Multi-Site Creative Teams | Managing Hybrid Teams

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This episode is brought to you by Ros Video from video switchers, graphics and routing. Whether sdi, IP or even in the cloud, ROS makes live production easy. Trusted everywhere from the biggest sports stadiums to city council meetings, newsrooms and more. Are you ready to upgrade your workflow? Kiecode Media offers the best Ros video pricing and a free consultation so you get the right products the first time. Trust the experts at Kie Code Media and book today at kiecodemedia.com. [00:00:33] Speaker B: Have you ever watched a production and thought wow. [00:00:35] Speaker A: That lighting is perfect. But then the host stares into the void like they forgot how to read. [00:00:41] Speaker B: Yeah, that's because they didn't use icann. [00:00:43] Speaker A: See, ICANN makes top tier studio lighting. [00:00:46] Speaker B: Prompters and gear that keep productions looking and running smooth. [00:00:50] Speaker A: So whether you need buttery soft LED lights or rock solid teleprompter so you. [00:00:55] Speaker B: Don'T forget your lines, or just pro. [00:00:57] Speaker A: Level gear that won't let you down, Ikann has you covered. [00:01:01] Speaker B: So if you want your production to. [00:01:02] Speaker A: Look like a million bucks without spending a million bucks, check out icann because great lighting and a good prompter can make anyone look like a pro. [00:01:16] Speaker C: Three, two, Red one, Crystal. [00:01:21] Speaker B: One and let's face it, creative teams are much more distributed than ever before. Editors are in different cities, freelancers are working from various types of laptops, reviewers spread time across departments and time zones. And yet many creative systems are still designed like everyone still sits in the same building. Folks, your disconnect is starting to show. Media gets duplicated, reviews slow down, security. [00:01:48] Speaker A: Becomes harder and harder to manage, and. [00:01:50] Speaker B: As content volume grows, teams spend more time fighting workflows than just creating. And that's why I'm absolutely thrilled that today we're doing this episode. Because today on broadcast to post, we're breaking down what it actually takes to support multi site creative teams without sacrificing too much speed, quality or control. We'll start with our usual key considerations segment which is focused on the must have technology stack for collaborative editing and creative work across multiple locations. We'll also cover shared storage, asset management, review and approve file streaming and the tools that teams rely on to scale without too much chaos. Because where's the fun without a little bit of chaos? We'll then hear from two guests working at very different ends of the creative spectrum. First we'll have Danielle destefano, CTO at ITV America, the producers of Love island usa, and she'll share how large scale television productions like Love island move massive amounts of footage from remote shoots into centralized post environments where their speed is absolutely insane due to the quick turnaround of the show. And we'll have our favorite Matt Stamos from Keycode Media who'll bring us his corporate perspective, drawing from his work with distributive creative and marketing teams using hybrid and cloud workflows to support multiple departments, freelancers and product lines. If you're creative in a multi site team or your team supports content creation across more than just one location, then this episode is for you. When creative teams go multi site, the biggest mistake is building your tech stack like a junk drawer. A shared drive here, a review tool there, a cloud subscription added at 11:47pm when something breaks. See, high performing teams don't think in tools, they think in layers and each layer has a job. Together they form a system that lets people work from anywhere without turning production into a slow motion incident report. Let's walk through the core technology layers that multi site creative teams actually need with real world examples of how teams are doing this right now. First, shared storage is the backbone and it's non negotiable. If your media isn't centralized, nothing else works reliably because the moment storage is kinda shared you get editors working from copies, versions drifting like continents, and storage costs quietly multiplying like rabbits. For many professional teams, the backbone is still high performance shared storage. Because video workflows aren't impressed by wishful thinking. Solutions like editshare and SNS are common because they're built for multi user editorial and high bandwidth video on prem multi location hybrid. The deployment varies but the standard doesn't. One source of truth, multiple editors, same pool of storage and performance you can count on. Shared storage isn't glamorous, but believe you me, and that's fine. Foundations aren't supposed to be glamorous, they're supposed to not move. Now, once everything lives in one place, the next problem is nobody can find