open approach, the EditShare video content management system allows each user to support a mix of Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Avid Media Composer, DaVinci Resolve and other professional post production tools seamlessly within tailored workflows.
EditShare worked in conjunction with its local distributors including, among others United Broadcast & Media Solutions (UBMS) to design, install and support these two applications and their customers.
Rayan Nasser, Sales Director at UBMS said, “Our customer, the largest smart city in Saudi Arabia, has some of the most advanced media operations in the Middle East, attracting and hosting world-class content creators and distributors. “EditShare’s ability to integrate key editorial tools removes the bottlenecks of proprietary systems, enabling us to offer clients the full range of post-production services using their preferred creative tools, while giving them the reassurance of outstanding support from us as an EditShare partner.”
Said Bacho, EditShare’s Chief Revenue Officer, comments, “With a Dubai-based regional team in place, EditShare has established itself as a trusted vendor in the Middle East whose innovations have provided customers with a wide range of possibilities for integration with the editorial tools and production systems they want to use.
“Media companies demand multi-vendor workflows that can be tailored to their specific production needs,” adds Bacho. “What is so attractive to our users is that we absorb the complex technical demands, eliminating bottlenecks and ensuring that the creative teams enjoy a seamless, intuitive experience – leaving them free to concentrate on making great content.”
EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
Flexible, cloud-enabled workflows, project synchronization with NLEs, LUT and RAW support, live capture and more
Boston, MA – May 10, 2022 –EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, will showcase its strong commitment to the Middle East region at CABSAT 2022 (17 – 19 May, Dubai World Trade Centre, stand C6-31), introducing its new FLEX cloud solutions. This suite of powerful media asset management and storage software solutions provides a straightforward way for businesses, large and small, to take full advantage of cloud services and workflows.
FLEX reflects the powerful business trends in post today, including the migration to a “work anywhere” environment, with ready access to content wherever the creative staff need to be. In adopting cloud storage and processing, it also meets the move towards an OpEx financial model, with the cloud hosting and storage fees flexing to reflect the level of business.
Michele Dwayk and Amjad Baidas, the latest recruits to EditShare’s team in the region, will be on the booth to showcase the new technology enhancements.
“The Middle East is a very strategic territory to EditShare, and we continue to work with many of the big players in the region,” comments Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer at EditShare. “We know how important strong relationships are in this community, which is why we have carefully recruited very well-known and respected talent like Michele and Amjad to work with our customers and channel partners here.”In its simplest form, FLEX Cloud Edit provides media asset management, high performance software-defined storage, and virtual workstations in the AWS cloud.
CABSAT will be the perfect opportunity to see the latest developments following their launch at NAB 2022. These are all aimed at simplifying the creative experience while providing even greater content security and availability.
A great example of workflow streamlining is the enhanced project synchronization with NLEs, including Media Composer, Adobe® Premiere® Pro and DaVinci Resolve. This allows complex projects to be readily moved between EditShare FLOW media management and the NLE environment.
Also added to FLOW is the ability to support the latest RAW format updates for RED and Blackmagic Design camera systems, and impose LUTs in real time, both on full resolution material and on proxies.
FLOW can now also ingest NDI contribution feeds and immediately present them for editing, ideal for news and sports fast turnaround editing. To make the workflows as slick as possible, EditShare has been collaborating with MoovIT on its Helmut 4 orchestration platform, and will demonstrate how they work together to make Adobe and EditShare the perfect environment for high pressure operations.
Content security and availability is vital to professional users, and EditShare is adding new hardware and software in this area. The EFS 60NL is a new device, aimed at nearline storage, and providing 60 drive bays in 4U of rack space. Within the EditShare environment, nearline storage is ideal for content which is needed but not being immediately worked on, ready to be transferred to the online servers with virtually no delay.
Adding to the security and sharing concept, EFS Multi-Site allows users with multiple locations to leverage built-in file acceleration to synchronize project storage between EFS clusters in different facilities. This ensures that users have ready access to content, wherever they choose to work. Cloud Sync extends the capabilities of Multi-Site to cloud storage, providing added flexibility in access as well as security in archiving.
