By Randi Altman

While some in the industry were starting to dabble in aspects of remote workflows prior to March 2020, COVID made this way of working a necessity. As they say, adversity breeds innovation, and that has been true during the past year as technology companies and post houses stepped up in a big way, making sure the work continued uninterrupted.

While there have been many advances and reasons to celebrate — including saved commute time, more time with family and access to global talent — there are some pain points as well, with the majority of those we spoke to citing slow internet speeds, the need for face-to-face creative sessions and missing out on those “watercooler” meetups.

For this virtual roundtable, we reached out to a variety of users to talk about how they made the transition to remote. We also talked to manufacturers, which have either introduced or adjusted their technology to help post studios build robust production pipelines.

Goldcrest Post New York’s Domenic Rom

Have you been working remotely during the past year? 
Yes. When the pandemic hit, we moved quickly to establish remote options for all our services. We kept our people and clients safe.

How have your remote workflows evolved from March of last year until now?
When we implemented remote services last spring, it was a scramble. We patched systems and workflows together. As with everything in this business, we have continuously refined processes, systems, technologies and protocols since then. We worked out the kinks and improved efficiency, security and client experience.

What are some of the tools you’ve been using?
We use standard remote desktop options including Amulet Hotkey, Splashtop and AnyDesk to drive our in-house Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve, Autodesk Flame and Avid Media Composer. ClearView Flex, T-VIPS and other HD video streaming tools let us work in 4K and HDR and facilitate the secure streaming of content directly to mobile devices.

Have artists been dialing into your servers or working locally?
All source material is kept in-house. Our artists access it through a secure connection. Security is paramount to everything we do, so under no circumstances do we allow client media out of house. We keep it safe behind our firewall.

What are some pain points of working this way?  
Remote work is heavily dependent on internet connection speeds, both at the facility and at the access point. We immediately upgraded internet speed and bandwidth at our facility and for most employees. Having clients and artists working from separate locations inevitably adds time to the process and results in some loss of personal connection. There is lag time between thought and execution. Internet connections go down, dogs bark, cats walk in front of cameras, babies cry.

What about the positives?
The most positive thing is that we’ve learned we can do it well. We kept our business going and kept everyone safe and sound in their homes. One of our greatest fears was having COVID spread in the facility, but we refused to let that happen. Remote workflows are now in place, they work well and, I believe, they are here to stay.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future? 
Remote work has come a long way over the past year. It had to because it was necessary. Even as people return to our facility, some work will remain remote because it is now practical, reliable, safe and convenient. It’s a viable option that many of our clients will choose.

Cinnafilm’s Ernie Sanchez

Which of your products are people using for remote workflows?
People are using our flagship product, PixelStrings. It’s a flexible and scalable SaaS that encompasses Cinnafilm’s and our partners’ audio processing solutions (including Tachyon and Dark Energy). PixelStrings provides enterprise-grade standards conversions within realtime transcode workflows; high-quality, motion-based frame-rate conversion; deinterlacing; denoising; and texture management.

With technology partners such as Skywalker Sound and Technicolor, PixelStrings also offers tools for audio/video retiming, channel routing, loudness control and fully automated SDR-to-HDR conversion.

Are they cloud-based? IP-based?
PixelStrings is a cloud-native platform that is also available for on-prem IP.

Were these tools available before the pandemic, or did you introduce them during the past year?
We introduced PixelStrings Cloud in 2017 due to the growing demand for cloud-based media conversion. This allowed us to be well-positioned for the shift that occurred due to the pandemic. We were prepared with vetted solutions that we continue to develop as our customers’ needs grow. PixelStrings On-Prem was released last year.

What are the trends are you seeing? Are remote workflows here to stay?
We’ve noticed there is a growing need for cloud-based transcoding and image processing. In the past, these processes were completed mostly on-premises. Many content owners are aggressively seeking the most efficient ways to get a lot of work done remotely, which is bringing a larger-than-expected variety of customers to our platform.

Our belief is that the hybrid remote/on-prem approach that has been adopted will continue to grow. PixelStrings provides the best of both worlds with an on-premises option that fully mirrors the functionality and interface of PixelStrings Cloud for private, on-premises deployments. Clients can select which option best suits their workflow and their budget.