anything. And that's where we find asset management. Media asset management. Find it, reuse it, stop remaking it. Here's the trap. Centralizing media doesn't automatically make it usable. As libraries grow, teams hit the point where they're recreating content because they can't locate what already exists. That's not creativity, that's amnesia with a budget. This is where Media Asset Management, or as we call it mam, earns its keep. Tools like Iconic IPV and EMAM put a searchable metadata driven layer on top of storage so editors, producers and marketers can search across years of content they can preview without downloading the huge file and reuse footage across regions and campaigns. And once you enrich your content with AI searches, there's no getting away from the fact that you need a way to sift through this ginormous amount of search results. For multi site teams MAM isn't a nice to have. It's how you keep the org from becoming a content factory that forgets it already built the product. Now that people can find the media, we need them to approve that media without generating 12 exports to get just one comment. Which brings us to Review and approve Kill the export spiral so we have a rule Review should happen in the workflow, not around it. In distributed environments, review often becomes the bottleneck because the process is usually export early, send links in email, chat or some other instant messaging service, wait and collect feedback in five different formats and the editor becomes the human comment translator. Modern review tools fix this by keeping review inside the System. Platforms like EditShare, Flow with MediaSilo and iconic Oripv can handle frame accurate commenting, version tracking and approvals without forcing editors into an endless export duty. The payoff is pretty simple centralized feedback, faster feedback loops, fewer misunderstandings, and much fewer I thought you meant the other version disasters. Great, you now can review cleanly. But if your metadata is manual you, you're about to start drowning as your volume scales because AI metadata helps you scale without hiring a tagging army. Quick reality check. Manual metadata doesn't scale, it just fails slowly until it fails loudly. AI driven metadata is where teams stop treating large libraries like your kitchen junk drawer and start treating them like inventory. With solutions like Datacore or Pixit Media's AI and Scala Logic's Carol1, you can automatically transcribe dialogue or speech to text as we call it, identify faces, objects, scenes and sentiments, generate tags and descriptions for legacy mams, and improve your search beyond keywords by using subjective semantic understanding. For multisite teams. This matters because it reduces reliance on tribal knowledge while at the same time improving the discovery of unknown moments in your assets. Okay, people can now find content. Now the question becomes how do they work with it from anywhere without dragging full res files across the Internet? That's where file streaming comes into place. They allow you to edit from anywhere without downloading the universe. Another non negotiable remote editing shouldn't require moving petabytes like it's 2009. Not every editor needs direct access to on prem storage or remote workstation. File streaming changes the model. You work locally, but only pull down what you need. Platforms like Lucid link or suite studios or even fast cache from Facilis allows editors to work on less expensive computers, stream only the required media and avoid downloading full res everything just in case. This is especially effective for freelancers and remote contributors. You get flexibility without turning collaboration into a logistics problem. And since freelancers aren't going away, you need a strategy that doesn't collapse every time you onboard a new one. Which brings us to our next point. Freelancer laptops standardize or suffer another rule for you. Freelancers are not a temporary exception, they're part of the operating model. So stop onboarding freelancers like it's a one off miracle each time. Multi site teams that scale cleanly typically standardize laptop based editing with with a clear plan, defined hardware and software profiles, secure access and that includes access to shared storage, streaming or remote tools, and controlled permissions and limited local storage however you connect them, Streaming remote access, hybrid workflows the point is consistency. Consistency keeps support manageable and security intact. Chaos is expensive, it just invoices you later. Now let's zoom out a little bit. Once you have lots of people working in lots of places, the real risk becomes coordination, not capability. That brings us to project orchestration so you can control the chaos at scale. Here's the common as teams grow, the work doesn't fail because editors can't edit. It fails because projects get messy, folder. [00:10:52] Speaker A: Structures drift, permissions get really weird, people. [00:10:55] Speaker B: Build their own system that works for them, and suddenly your pipeline is held together by