“This year’s participation at CABSAT marks a first for EditShare by exhibiting at our own booth with a regional team on board,” added Bacho. “It will be great to show our users and channel partners in the Middle East all the exciting new innovations we have been working on, and discuss how we can transform story-telling.”
To book a meeting or demo at CABSAT, please click here.
About EditShare
EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
Newly redefined cloud and hybrid storage; rich edit support
Boston, MA – May 03, 2022 –EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, is using its presence at the Media Production & Technology Show (MPTS, 11 – 12 May, Olympia, London, stand L726) to highlight its latest enhancements for production and post production. Headlining the stand will be the new suite of FLEX software solutions for cloud and hybrid workflows.
FLEX meets today’s expectations in post, including the freedom to work with any edit software, and to do so from any location. It provides a simple, ready to implement and very cost-effective route for edit in the cloud, remote collaborative working, and secure cloud archiving.
EditShare is committed to the idea that post production creatives should use the tools that best suit them and their work and FLEX reflects this by offering turnkey bundles that allow customers to get started quickly, with a known configuration and pricing profile.
In its simplest form, FLEX Cloud Edit provides media asset management, high performance software-defined post production storage, and virtual workstations in the AWS cloud.
The FLEX Cloud Edit+ bundle adds accelerated file transfer capabilities and comprehensive workstation management.
FLEX Cloud Sync provides a simple route to back up media libraries and FLOW databases to AWS S3, where it can be retrieved when required, making it easy to retire LTO tape libraries and gain huge resilience and availability.
MPTS will be the first opportunity to see other significant developments following their launch at NAB 2022. These are all aimed at simplifying the creative experience while providing even greater content security and availability.
A highlight for editorial workflows is enhanced project synchronization with NLEs, including Media Composer, Adobe® Premiere® Pro and DaVinci Resolve. The next release of EditShare’s core FLOW workflow management software will include the first implementation of this integration, allowing complex projects to be readily moved between EditShare media management and the NLE environment.
Also added to FLOW is the ability to support the latest RAW format updates for RED and Blackmagic Design camera systems, and impose LUTs in real time, both on full resolution material and on proxies.
For news and sports fast turnaround editing, FLOW can now ingest NDI contribution feeds and immediately present them for editing; making the workflows as slick as possible.
Adding to the security and sharing concept, EFS Multi-Site allows users with multiple locations to leverage built-in file acceleration to synchronize project storage between EFS clusters in different facilities. This ensures that users have ready access to content, wherever they choose to work.
EditShare will also be available to discuss the new EFS 60NL, aimed at nearline storage and providing 60 drive bays in 4U of rack space. Within the EditShare environment, nearline storage is ideal for content which is needed but not being immediately worked on, ready to be transferred to the online servers with virtually no delay.
“Our focus is on simplifying the day-to-day experience for our customers,” said Stephen Tallamy, CTO, EditShare. “Whether it is deep integration into NLE software to help editors focus their creativity, or helping post houses manage costs and security as they migrate to the cloud, simplicity and power is what sets us apart.
“The UK is, of course, a global powerhouse in broadcast and post-production, so we are excited to have a presence at the London show,” added Tallamy. “We are looking forward to showing our latest developments for the first time on this side of the Atlantic, and sharing our knowledge with the local media tech community.”
To book a meeting or demo at MPTS, please click here.
About EditShare
EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
Mike Wright to head up sales in Americas in time for NAB 2022
Boston, MA – April 20, 2022 –EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has underlined its commitment to the key market of the Americas with three new senior staff, in addition to the solid regional team already in place. Mike Wright joins as VP for sales across the Americas, Jodynne Wood as VP of business development in the region, and Gregory Cash to lead the regional pre-sales team.