What do you see as the best parts of remote?
On the high end, remote has enabled some of the best talent anywhere in the world to be available for hire. All that is needed is a solid internet connection to bring the best and brightest minds in software development, editing, visual effects, etc. into your project.

In general, it provides options that reduce employee stress and fatigue, and it returns days of their lives back to them by eliminating commuting. At Cinnafilm, our CTO calculated that he has gained over a year of his life back by working remotely and eliminating his commute.

What about the hardest parts?
In general, there could be inconveniences or concerns. An inconvenience could be upload and download of the source and rendered files. A concern could be the user’s comfort level with using secure, public-cloud infrastructure. But there is no such thing as a fully secured workflow system, whether it’s in the cloud or on-premises.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
Bandwidth to the last mile makes everything easier. Some clients already have fiber-based connectivity, so this isn’t an issue with them.

Where the Buffalo Roam’s Taraneh Golozar

What services does your company provide?
Where the Buffalo Roam (WTBR) is a full-service creative production company with offices in Oakland and Los Angeles. With decades of experience in advertising and commercial production, we offer services from strategy development, business affairs and production to post production and finishing.

Have you been working remotely during the past year?
Our work-from-home mandate went into effect in March 2020. What started out as an option quickly became enforced within days, as all employees were stationed at home. We continue to follow city and state protocols and limit our in-office interactions. Currently, we are assessing how we can benefit from the advantages of remote workflow when things get back to normal while seeking a healthy balance between the two.

How have your remote workflows evolved from March of last year until now?
Technological advances have helped this process. This industry could not have survived if we were still in the world of dial-up internet or if the use of floppy disks was our only method of file exchange. Comparatively, today we can stream a live session from across the country/globe or transfer terabytes of data with just one click. The evolution of technology was heightened even more during the pandemic, and we expanded our communication horizon through platforms such as Google Meet, Zoom, BlueJeans, Slack, FaceTime and others.

What are some of the tools you’ve been using?
Slack, Dropbox and Google Sheets were our bread and butter for the longest time until we were introduced to Rangeworks, a project resource and digital asset management platform. Rangeworks became our savior in the work-from-home era. It’s a flexible platform that delivers core functionality and then adds a customizable layer that can be configured to deliver exactly on the needs of all end users.

Have artists been dialing into your servers or working locally?
With full-time artists already working remotely before the pandemic and working seamlessly between the two offices, we were ready to go fully remote. But as most things go, it’s a bit different when you want to work remotely versus being forced to. That said, having the Dropbox server has been our lifeline in terms of the full office needing to work together without much interruption.

What are some pain points of working this way?
In-person human interaction is essential for any individual, team or company’s health and growth. Working remotely removes the human experience and the sharing of creative ideas. Just being able to spend time together without the need for screens has been a huge challenge.

What about the positives?
One perk is that you get to sleep in longer, but the best thing that has come out of working remotely is that it has allowed us to hire and partner with more talent from around the world, which brings all sorts of fresh perspectives to the work. With the power of the internet, we are connected through space and time no matter the location or time zone.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future? 
With on-site productions, we get to humanize the process and establish care, but that affinity tends to get removed from a remote workflow. Companionship is a profound connection that builds trust and improves productivity. Perhaps the combination of both remote and on-site productions can be the solution to making the remote workflow easier in the future.

Colorfront’s Aron Jaszberenyi

Which of your products are pros using for remote workflows?
We recently introduced Colorfront Streaming Server, which is a dedicated 1RU box with SDI input. It offers secure sub-second latency and reference-quality streaming from any UHD video source. But the same remote video-streaming technology  — including On-Set Dailies, Express Dailies and Transkoder — is available in all Colorfront dailies and mastering systems on Windows.

Are they cloud based? IP-based?
Having access to Colorfront Transkoder on a GPU-enabled workstation in AWS and Microsoft Azure is great, but you also need high-quality, low-latency video monitoring, just like you have with SDI on a local system. Colorfront Streaming also works great when needing to access systems in your facility remotely.