hope and slack messages. In Adobe heavy environments, for example, tools like teams or Productions or group based project preferences can get you started. Adding solutions like Projective Strawberry can also help large teams stay organized by standardizing project structures, managing permissions and workflows, and integrating directly into Adobe Creative cloud apps. This orchestration layer reduces errors and gives leadership visibility across dozens of projects and contributors, which is exactly what multi site operations need once the headcount goes up and the tolerance for surprises goes down. Multi site creative teams aren't a future trend. They're the default now. The teams that win don't buy more tools to add complexity. They invest in the right foundation to remove friction. And that's the real stack. A layered system that lets creative teams collaborate, scale and deliver from anywhere without production turning into a daily scavenger hunt. Today we're joined by two guests who. [00:12:17] Speaker A: Work with multi site creative teams, but. [00:12:19] Speaker B: At very different scales. [00:12:21] Speaker A: First we have Danielle DiStefano and she's. [00:12:24] Speaker B: The CTO at ITV where she oversees. [00:12:26] Speaker A: The technology behind large scale television production and Post production, including reality programming like Love Island. Her team's moved massive volumes of footage from remote production locations and into centralized post environments where speed and reliability are critical. And we're also joined by our very. [00:12:43] Speaker B: Own Matt Stamos from Key Code Media. And Matt here works at the corporate. [00:12:47] Speaker A: Creative and marketing teams that are scaling content production across multiple locations, departments and product lines. [00:12:54] Speaker B: He helps design hybrid workflows that support. [00:12:56] Speaker A: Asset management, remote collaboration and large freelance teams. Together, these two bring a broadcast and corporate perspective on what it takes to run multi site creative teams successfully. Thank you both for being with us here today. [00:13:11] Speaker C: Hi Michael. Thank you. [00:13:14] Speaker A: So let's start with what multisite really means today. [00:13:17] Speaker B: So Danielle, we'll start with you. [00:13:19] Speaker A: When people hear multisite creative teams, they often think remote work right in your world. What does multi site actually mean from a production as well as post production perspective? [00:13:31] Speaker C: There are different ways that we look at multisite productions. There's eng field shooting and getting media back into post. Obviously in this post Covid world, everyone is pretty much remote for the most part. And so no matter where we're shooting, we're having the media come back and everyone is remote that's accessing it. And then we also have global productions that we do such as Love island where we film in Fiji, but we edit on location there. And then we've also shot and edited in other countries and had the media come back and edit all over the world. So you name it, we've tried it at least and we're attempting to do it because everything now just needs to be flexible. [00:14:20] Speaker A: And Matt, when corporate teams come to you and they say, look Matt, we're now multi site, what's usually happening behind the scenes that's kind of forced that shift? [00:14:30] Speaker D: It's similar to what Danielle's talking about. It's different, different requirements for different use cases. So they may be shooting remotely or using external third party production companies or utilizing freelancers or they just straight up have different creative offices throughout the world. So it really kind of depends on the customer what their use cases are. But we see a lot of what like for example Danielle is saying where it's the use cases change based on the type of creative work, whether that's sort of unscripted versus scripted versus sports versus marketing or sales enablement material. So it definitely changes on the type of content and the type of organization. [00:15:11] Speaker B: Thank you, thank you for breaking that. [00:15:12] Speaker A: Down from both of you. If we shift gears a little bit and we talk about speed as kind of the design constraint, when we're developing these workflows, Danielle Speed obviously is everything in reality television from camera to editor to delivery. What does speed actually look like in practice for a show like Love Island? [00:15:32] Speaker C: Well, for us I think it starts with finding the right partners. I mean, ultimately you need people that are going to understand that you are on call 24 7. There is media coming in 24 7. We never stop filming and we have some really great partners that we work with on site in Fiji and all over the world that help us put all of the puzzle pieces together. And they have to work together because ultimately we need to make sure that if there is a problem along the chain of events that we can solve it very quickly. So to me, Speed is not only obviously it costs money and