Mike Wright brings a wealth of commercial leadership experience. His proven career in the media technology industry has seen him in senior sales roles at Telestream, Tektronix and Grass Valley. “Mike is charged with leading and growing our sales organization across the media community, including the management of our strategic accounts as well as our channel partners in the Americas,” commented Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer at EditShare. “We already have a broad range of great users in the Americas, and we are excited to continue our success in the region.”
“A key part of our business growth will come from tier 1 production houses and broadcasters, which is why we have tasked Jodynne Wood to take on the business development role in the Americas,” Bacho added. “She will look after our key strategic accounts to make sure we are serving them diligently.” Wood brings experience in cutting edge technology within the media business. She also draws on her experience at GrayMeta and Ci-Sony Media Cloud Services to build strong and trusted relationships with her clients.
The third new addition to the Americas team is Gregory Cash, who has experience on both sides of the market with spells at NBC Universal and Rohde & Schwarz before making the move to EditShare. His new role in managing pre-sales for the Americas region means he will focus on demonstrations and proof of concepts, managing the relationship between EditShare and its users to ensure that the requirements are absolutely clearly defined with key metrics in place.
“We already have a strong team in the Americas, who have delivered remarkable success in recent years,” Bacho said. “Mike, Jodynne, and Gregory are key appointments to bolster the regional growth even further, maximizing our potential in the market and reinforcing our commitment to the Americas. It is great that they will all be on board in time for NAB this year, allowing them to meet our fantastic customers and channel partners in the region first hand. We all look forward to great things from the revitalized team.” Mike Wright, Jodynne Wood, and Gregory Cash will all be on the EditShare booth, N3008, at NAB2022 (24 – 27 April, Las Vegas Convention Center). For more information on EditShare solutions, please click here to get in touch.
About EditShare
EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
Let’s face it: the traditional agency pitch is a drawn-out, sprawling, cumbersome process that has made its way into all aspects of creative business development.
From selling agency services to proposing high-profile campaigns; from bidding on big commercial production projects to placing new talent – in every creative endeavor, agencies, boutique firms and reps dutifully invest time, creative energy, and resources into frustratingly rigid dog-and-pony shows. And talk about rigid: according to pitch consultancy ID Comms, today’s agency pitch process has been in place since the early 1990’s. In other words, “most consultants’ pitch templates are older than the internet.”
Even during the COVID-19 pandemic when accelerated changes swept through so many other industries, these archaic processes still remained in place, keeping agencies tied to stagnant and unproductive methods of developing new business – while the rest of the world raced ahead. Basically, we’re stuck with the traditional pitch.
The Creative Cost
Yes, the process is rigid and time consuming. Yes, the average agency surveyed in industry report The OUCH! Factor™ spent 22.2 days’ worth of staff time last year on each pitch they entered (equal to one employee working one full month per pitch – 11 times a year). And sure, the odds of winning the pitch after all that work are around half, according to the same research. It couldn’t get any worse, right? Wrong.
New studies have shown that the traditional pitch process actually undermines the core strength of an agency or commercial production company: your creativity.
“We’re meant to be in the business of creativity, but the focus has shifted,” says MullenLowe Group UK’s Lucy Taylor in a Campaign Live article from March 2022, Resetting the pitch process and bringing the soul back to adland.
Pitches can be very stressful and lead to burnout, posing a serious problem for clients, who require an ecosystem of dynamic agencies doing great creative work, which is “the lifeblood of our industry,” says Andrew Lowdon from ISBA, the trade body representing advertisers, in Marketing Week. After all, says Jemima Monies of adam&eveDDB in the Creative Salon, “New business should be a means of nurturing talent, rather than draining it.”
How can you shift the odds in your favor when it comes to preparing for the dreaded pitch?
The Agency Reel: The Win Before The Pitch
Consider the common, basic criteria clients use to determine the fit of any agency— essentially, the admission price for you to compete: you understand the clients’ business, the vision, their immediate need · you have experience in their industry you’ve got a recognizable roster of previous clients you’ve got the right mix and level of capabilities you’ve shown you can personalize your solution to them
With one creative reel done right, you can prove to your prospects that you possess all these characteristics, before you invest valuable hours into a pitch.