Were these tools available before the pandemic, or did you introduce them during the past year?
Colorfront has been working on remote streaming for several years as part of our cloud initiative. We only released it to our customers about a year ago, coinciding with social distancing and the COVID lockdown. We have seen wide adoption by a number of major studios, OTT providers and post facilities, and it is actively being used in production on both sides of the Atlantic.

What are you seeing in regard to trends? Are remote workflows here to stay?
We are using mature, cutting-edge technologies with industry-wide adoption of remote streaming, such as SRT (secure reliable transport) and NVENC (Nvidia GPU-accelerated HEVC encoding). These building blocks allow Colorfront’s remote streaming solution to offer secure, optimized video streaming performance across unpredictable networks. The demand for remote work will only increase, and after learning that they could work from anywhere, colorists, editors, VFX supervisors, QC operators, producers and clients will continue to want perfect reference-quality remote video at their workstations — from the facility and from the cloud.

What do you see as the best parts of remote?
We see studios moving massive video files into the cloud: 4K lossless Dolby Vision IMFs, terabytes of OCN Raw files and OpenEXR files for visual effects. Well, once there, studios also want to put eyes on them for QC or for review and approval. How do you do that without moving the footage? Colorfront’s customers routinely spin up a Transkoder in AWS, hit play and stream reference-quality HDR video and audio to a dailies or QC operator or VFX supervisor sitting at the facility — or in their home.

What about the hardest parts?
One of the nontrivial aspects is reliability — that is, robust streaming even on nonproprietary networks rife with packet loss and bandwidth fluctuation — that ensures the best possible viewing experience on typical home broadband connectivity. Other aspects are achieving true reference quality, including support for 4K video in 4:4:4 SDR/HDR, and support for Dolby Vision and multi-channel immersive audio and security (AES-256 bit encryption, visible and forensic watermarking.)

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
By moving everything into the cloud more quickly. Networking and cloud-based production technologies are maturing rapidly. Innovations like SetStream.io and Frame.io’s Camera to Cloud (C2C) will help to further enable production teams to collaborate on complex projects over long distances.

Hayden5‘s Melissa Balan

What services does your company provide?
We are a post company working with brands, agencies and entertainment clients. One of our new proprietary offerings is Cloud Cuts, which is our vision of what the future of post can look like — with editors, colorists, VFX artists and sound designers working from anywhere in the world. High-definition, low-latency, browser-based client edits. Accelerated file transfers spanning continents. Secure lifetime backups of all client media. We’re embracing remote post not because we have to, but because it’s better.

Have you been working remotely during the past year?
We have. Our primary headquarters are in New York, and the East Coast team began remote work in March 2020. In early 2021, Hayden5 officially expanded to Los Angeles and now has a team of West Coast production and post staff. While the pandemic forced us to shift to remote workflows, we’re now fully embracing the flexibility that decentralized post provides.

How have your remote workflows evolved from March of last year until now?
When the pandemic hit, it was finally time to leave hard drives behind. Since then, we’ve completely restructured how media arrives in our ecosystem, how it’s shuttled between relevant parties, and where it ultimately ends up. To pivot our entire workflow to digital.

What are some of the tools you’ve been using?
We’re now using purpose-built file acceleration tools to transfer media across the fast lane of the internet directly into our on-premises storage, where it is automatically indexed, proxied and backed up. Our new asset management system provides a web portal for us to browse media from anywhere. From there, point-to-point downloads are initiated to share media with editors working from all over. When projects wrap, we can archive to a secure cloud storage with the click of a button.

Have artists been dialing into your servers or working locally?
We’re currently taking a hybrid approach. Our on-premises storage acts as a repository for all inbound media, which is then shared with our contractors via accelerated file transfer links. Once content is downloaded, contractors work with the media locally, then consolidate projects back to our on-premises storage upon wrap. We have plans to make this process even more seamless and decentralized.

What are some pain points of working this way?
In short, internet speeds. Some contractors have gigabit connections; others don’t. We’re actively solving this problem with new hardware and software solutions so that any vendor, with any connection, can work efficiently. This is the core value-add of our Cloud Cuts system.