you need to have the right connectivity, but you really have to have the right partners. [00:16:16] Speaker A: I'd like to pull on that thread a little bit. Aside from just partners, what technical or workflow decisions have the biggest impact on how quickly footage gets from a remote shoot like Fiji into the hands of the post team? [00:16:32] Speaker C: I mean really it comes down to whether we're shooting HD or uhd. That's the big difference there. You know, whether it's SDR or HDR does not really matter in terms of offline editorial. But if you're talking about shooting 247 and you know, for Love Island, I think there's like 80 or 90 cameras, but you're only recording 16 cameras at a time and then you have a bunch of ENG cameras. So maybe you're bringing in 20, 25 cameras. HD to UHD. That's a huge jump in terms of footage. So for that show, it's hd. We've talked about and looked at doing a show of that scale in UHD and it is a much bigger undertaking due to the size and the volume. [00:17:15] Speaker B: And just for a little bit more information. [00:17:18] Speaker A: And proxies aren't something that can kind of work around that by generating low res but high resolution or high raster, large raster for proxies. Is that something that can't adapt in an environment like that? [00:17:32] Speaker C: Yeah, that's actually true. Is basically if you had longer production cycles or post production cycles, yes, we would definitely be working in an HD proxy. But for a show like Love island, it's quick turn and so you are editing within 16 to 18 hours and airing 24 hours later. There's no time for that. It doesn't make sense. So everything on site is connected via 10Gig and the media all comes in on site. Even when they go out and do remote like dates on a boat or a yacht. That stuff all comes back on site and gets processed with a post vendor. That helps us make Avid media straight from the cards and from the robocams coming in from the feeds coming in. Now if the show had more lead time and a normal production schedule. Yes, that's exactly it. We would make HD proxies work in hd. We've actually started transitioning a bit from Avid to Premiere that can handle a bit more of like the HD workflow. And we are still doing primarily Avid for our big shows, but like not for Love Island. Love Island's Avid, but for some other smaller shows where we just need to get footage in fast from the field. [00:18:38] Speaker A: Thank you for that extra information. And Matt, if we pivot to kind of corporate environments, speed is often framed a little bit differently. [00:18:46] Speaker B: So what does speed mean for the. [00:18:48] Speaker A: Teams you work with and where do they usually lose the most time? [00:18:53] Speaker D: Yeah, speed is interesting. Sometimes that's what I sort of refer to. There's sort of live where you just go into air. But then when there's a post workflow involved, it's sort of. There's two speed bumps. It's sort of camera to timeline and then timeline to distribution or platform error. Right. So there's different little sort of speed bumps. We run into a similar scenario where if there's a short turnaround, there isn't really time for proxies. But if there is a longer turnaround, those proxies are really useful especially for review and approval. And then it also depends on the sort of finishing stage. If you get into more theatrical releases and higher end film production, there tends to be more emphasis on the color, the audio sweetening. And so there's a little bit there. Sometimes there's a bump in there. But sort of traditional corporate work we just sort of see that timeline bump and then that, that last sort of final approval bump before it goes to its. It's like I sometimes like to say their final eyeballs. Right. Where before it goes and sees public. [00:19:56] Speaker B: Eyeballs, let's move a little bit towards. [00:20:00] Speaker A: The organizational part of media, which I know that's not why people get up in the morning, but it's a very important process, especially when you're working with immense amount of data back catalogs and as you mentioned, working with a multitude of cameras that are running almost 24 7. So Danielle, with multi camera shoots and constant coverage, how critical is having a clear source of truth for media in a multi site environment like yours? [00:20:29] Speaker C: It is the most important thing, I think, no matter what, but when you have a smaller team or you're doing like a one off project with one editor, one producer, you can be disorganized if you want to be. But when you're dealing with a team of 80, 90, 100 people accessing the same footage and needing it immediately. I've worked at the Olympics for NBC for many years and Love island is like the reality TV, the Olympics of reality TV. It is like there is just crews working 24, seven shifts. Everyone needs the same media, the social team needs the media. So we're pretty locked down with our organization. And I think the key to that is just having really, really good AES that understand that their job is to keep everything else moving and to