A good reel will help pave the way into a prospect conversation, while leading with proof points they care about— giving them confidence to include you in the brief.
Better yet, a reel will allow you to learn earlier in the process (even before the competition begins) whether the client feels you’re a good fit. Then you can determine whether to continue to invest, or weed out the clients that aren’t a good match, and, instead, pivot to the next important project.
What’s important to note is this: the best reels reflect the specific client who’s watching it, and demonstrate what you can do for their exact needs. That airtight resonance of your work with the client’s needs is what gives a reel the best chance at hitting every one of their initial criteria.
Sizzle On Demand?
Of course, every client is different. That means the best reel you can use is one that’s customized for each client. And creating custom sizzle reels professionally can get very expensive—up to $10,000 per minute of finished video, or more in many cases.
And that’s the conundrum: on one hand, a reel made just for the client you want to pitch will be far more effective, and ultimately win more of the right clients for your agency or firm. On the other, it’s risky, involved, and expensive to professionally create a bespoke agency reel each time, when you have no idea whether you’ll land the project.
If you’re going to engage with multiple prospects while trying to beat The OUCH! Factor™ odds, it makes sense to scale your reel-building capabilities internally. Doing this will allow you to conduct business development proactively and more swiftly when you want to get ahead of the pitching cycle; reduce the expense and time of customizing every reel; and most importantly, increase the “at bats” your reps can get for you with as many clients as you can handle.
Best of all, with the right tools, it’s possible to build reels quickly with the people you have in place (whether internal talent or outside reps), using the content you’ve already created. Just make sure the tools you choose have what it takes to hit all the right marks with clients.
Agency-Friendly Requirements For Reel-Building Tools
As a secure and highly customizable media management and reel sharing solution for 1,500 creative companies around the globe, Wiredrive has had marketing teams, agencies, and commercial production businesses as our customers for more than a decade. Our customers have called Wiredrive one of their favorite solutions for making custom reels – and the software includes a complete set of features designed specifically for this capability, called Library.
We’ve examined the usage of hundreds of Library customers and categorized their reel-building requirements into three major themes. Keep reading for the specific features you should look for when considering your own internal solution for custom reels.
First Things First: Streamline Steps
Every additional process it takes to get from your content to your finished reel is another obstacle between you and your potential clients.
Think about all the disparate components involved in delivering a video show reel today—from cataloging and finding all the pieces of content you want included, to getting them from where they are into the right format and location for production, to designing a template to showcase them – and look for a solution that eliminates steps all along the way.
Connection To Asset Catalog
Everything starts with the assets. Since the reel is your resume (tailored, of course, to your prospect), you’ll likely draw from the entire library of your creative work as the source of raw materials for the final portfolio. Why not use a presentation tool that connects directly to those assets?
Instead of having to start from scratch and think about “Wait a minute, was that on Vimeo? Do we still have that in storage?” choose a solution that doesn’t require people to take the media out of one system and move it, transfer it, or send it into another system.
When you have a library of all your final finished work, already uploaded, cataloged, tagged, and easy to find, you can easily use it as the back-end of your media source and then wrap a show reel around it.
Consolidation Of Multiple Tools
Most agencies and production teams could be using up to a half dozen or so different tools to present and share their work. Anything from downloading media from their company Google Drive to creating Keynote presentations that link to Vimeo videos, to collecting everything in a video site like Wistia, and even creating custom websites to host pitch reels.
Not only does this involve a multi-step process to collect assets and deliver a polished reel, but it also means paying a half dozen monthly fees for different tools—along with the multiple storage costs across those tools.
Find a front-end solution that consolidates a lot of discrete tools that don’t talk to each other, and instead contains everything in one platform that handles each task, all collated together. Otherwise, you end up paying for that many vendors, and taking on the administrative overhead of the fragmented landscape.
Keep Things Simple
This is the next major theme: you want tools that are simple enough that anyone who needs to can create a reel when prospects need to see one. And “anyone” could even mean your sales reps who have a prospective client on the line that wants to see something right now.