What about the positives?
The positives greatly outweigh the pain points in our remote workflows. Not being limited to the physical world frees us up to work with a much larger network of talented professionals. We have freelancers in most major cities around the world. I’m based in LA, but my post producers are on both coasts, and our clients are all over the world.

The ability to transfer media digitally and smoothly from production to post and to conduct our offline and online workflows from anywhere in the world — even offering low-latency live-edit sessions in a virtual “room” — allows us to offer a lot of flexibility to our clients and hire the best people to do the best work. Plus, no time commuting between work and home means more time with family and friends and helps contribute to a cleaner environment by cutting down on emissions.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future? 
Better, faster, more reliable home internet access across the US and the world; Mac hosting for PCoIP products; bare metal Macs in the cloud; simpler/more predictable pricing for cloud-based active-tier storages.

Dell Technologies’ Thomas Burns

Which of your products are people using for remote workflows?
Dell Technologies’ presence in remote creative workflows spans core data center infrastructure to technology at the edge and end-user devices.

On the data center side, our customers are using Dell EMC VxRail and VMware Horizon for VDI, Dell EMC PowerEdge servers for compute, Dell EMC rack workstations and Dell EMC PowerScale and ECS for storage. On the end-user side, our customers are using a wide range of Dell Precision workstations and displays.  Some of our customers are also using a range of Dell Wyse PCoIP-capable thin clients.

Are they cloud-based? IP-based?
While many of our products are deployed on-premises, we offer multi-cloud and cloud-native solutions.

Were these tools available before the pandemic, or did you introduce them during the past year?
While there were some new products announced during the past year, like Dell EMC PowerScale F200 and F900 nodes, the majority of the products being brought in to solve the challenges of remote workflows were already on the market prior to the pandemic and were already in use in workflows that span the globe.

In fact, we were able to provide guidance based on these experiences to help get remote workflows up and running quickly. One example of this is the work we’ve done with Like a Photon Creative, Australia’s only female-owned and operated animation studios. Like a Photon Creative was able to embrace remote workflows and realize a 120% productivity boost.

What are you seeing in regards to trends? Are remote workflows here to stay?
I believe that remote workflows are here to stay, at least in some capacity. But I think it will resemble a more hybrid model that offers flexibility to work from wherever while still providing the opportunity for face-to-face collaboration when necessary and possible.

Remote workflows open the possibility to find and retain talent that used to have geographic limitations, both on the local and global scale. For example, remote workflows make it possible to live in an area with a lower cost of living without the need to commute daily to a centralized office that might be in a higher-cost area. On the global scale, it allows for access to a wider pool of talent and 24/7 creative workflows.

What do you see as the best parts of remote?
Aside from what I’ve already covered, the best part is providing the flexibility for creatives to work however they find themselves being their most creative. Whether they are more creative at home or in an office, the result will ultimately be a higher-quality product in the end.

What about the hardest parts?
Workflow complexity and ensuring that valuable IP remains secure. On top of the complexity of data moving between working groups using tools both on-prem and in the cloud, remote workflows introduce a whole new layer of workflow management complexity and a larger threat landscape that may span devices outside of traditional firewalls.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
Working with a partner to identify the opportunities and challenges of remote workflows and developing a strategy that accounts for both data management and security challenges upfront.

From a data management perspective, it’s really about shifting from file management to asset management. This requires developing a deep understanding of data flow and dependencies between working groups and using tools that consolidate and automate this management — for example, the Dell EMC DataIQ plugin for the Autodesk Shotgun API.

While security might not be top of mind when developing a strategy, it’s vital to get ahead of threats with a comprehensive content security strategy. Failure to do so might lead to revenue or reputational loss due to leaks of sensitive data.

One way to get ahead of this is by employing good policy and governance along with using prevalidated solutions and architectures that meet industry standards, e.g. the Trusted Partner Network.

DigitalFilm Tree’s Nancy Jundi

What services does your company provide?
Dailies and GeoDailes: Drop off physical drives or go true camera-to-cloud from anywhere in the world.