like support producers, editors, social, whoever needs access to that footage. [00:21:19] Speaker A: And is that typically done via an asset management system or because of the tight turnaround? Are we looking at folder structure, file structure, naming conventions and things of that nature? [00:21:30] Speaker C: Yeah, just basically we used to use an asset management system and we moved away from it and we work with a vendor now who helps us make the Avid media and we just organize it in a way again, it's all full res. We have a deletion kind of process where we keep a near line, two near line copies, and then we are deleting the Avid media after X number of days if we don't need it and we consolidate. So there's like a full media management ecosystem within the ecosystem and we have dedicated assistant editor as their job is to make sure that that keeps moving along and then that we have what we need when we need to leave the island. Because inevitably we end up needing to cut a spinoff show or a promo or you know, fix an evergreen master or something. So a lot happens in Fiji and then we have to be able to leave the island with all the right media in the right places and check it before we leave. [00:22:27] Speaker A: Now Matt, on kind of your side of the house, obviously you'd see a lot of duplication and version confusions with corporate teams. Why does that happen so often once teams go multisite? [00:22:39] Speaker D: Well, I think that a lot of times it goes back to access to the high res. So unless they're doing a remote conform and they've got remote editors, say in New York and la, whoever's conforming is going to have to have access to that high res. I always sort of joke, it's like duplicates are okay as long as they're intentional, right? So if you know you have duplicates or you created them for a reason and then you have the mechanism to delete them and make sure that you keep an appropriate copy on your appropriate storage. It's fine. But a lot of times it boils down to access to hires and where conform happens. I do see that, and I kind of want to touch on this, that the file and folder structure is really important. But what we're finding is when people do have the luxury of the time and they can deploy a MAM system, a properly deployed MAM system lets customers sort of rely less on that file and folder structure. It's no less important for keeping your storage organized, but for searching and collaboration and the ability to make collections or projects more portable. A MAM does really do a great job of letting you think beyond just a file and folder and especially with the AI tools available, be able to think in things in a semantic or federated way. But again, on short turnaround productions, that's a luxury that is just not available. [00:24:02] Speaker A: So let me follow up on that. Matt, what does a real source of truth look like in practice and what are some of the patterns that pretend to solve it but don't actually scale aside from the folder and file structure? [00:24:17] Speaker D: Well, in practice it looks like a database full of metadata and then a file structure that has the original files. There are systems where that stuff all tries to do it in one place. But what we find to be really helpful is say for example, having a MAM database with rich metadata pointing to a rich file system that could be tiered from S3 and LTO to a nearline to an online so that there's sort of accurate representation of where the original back to that high res question. There's an accurate representation of access to the high resolution so that I can access the appropriate high res for my role. Say, for example, that stuff's been archived off the LTO and wiped off of primary storage. I may not want to bring it back from LTO if I can bring it back from a tier two or a nearline. If it's not on nearline and not on, you know, and it's only living on an S3 bucket or an LTO tape, you want to be able to make good decisions about that. I always sort of joke the pain of archiving is not archiving, it's restoring. You want to be able to make that process as quick and cost effective, especially in the cloud world. You want to make that as quick and as cost effective as possible. [00:25:27] Speaker A: That brings up a really good point. It takes us to our Next topic is centralized infrastructure for distributed teams. So, Danielle, ITV centralized post production into a new headquarters in Connecticut. What problem were you ultimately trying to solve by consolidating finishing, storage and post infrastructure into one location? [00:25:47] Speaker C: Well, we actually have two main locations. So Connecticut is our headquarters and Los Angeles is our other main location. They're connected through an npls. So essentially when we moved from New York City to Connecticut, we moved all of our facilities to Connecticut. And within that facility we are able to do online, offline, online, we've Adobe Atmos Room, we're able to do everything all under one roof and we are able to keep it within our firewall. So from a content security standpoint, when you're