By Flora Muschamp, Head of Product Management
Our Product team is well versed in what it takes to collaborate remotely. For tech teams, the focus and concentration afforded by working from home, as opposed to a busy open plan office, are hugely beneficial and before COVID-19 the majority of our developers were working from home at least 80% of the time. As well as providing the time and space for concentrated programming, working from home can help provide more flexibility in schedules, less time wasted commuting and can lessen the chance of burn-out which is all too common an issue for tech companies.
For us building the ClearView suite of tools is all about offering the best of remote working to our customers in the creative spheres. Whilst creative work tends to be more inherently collaborative, this shouldn’t mean that in order to get content to our screens those involved should throw the concept of life/work balance out of the window. Too many valuable hours are lost to painful slow uploads to review platforms, travel time and miscommunication. Our goal is to give you that time back.
We launched ClearView Pivot in February of this year and whilst stories of a spreading virus were starting to hit our news cycles we had no idea then of what the impact would be to our industry. Clearview Flex was already receiving praise from our customers who loved that they didn’t have to traverse the 405 in LA or deal with the UK’s consistently inconsistent rail service to get to a review session by allowing streaming of up to 2K video straight from your edit suite or set to any device at any location. Pivot was created as a complimentary service with a higher-spec for 4K, HDR, 12-bit colour and 4:4:4 chroma sampling for projection quality review for VFX, Colour grading and finishing review.
Whilst the Pivot service is positioned as a predominantly facility-to-facility model, running between Sohonet Media Network connected sites, it also offers considerable time and cost savings to its users. Whether that’s a director who no longer has to travel to New York from LA for Post or a technical assistant who’s time was previously spent calling IT teams to change firewall rules when using less firewall-friendly, technically demanding alternative solutions.
Since Pivot’s launch 7 months ago, the requirement for remote collaboration has increased exponentially and we are seeing new use cases emerge which were not initially considered. Not only are people using the Pivot service across geographic regions, they now use it to maintain social distancing within the same building or studio lot. Flex is being used to limit the number of people needed on set as even key creatives are locked out under tight restrictions. Whilst, of course, we hope that the catalyst for this growth will diminish quickly we believe that the benefits of remote working will have been felt by all, and the trend itself is here to stay.
We’ve been working to make sure we are able to meet these new use cases head-on. This has meant sharpening our tools at both ends of the spectrum. We’re adding higher colour bit-depths and surround sound to Flex (10-bit colour and 5.1 sound beta trials are coming towards a close). For Pivot users, the request can be, “how do I get that level of quality for my VIP users now sheltering at home?” That’s where Pivot Lite comes in.
Today we announce the launch of Pivot Lite, an alternative receive-only hardware option for the Pivot service which is network agnostic and requires as little as 100 mbps of internet bandwidth making it suitable for the professional creative working from home. Pivot Lite offers the same 4K high dynamic range (HDR) with 12-bit colour depth and 4:4:4 chroma sampling for full-colour quality video streaming and ultra-low latency that you can expect when streaming to a standard Pivotbox. Pivot Lite will be available to all customers from the 17th September.
We have worked with the leading studios and content creators throughout the pandemic to ensure that it has been put through its paces in real-world settings and the colour technologies have been fully inspected and approved by experts across the industry.
Customers can continue to take advantage of our COVID-19 discount until September 30th. For more information on all our ClearView offerings see: https://www.sohonet.com/real-time-collaboration/
| 12 month+ pricing until September 30th | 12 month+ pricing from October 1st | |
| Pivotbox | $1,300 pm | $1600 pm |
| Pivotbox Lite | $975 pm | $1200 pm |