Cinecode: story visualization

SafetyVis — on-set safety, living storyboards, Lidar and import of your set

Color, VFX and online: available with remote review

GeoPost data management: All cloud, all secure

HDRexpress:Helping older show libraries step into the world of HDR streaming using a Dolby-certified workflow on SDR source material

Archival: While we’ve been early adopters of camera-to-cloud, we’re also emboldened by the future of LTOs in tandem with QR code technology.

Have you been working remotely during the past year? 
DigitalFilm Tree has remained fully operational, 100% staffed and open to serve remote needs while still available to receive physical media. That said, 85% of our staff did immediately pivot to working from home because we have the network security and infrastructure in place to secure unaired media in the home/on consumer Wi-Fi.

How have your remote workflows evolved from March of last year until now?
We’ve deployed hundreds — and approaching well over a thousand — network security routers to protect remote editors, colorists, VFX artists and more. The threat to those working on unaired media in the home was and remains real. To work from home had always been a luxury. Overnight it became a necessity, and hackers were incredibly quick to capitalize. Our router inventory skyrocketed overnight, and our network security team was awake for a good, long stretch ramping up in those early weeks.

After security, it was really a matter of helping to get others back to work. We really just had to increase inventory to keep up with demand for remote review stations and on-set/camera-to-cloud GeoDailes pods, and then we hired more previz artists to help productions visualize cast and crew safety protocols.

What are some of the tools you’ve been using?
We’re pretty agnostic across the board, but for previz we use Unity and Unreal. Dailies work is mostly Blackmagic Resolve, but we do have a couple FilmLight Baselight shows. Editorial is Resolve and Avid Media Composer. Color is Resolve. VFX is Foundry Nuke and Adobe After Effects. All departments have their bevy of organizational tools, like ftrack and Shotgun, Trello and Slack. Signiant and Aspera are used for file transfers. The list is endless, never mind what’s proprietary.

Have artists been dialing into your servers or working locally?
Both. We’ve reached a point in our safety threshold where if staff wants to work from home or the office, they can choose. As for clients, we’re still servicing all needs remotely. Only now have we begun discussing on-prem offerings, but only as a means to prepare. There has yet to be a demand from clients to get back in the bays, which might suggest we’ve set them up a little too well at home

What are some pain points of working this way? 
Home internet. We’ve spent a large chunk of the last year in conversation with just about every internet provider you can imagine to either offer better solutions, beta their idea of a better solution, deploy/test/architect edge computing for last-mile internet options — you name it. We’ll keep trying because there’s no reason some portions of Los Angeles should still be seeing up/down speeds that are reminiscent of dial-up.

What about the positives?
Endless. Quality of life can skyrocket in these conditions. When it’s an option to work from home or the office, you can plan your life a bit more organically. Again, our building is a tool to serve a greater whole; it’s not an office in which we seat people for eight hours a day. We’ve got a mixed bag of folks — some prefer the office, some prefer the home and some prefer a hybrid. There’s also a lot to be said for productivity. Proximity doesn’t always equal fast answers. The dilly-dally here and there or the constant interruptions prevent focused work. The office days can eat up a lot of time for some folks. For others, the home is less productive, or they are protective of their time, so flexibility has really only increased output and efficiency and has clarified how we communicate with one another.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
Better home internet.

Scale Logic’s Bob Herzan

How are folks using your products for remote workflows?
We see editors using VDI, proxy editing, sync and cloud technologies and even sneaker-netting media drives around. In most cases, our customers must adapt to several different technologies to adjust their workflow and create the level of efficiencies they need to get the job done.

Our Remote Access Portal (RAP) is storage- and MAM-agnostic, providing editors seamless access to content that exists in on-premises storage — and enabling them to access that content and sync to a local storage device. From there, they can work locally and then easily sync changes back to the project file.

Are they cloud-based? IP-based?
Scale Logic supports both cloud-based and IP-based technologies to satisfy various customer requirements. Proxy editing that takes advantage of current media asset management technologies can be an excellent choice for private and public cloud offerings.

However, if you do not have a MAM solution in place, our RAP offering will allow a push/pull workflow between your on-premises storage and your remote editors — virtually turning your current on-premises storage into your own private cloud.

