Streamline Your Production Post Strike: 4) Getting The Right People In The Room For Review

In this blog series Sohonet looks at the 5 ways you can cut costs and save time as productions recover post-strike. In this penultimate post, we turn our attention to the critical task of getting the right people together for review-and-approve discussions and the best remote video collaboration tools for the job.

The challenge 

No one in our industry works in a vacuum – there’s a huge number of players involved in conjuring the magic that ends up on our screens. Post-production is a crucial time for collaboration: reviewing cuts and taking notes from the right creatives and execs at the right time is critical. 

Being able to iterate quickly, through immediate communication, reaction and response, enhances your ability to be creative and produce high-quality content. The serial workflow through the editing, VFX, sound and colour suites is something you can’t 

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"Collaboration in post is key; as soon as there is a cut of a film, then that’s when everyone starts to have an opinion”. Paul Webster, Producer

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change. But within each phase, there are delays you can avoid. Consider the time and cost of getting key stakeholders to fly into a facility for a review session. The hours lost each time an editor or artist has to upload a (huge) file for review.

And each time the director or a studio exec has to download it, review it, add notes, upload it again. And on it goes, all the way through post. 

The Fix:

For successful review-and-approve discussions (i.e. ‘make the sky angry’, ‘smooth the scene transition’) you need real-time remote solutions that recreate that over-the-shoulder collaborative experience. Low latency is key to this. When streams lag even a little, picture and sound review sessions will be confusing and slow. Badly out-of-sync sessions are a complete waste of everyone’s time. True ‘real-time’ review tools allow creatives to look at the same frame at the same time and don’t require you to upload content before reviewing - which constrains creativity. 

Of course - there will be times when schedules just don’t  work or 4/5 can make it for a review session. In these instances, you want to have an easy-to-use, secure offline viewing platform so your collaborators can review the cut in their own time. 

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“Budgets have got smaller, schedules have got tighter, and at the same time there’s been a trend to have more and more people in the room for reviews. And more perspectives naturally beget more discussion and require more time.” Karol Urban, Sound Editor

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Tech Tip 

ClearView Flex provides creative teams with a user-friendly tool to stream live, encrypted video & audio with sub-100ms of latency, enabling everyone to collaborate from wherever they are, watching the same screen, seeing the same footage, and listening to the same rich audio output. Ideal for editorial and audio reviews, VFX team reviews and “light” colour review.

Where image quality and colour fidelity are vital (for remote colour grading or VFX reviews) ClearView Pivot offers HDR reviews in 4K at full-colour quality over our uncontended private Media Network so nothing gets lost in translation

And with ClearView Rush - you can easily distribute cuts and have collaborators review progress, add notes and mark-up assets whenever, wherever, without having to coordinate diaries. 

Discuss your specific workflow and requirements with one of our experts >