Your responsiveness alone—along with your quick-turnaround capability of a beautiful presentation—will make a strong impression from the start.
Easy for Non-Designers
If most of the people pitching your services are natural-born salespeople, not natural-born designers, one requirement to look for in augmenting your in-house reel capabilities is the ability to create impressive-looking output without being a professional designer.
Prebuilt templates, customizable design themes, and drag-and-drop presentation building are valuable features that any presentation software should have. The further ability to simply plug in the desired asset and have it “just work” saves many nail-biting hours otherwise spent struggling with incompatible file formats, complicated editing software, and painstaking adherence to creative guidelines.
Brand-Customizable
If there’s any caution around allowing reps and other non-creatives to build effective agency reels, it’s that you have clear standards for external-facing presentations, fixed guidelines for what they should look like, and a reluctance for people to simply make their own and go off-brand. After all, that’s a recipe for what should be a captivating portfolio to turn into Myspace really quickly. Regardless of whether your staff and reps are creatively gifted or visual newbies, ensure your solution can be deployed under a model of brand control. Set up templates that do fit the model, and then that template can be applied automatically to hundreds, thousands of presentations that get sent out for all the things that you do.
No Code Platform
It’s worth mentioning that bringing the tools for reel-building in-house doesn’t necessarily mean everyone needs additional tech skills (or a new hire to manage the solution). Many small companies would contract with a web development firm to create bespoke client branded web pages, but then the agency would still need to figure out how to get them the assets they need, how to ensure client assets are secure, how to specify the correct analytics. It truly is cost-saving, complexity-saving, and time-saving when the platform doesn’t require staying up to date on technology skills.
Embrace Analytics
Posting a sizzle reel on YouTube could show you the number of views, daily trends, and so on, but with the right tools you can gain enough knowledge over time to know in advance whether your pitch will have a chance.
Reporting And Insights
How powerful would it be if you could eliminate uncertainty around the business development process? To have insight about whether your reel was viewed (or wasn’t), the knowledge of how widely it was shared, and potentially, even the confidence to determine whether you’ll be selected?
Make sure the solution you choose has enough data reporting built-in that you can make better, faster, and more effective decisions about the presentations and reels you’ve sent out.
It’s one thing to check the basic box of “So oh, could you use a Google Analytics code and put it on the web page where the video was shared?” But it’s another to be able answer questions around, for instance, how much media was viewed by your recipient. Was only a short clip viewed and then the window closed, or did the recipient stay engaged enough to view the entire reel? Was it shared with other people? In what time span was it viewed?
All of these types of insights can signal interest, consideration, and urgency of a decision—or it can indicate that your creative efforts should be spent on the next promising account. Find a solution that helps you make better, more profitable decisions.
Make Your Next Pitch A Fast One
The agency pitching process isn’t going away anytime soon. But with tools that let you quickly put your prospective clients’ vision front-and-center – using the beautiful work you’ve already created – you can get on the shortlist, and possibly even short-circuit the distance to a winning pitch.
Wiredrive Library puts your entire media vault at your fingertips. When all your assets are so readily available to your team, you can empower your stakeholders, sales and marketing teams to easily create and send video reels and multimedia presentations of finished work, to help present your work effectively – and win more pitches with less pain.
Want To Learn More?
Discover why agencies and commercial production companies have found that Wiredrive by EditShare makes a difference in their pitching workflows.
Check out this case study to find out how Australia-based video agency New Mac became more efficient at responding to business opportunities, and improved how they present themselves in those opportunities.
EditShare’s video workflow and storage solutions power the biggest names in entertainment and advertising, helping them securely manage, present, and collaborate on their highest-value projects. To learn more about how EditShare can help your video production team, contact us today.
Remote production has become an attractive proposition, with multiple benefits. The challenge, though, is to provide sufficient connectivity to allow the production and post production teams access to content in a timely manner.
In this short blog piece, EditShare’s CTO, Stephen Tallamy, runs through some of his top tips for making remote editing more productive.