In addition to this, adding a VDI configuration to support larger file-based workflows enables remote workers to access any office editing systems that are connected to the on-premises shared storage. This allows editors to work seamlessly on projects while still collaborating with other colleagues who are syncing their changes via RAP.

Were they available before the pandemic, or did you introduce during the past year?
MAM-based proxy editing has been around for a while, with many updates taking place over the last year to improve on this level of workflow. Our RAP solution and VDI support was developed around a larger need to bring a remote workflow to those without a MAM in place.

What are you seeing trends-wise? Are remote workflows here to stay?
Without a doubt, remote workflows are here to stay. We have seen customers change their environments to a more hybrid model by downsizing their facilities or even getting rid of them altogether in order to go fully remote.

Our clients see great benefits in being able to work and collaborate with freelance editors of their choice. As our customers go from necessity to choice, they will learn better ways to support their remote workflows. Meanwhile, we as innovators will listen, learn and support their requirements through technology and managed services.

What do you see as the best parts of remote?
First, the flexibility that remote allows creative artists. Being able to sync to a local device, even without an internet connection, allows these professionals to work from literally anywhere. Second, compared to working in a cloud-based environment, there are no additional operating costs to work remotely. Rather, you’re using your own storage to create your own private cloud, so there are no fees to sync your data.

What about the hardest parts?
One big challenge is that remote workers often need to change the way they think and communicate. Moving to remote editing requires good communication and solid SOPs for a successful transition. This is especially true when working in a collaborative editing environment; you want to ensure that you’re not overriding or interrupting the work that someone else just did. It’s easy enough to check with a colleague when you’re working in the same physical office, but not so much when you’re working from separate locations. So it’s critical that your team understands and consistently adheres to a set of operating procedures.

Another challenge is the variance of internet providers and the level of performance an editor may have in his or her area. There is a time cost for dealing with large media files. If you have a slower internet connection at home, it could take days to properly sync data. So having a good internet connection is imperative.

Finally, security is another huge concern for those making the move to remote work; they want to ensure that their intellectual property is always protected. The good news is that, with RAP, you’re sending your media files securely over HTTPS from the on-premises storage to your personal drive.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
One of the biggest challenges we hear regarding remote workflows is the inconsistency of internet speeds. Download and upload speeds will continue to play a huge role in remote workflows — specifically, how quickly editors are able to sync and access huge files so they can do their jobs effectively and efficiently. As ISPs roll out faster internet options, I believe we will begin seeing a major boon in the marketplace for remote workers.

Streambox’s Bob Hildeman

Which of your products are people using for remote workflows?
Chroma 4K, Chroma X with Cloud Sessions workflows using iOS, OSX and Windows media players and Chroma and Halo decoders.

Are they cloud-based? IP-based?
Yes, IP-based with Cloud Sessions workflows. IP-based workflows cover all product support and internet protocol transmission for video streaming. Cloud-based workflows use AWS, Azure and others for data processing, video/audio routing, archiving and management.

Were these tools available before the pandemic, or did you introduce during the past year?
Yes, we had the solutions I mentioned prior to the pandemic. However, we have updated our media player software and Spectra, our virtual encoder.

What are you seeing trends-wise? Are remote workflows here to stay?
We are continuing to see demand for remote workflows that allow our customers to make faster and better decisions for grading, editorials, VFX and sound productions. The content creations are global due to all the streaming companies.

What do you see as the best parts of remote?
At the end of the day, customers are saving time/money by having faster feedback to make changes, approvals and team collaborations on ideas across the global footprint.

What are the hardest parts?
We continue to work to make solutions easier to use at lower costs and to drive higher-quality new software like Spectra, our virtual encoder product that plugs into tools from Avid, Adobe, Resolve and other video editing applications. This is a new type of workflow for editing directly in the cloud or in on-prem edit bays.
What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
Advancements in technology would help a great deal. This could be new iPad Pros with high-quality, color-accurate Retina displays; faster MacBook Pros with M1 chips (which produce higher-quality 10- and 12-bit videos); newer, lower-cost and color-accurate monitors; and LG OLED TVs that support Dolby Vision and Atmos. Our software takes advantage of all of these new technologies to deliver high-quality and color-accurate videos at lower costs.