working with streamers, like everything is about content security. When you're working on competition series, whether that's Hell's Kitchen or Love island or any of the competition series that we work on, we want to make sure alone, we want to make sure that we have our content secured behind our firewall. So we're essentially keeping everything in one of our two hubs and we have a secure transport between the two. And that's really the way that we've been able to hire an executive producer in LA and an editor in New Jersey. And they basically will pop into one of our facilities and ride across the NPLs and be able to access the media in one of the two locations. [00:26:57] Speaker A: Outstanding. Thank you for digging into that a little bit. [00:27:01] Speaker B: Matt. [00:27:01] Speaker A: Corporate teams often don't build facilities at the same scale, right? So how do they achieve the similar outcomes using hybrid or cloud enable approaches? [00:27:11] Speaker D: Yeah, we've seen quite a few folks using tools like suite studio and LucidLink for things like that. We do see people remote in with, you know, the Teradicis, if you will, and jump desktops of the world. So there are, there are sort of multiple ways to do that. Typically, corporate networks are not big fans of having big media flowing over their, their house networks. That does happen. But generally speaking, we found that sort of those block forwarding tools like suite and LucidLink are really, really popular in the corporate crowd. They're really particularly well adapted freelancers as well. But it does open different sort of security protocols, it does make permissioning around those file structures different. And you do find yourself potentially duplicating files onto those storage devices for short term and managing the flow of data, say on and off primary tiers onto those sort of cache or block forwarding tools is really important. And that's where asset management, for example, can help automate that process. So that stuff say after 90 days gets deleted or users after they have completed their work if their freelancers get removed from the distribution list. So we see that pretty common. But again, like I said, it depends on the organization. Some people have robust, some companies have really robust networks and being able to remote into just a machine remotely and use a PC over IP tools is really effective. But we're seeing a kind of a mix depending on the type of work too. There's definitely different levels of sort of production requirements and people finishing in 8k or higher or in HDR. Even those PC over IP tools aren't super great. So it depends on the workflow. [00:29:00] Speaker A: I'm glad you mentioned freelancers and folks remoting in because I want to jump into talking about remote editing and being able to scale with freelancers. So Danielle, even with a centralized headquarters, remote editing is still part of the workflow I'd imagine. What makes remote editing successful at scale versus frustrating for your teams? [00:29:21] Speaker C: For us again it's first and foremost security. So we have VPNs single sign on, you know, two factor authentication. People have to remote into our system and I think we were doing remote editing before COVID just to try it out and obviously we thought we'd all be on a beach somewhere but that didn't work out. So ultimately when Covid happened we just scaled up with HPRGS at the time. We've now moved to the HP anywhere software and that has been really reliable and really, really great. And then we've basically with that we found that to be the most reliable program for people to remote in. And now we can like monitor their connectivity better and just make sure that it's a positive experience for everyone. We have a team that onboards everyone individually because every single person's home setup is different. That has been the major shift is that one to one care that we need to do and filling in like we'll send out a Google form or a jot form and say tell us what your home Internet is like and what are you using, how many monitors, what's your display size? Because we've now over the last few years, five years I guess have figured out that all these little things matter. So for us it's just kind of paying attention to that stuff and figuring out, you know, what works, what doesn't work and just listening to the people at home and like usually if there's a problem that persists, it is a problem. But again it can also be someone's home Internet. So it's tricky to navigate. [00:30:56] Speaker A: Matt, freelancers are a major factor in a lot of the corporate creative teams that you work with. What kind of separates organizations that scale freelancers smoothly from those that kind of struggle constantly? What kinds of things are they doing that's different? [00:31:10] Speaker D: I think, Danielle, you sort of touched on it. It really is about security, right? So it depends on the type of customer. But I have customer with 490 creative users across two dozen countries, and most of them are freelancers. So there's a tremendous