1 – Get Organized Remotely
In a remote editing set-up, the editing software is on your computer but the raw footage is on a server at a remote location. It might be the broadcaster or production company’s headquarters, in the cloud, or if you’re involved in fast turnaround editing it might still be at the location of the shoot.
To minimize the download time, I recommend your first task is to organize the clips and decide what you need directly on the server. To make this easy you’ll ideally use a web-based tool to start building up your project structure. EditShare’s award-winning FLOW software has built-in web tools that allow you to easily drag and drop material into bins, create sub-clips and even create a rough timeline and cuts-only edit before you start downloading.
This will have two benefits. First, you get your material and can start working faster. Second, you have fewer clips to download to your computer, so you can be more productive. Especially if you already have a rough timeline mapped out.
Organize your footage using AirFLOW to save time in the edit.
2 – Embrace the Proxy
What are proxies? They are reduced resolution versions of clips, which make it easier for the editing software to run seamlessly on your computer. We all use them every single day, without even thinking about it. It’s what we generally look at when we are in the edit software – a scaled rendering of the original media.
Unless you’re working on the finest details of the image, you don’t need to worry about the full resolution versions.
If you do have full resolution content available in your editor, then don’t forget that Premiere Pro allows you to toggle between looking at the proxy and the full resolution with a single click of the mouse. If the toggle proxy button is not there, below the source or the program monitors, then click on the + button to reveal it. Once you have the toggle control, you can switch instantly into full resolution to check a detail, then back to the proxy for smooth playback.
Add the Toggle Proxies button to your Button Editor to switch between proxies and original media.
3 – Centralize the Proxy Creation
This is the logical extension of tips 1 and 2. In standalone editing, you import the full resolution material and your software creates the proxies. This takes time and processing power.
But if you organize your material in advance on the server, you only need to download the proxies, saving even more bandwidth and download time.
FLOW actually has two types of proxies. You can determine whether you want one or both, and set parameters, on a project by project basis.
The first is what we call the “streaming proxy”, which is an MPEG-4 file designed to be lightweight for internet delivery. It can start with a 4K or 8K file and still deliver a compact proxy.
The second is an “editing proxy”, which is in H.264 or ProRes, and supports multiple audio tracks, in a wrapper recommended by Adobe for seamless use of the proxy toggle feature. But while it is designed for maximum flexibility in editing, you can work perfectly well with streaming proxies if you have a simple audio layout in your original media.
Set your proxy format once and automatically create both streaming and edit proxies.
4 – Plug In To Adobe® Premiere® Pro
Working in a web tool can be great during the organization stage, when it gets down to the edit you really want all your focus on the job in hand. You want to stay inside your editing software.
One of the great benefits of using Premiere Pro is that Adobe actively encourages open interfaces, which in turn means that developers like EditShare can provide very tight integration. We’ve put a FLOW panel into Premiere Pro, so all the things I have talked about, like organization in advance and selecting what proxy to use, can be done within the familiar user interface.
The EditShare panel also allows you to send your work in progress, as a proxy, to a producer, who can make comments tagged to markers in the timeline. It’s a fast and seamless way to work towards approval.
Use the FLOW panel to select media, import markers, rough cuts and publish for review
Finally, that same panel gives you relinks to the original footage, should you need it, which leads naturally to…
5 – Finishing the Job
At the end of the project you need to conform it: finalize the edit with all its transitions and effects using the full resolution originals, and output to the final format.
If it’s a prestige project, the editor will want to check the final output. So, you relink to the original footage and download only the parts of the project you need for the edit.
But if speed is of the essence, then you upload the EDL to a remote renderer or Adobe Media Encoder hosted on the server. You upload a very lightweight file, and the heavyweight processing power of the server speeds the rendering. This is ideal, for example for sports highlights packages.
These are just a few thoughts on how remote editing can be smooth, seamless and productive. For a glimpse of how it works in practice, you can watch our short YouTube video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DahAtBLMZbg