Syn’s Nick Wood

What services does your company provide?
Syn is a music agency providing music and sound to the film, TV, gaming and advertising industries. We offer original music, sound design, sonic branding, catalogue music and more. We also offer ADR/VO recording from our studio in Tokyo, working with both local and international productions for translation, localization, production and post.

Have you been working remotely during the past year?
Music making can be — to some extent — a fully remote process. However, we’ve continued to do socially distanced sessions from our studio in Tokyo and tried to record live musicians and live artists wherever it was safe to do so. From recording vocalists such as Maxayn Lewis in Los Angeles, to working with voice artist Rudi Rok in Helsinki, all the way to recording 60-piece orchestras in Macedonia, we’ve certainly fully committed to working remotely. Thankfully, with modern technology, great work can also be made at home, and we’ve tried to encourage that whenever possible.

How have your remote workflows evolved from March of last year until now?
Given Syn’s global setup (with teams in Japan, China, Southeast Asia, UK and the US), I think we were fortunate to be well-prepared to work remotely. As an example, we have a daily production meeting, which we started well before the pandemic, and this enables us to work closely as a team despite the large geographical distance sometimes. We’ve tried to keep everyone engaged and positive while we’re not in the same room — from cocktail-making evenings on Zoom to weekly show-and-tell workshops.

What are some of the tools you’ve been using?
From an audio point of view, we’ve been using Source-Connect to offer realtime ISDN connection for sessions we’re running from the studio in Tokyo, giving directors, producers and clients the opportunity to “join” the sessions remotely and give their feedback with ultra-low latency.

What are some pain points of working this way? 
There’s definitely something to be said for realtime, face-to-face contact. After all, that’s how humans have communicated for centuries. I think one of the difficulties of a mostly remote setup is keeping a team positively engaged and communicating in an effective way. While tools such as Teams, Basecamp, Slack, etc. are all good facilitators of communication, there’s nothing like a face-to-face conversation, with all the nuances and subtleties that involves.

What about the positives?
One of our differentiators is our diversity and international reach. I think transitioning relatively easily to a remote working format has only made our global, 24/7 setup smoother and more efficient. It’s reinforced the idea that great music can be made across borders, time zones and language barriers. I think that sometimes it takes a challenging situation — seemingly with lots of obstacles and barriers — for you to think outside the box and create solutions.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
Increased integration between platforms, perhaps. It’s a great thing that there are now so many platforms and tools to support, automate and encourage remote working, but sometimes juggling so many different platforms can be confusing and complicated. So increased integration between tools — and perhaps increased automation (where appropriate) — would make remote work easier in the future.

Source Elements’ Rebekah Wilson

Which of your products are people using for remote workflows?
Our entire solution toolbox was built from day one in 2005 for remote workflows. Source-Connect, for example, is an industry standard for remote recording. Source-Nexus was born from the need to connect remote applications together “within the box,” removing the need for external hardware to make internal connections with our DAW.

Are your tools cloud-based? IP-based?
While we support certain cloud features, such as file transfer, we really focus on connecting remote people in real time to “be apart but create together.”

Your tools were developed pre-pandemic, but were some of them updated due to the need for remote tools?
Our tools have been developed and sharpened over the last 15 years. Since the pandemic we have, of course, invested a significant amount of effort in delivering and improving the new hybrid workflows that we all feel will be here to stay.

Our updated Source-Live Pro: Low Latency service has incredibly low latency (often eight frames or so from point to point) with HD. That’s 1920×1080 pictures at up to 60fps with in-sync, broadcast-quality audio, which allows for realtime remote collaboration with multiple remote parties. This is a specialized, purpose-built collaboration tool for AV professionals, not conferencing software.

What are you seeing trends-wise? Are remote workflows here to stay?
We know that remote workflows are here to stay, and we can say that through the experienced lens of over 15 years of providing remote workflow solutions. The paradigm has changed, and we have learned to work better and to work smarter. The world is now our global creative village.