amount of effort into orchestrating the single sign on, orchestrating where projects live and how those projects are accessed and what tools they're accessed with. So it definitely depends. But we're seeing an increased sort of focus, if you will, on security, because people realize that this content is valuable and this content is often created before products are seen, whether that product be the actual content itself or whether that content is about a product that's soon to come out. So there's a lot of scrutiny and security over the content and there's a lot of tools to do that, but it takes an investment, not just in time, but in technology. [00:32:13] Speaker A: And that kind of takes us to the next segment where we talk about review and approval and bottlenecks. There's a lot of different flavors, a lot of different ways to do review and approve. And I'm curious, Danielle, even when editing is moving quickly, which it obviously is with some of the projects you're working on, where do you most often see workflows slow down? In distributed teams, when it comes to review and approval workflows. [00:32:38] Speaker C: I think the big thing is communication. And we realized that in Covid, and we did Love Island Season 2 was the peak of COVID and we couldn't even be in the same room as people we needed to collaborate with. And that was a real challenge. And I think it comes down to communication. We have kind of a set, you know, group of channels that we communicate, whether that's Slack or WhatsApp or Google Chat, depending on the show. And we just set that up ahead of time and we kind of hold people to that communication because ultimately, whether that's support or, you know, something's running late or the shoot's going long and we need to get that footage in, or we need to rush a card in or the bag audio is not ready yet. You know, whatever that is, that comes down to communication. So to me, when things start to go haywire or. Or slow down, it's because people haven't communicated. I don't know if that's the. That's what you're looking for there. It's not a very technical answer, but the humans are definitely a big part of this and have to make it work. And I think getting people to buy into the remote workflow, I think we've, we've seen it a lot over the last few years with people being able to work at home and have dinner with their families and be able to edit. But it's like, you know, you have to have that at every level because if at the top level of your production, people aren't communicating and they don't know how to work with a distributed team, it all starts to fall apart at that point. [00:34:09] Speaker A: Matt, from a systems perspective, what is the biggest improvement corporate teams can make to speed up the review and approve process across multiple locations as well as departments? [00:34:19] Speaker D: Yeah, using formal tools. So one of the common things we see is people do link sharing and then they'll send an email. So then the creative needs to look at the link. Okay, this is what they saw. Okay, let me go look at the email. And suddenly the information they need to make creative decisions is in two or three places. When you use more formal review and approval tools, the comments can be right in there. They can just type right in there. Some of them even have telestrators and things right in there so they could circle and draw on the content. So to me, it's really sort of streamline that process. It also leaves a crumb trail. So these asset management tools will show you, give you a copy of every link you've ever shared, and then you can see every person that's ever downloaded or looked at everything that sort of crumb trail to the usage of those share links, who's downloaded it, who's commented, who they can even comment on. In time, we can create markers. So to me, not only does that sort of streamline the communication and keep that in the same sort of sandbox, but it also creates a crumb trail back to the permissioning. Right. So suddenly you have the ability to have an audit trail, if you will, of the content and see how it's been used and who's been accessing it. [00:35:33] Speaker A: A discussion I have quite a bit with clients is when should review and approve be synchronous vs asynchronous? When is review and approved done in real time, where everyone's on the same call looking at the same video versus the kind of push, pull, asynchronous methodology of sending it to someone. They watch it at their leisure or in their time zone and then leave the notes and then the editor has to then translate those notes. [00:35:56] Speaker B: So, Danielle, if we could start with you. [00:35:57] Speaker A: Where do you kind of draw the line as to what needs to be synchronous and what needs to be asynchronous for review and approve? [00:36:03] Speaker C: It depends on the production. And ultimately there are pros and cons to both. [00:36:07] Speaker B: Right. [00:36:07] Speaker C: We do find that when it's asynchronous, everything takes longer and you're getting pages of notes and, you know, something as simple, especially in a color. Correct. If you're sending, you know, a link out and make this a little more green or a little less green, it subjective. Right. And so if you're in the session and you can show the producer or the EP what it looks like, it goes a lot smoother. So we do use, you know, tools like clearview and some other tools to, to do the synchronous screenings for a show like Love island, we have to do that like in real time because of editing time and how that show works. But there are pros and cons to both. And I think that depending on the show, we will usually the EP or the network will guide us in terms of how we want to go about that. And then we have a variety of tools, whether that is again, Clearview, Evercast, SRT tools built in, Freem, IO, media, silo, you name it, Pix, whatever it is. Because we are, again, we're providing content to several different networks. So depending on their security provisions and needs, we may have to do it differently. [00:37:18] Speaker B: And Matt, what mistakes are you seeing. [00:37:20] Speaker A: Organizations make consistently when they're designing hybrid or multi site creative workflows? [00:37:26] Speaker D: I think they're underestimating a few things, right. They're underestimating the power of metadata. And I joke at this, but it is really true. There's kind of two kinds of metadata. There's fact and fiction. And the fact one is pretty easy, that's the technical metadata. But the fiction one is actually really important. It's like people's. If a good, bad or ugly is what I like to say is a piece of content good, bad or ugly. And sometimes that's a value judgment or a taste, but that's really, really important. And I think creatives are often, maybe forget that they're often, they're not valued, but they're often paid maybe for their taste. So good creatives bring that taste every day. And their taste is really important to their job. They can take a pile of content, make a bunch of choices about what's good, bad and ugly. And generate content that meets the mark, achieves the goals or is creative or funny or engaging. So I think people underestimate that. They underestimate the power of metadata and the value that human beings bring. And that value oftentimes is not just technical chops, but that creative sort of, that ability to define that fiction and define what good content looks like. To take a bunch of raw content, jump it on the timeline and make something meaningful, tell a story right is really a valuable asset and one I think is often underestimated or underappreciated sometimes in the corporate market. [00:38:59] Speaker B: Matt, if you're looking ahead, what technology. [00:39:01] Speaker A: Or trends should creative leaders be paying closer attention to if they want their multi site creative teams to scale without burning out? [00:39:10] Speaker D: Gosh. Networking, right? Networking to me is really, really important. Understanding what networks are available to you and what they're capable of doing and I think that sort of leads into what Danielle was talking about is like what tools do people use to communicate? That's going to be huge. And it's interesting, I actually often ask customers, well, how do you prefer to communicate? Would you rather be on slack? Would you rather be on teams? You want to do this via email? We'll do smoke signal, carrier pigeon, whatever it takes, right? So I think how you communicate and what those networks look like is really important. [00:39:46] Speaker A: And Danielle asks the same question of you. What kind of technology or trend should creative leaders be paying closer attention to if they want their multi site teams to scale out again without being burnt out? [00:39:58] Speaker C: I mean, I really think this is where we can lean into AI and help productivity and help burnout, Whether that is sifting through emails to find that little nugget that you had a conversation about two months ago and you can't remember all the way to like automating certain tasks that are just mundane tasks. And how do we take the time that we were spending doing those mundane tasks and putting that time and energy into the creative. And that's really, you know, that's our goal is how do we support that. And so to me, the productivity side of AI or the metadata and the tagging and the capabilities of being able to search and find. We have 25 seasons or 24 seasons of Hell's Kitchen. Going back and finding something that's easy to find now with a few clicks of a button is pretty amazing and saves a ton of time. But also it's like, now we can put that into what do we make of this now? And that's just one example. But I think a lot of people have massive libraries and a lot of content, a lot of information. And I think we're burned out by having to sift through all of that as humans, and it's coming at us in so many different ways. So how do we use AI and technology to help kind of cut out the noise and focus on the creative part of our brains? [00:41:20] Speaker A: Well, Matt and Danielle, thank you so much for being here and answering my questions. [00:41:31] Speaker B: Sam.