For us, it’s not really new, but we have expanded further in new directions, reaching new possibilities and new potentials.

What do you see as the best parts of remote?
I love the fact that everyone I talk to is not only creative and openly collaborative, but comfortable and enjoying being nearer their families; we aren’t wasting time commuting or missing planes. We have so much more time to work together productively and meaningfully in a less stressful way. We are working smarter, not harder. Although this can lead us to spend perhaps more time than we might otherwise — like on our computers — so we must all take appropriate breaks!

What about the hardest parts?
We all love those “water cooler moments” or going out for lunch during work. That’s something we can’t replace, but we know that by creating together as we work remotely, we strengthen our sense of connection and community. When we do eventually get to meet, and when we can travel again, we’ll immediately become firm friends, as we have already created a strong element of trust and collaboration.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
There are a few things on our wish list:

First, it would be that the entire world has access to fast internet. There are vast parts of the world where this just isn’t possible. However, with 5G and projects such as Elon Musk’s Starlink on the horizon, we know this will change quickly. We are doing a series of winter concerts with a ski resort in New Zealand, far from any city, thanks to the Starlink service.

Secondly, the very act of working and collaborating remotely has now become mainstream and part of the new world culture. This makes our job a lot easier, as everyone now has the appetite to try working smarter. We look forward to making that a reality for everyone.

11 Dollar Bill’s Del Feltz

What services does your company provide?
11 Dollar Bill is a full-service post studio specializing in creative design, animation, editorial and finishing.

Have you been working remotely during the past year? 
Yes, and we were very fortunate to be able to adapt to the new normal rather quickly. With offices in LA, Chicago and Boulder, we were already set up for remote work and were already sharing resources across all offices. We needed to make some adjustments but feel we were one step ahead of the game going into it.

How have your remote workflows evolved from March of last year until now? 
I think our biggest evolution has been with our clients. We work in a very hands-on industry, and most clients prefer to be in the room with our team when working on projects. But they have seen that remote work sessions are possible and have been super-supportive along the way, trusting us to do more unsupervised sessions, which makes the live sessions more productive.

What are some of the tools you’ve been using?
Over the past year, we have introduced several options for working remotely. We have implemented technologies including Zoom, Slack and Streambox that facilitate long-distance collaboration. Our goal was to incorporate technologies that our clients were already using and were familiar with so that there wasn’t a big technology learning curve for them.

These solutions have worked exceedingly well and proven to be not simply stop-gap measures, but efficient ways to get things done. We will continue to offer remote options even in the post-pandemic world and are working to further extend and improve services to benefit clients who value that convenience.

Have artists been dialing into your servers or working locally?
It has been a combination of both.

What are some pain points of working this way? 
I think the biggest pain point was trying to figure out how to maintain our company’s culture while being so secluded and somewhat disconnected. We began by having status meetings twice per day over Slack, which allowed us to touch base on the work as well as on a personal level. We also had some fun virtual happy hours and officewide events that weren’t mandatory, but almost everyone attended in order to get and maintain that connection we were all missing.

What about the positives?
Although the pandemic brought unpredictable challenges, we have weathered the storm without serious setbacks. We remained productive and were able not only to avoid staff reductions but also increase staff over the past year.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
On the technical side, remote workflows are limited by the internet bandwidth of the client. However, when time is an issue or when our clients prefer it, we will continue to offer remote services. Nothing beats having our clients experience the food, culture and comfortable, collaborative environments that our River North and downtown Boulder offices offer.

AFX Creative’s Toby Gallo

What services does your company provide?
We are a design-driven, multidisciplinary content creation studio specializing in VFX, 3D animation, motion design and color grading. Our capabilities include live interactive remote color-grading sessions, remote Autodesk Flame sessions, a full-service CG department and more.

Have you been working remotely during the past year?
Yes, immediately after the COVID-19 restrictions began, we started to rely heavily on remote collaborations. Thankfully, we had the virtual resources ready for a seamless transition. Because remote operations have become such a mainstay, I don’t foresee this paradigm shifting anytime soon.

How have your remote workflows evolved from March of last year until now?
Although AFX Creative had been set up to handle remote workflows and collaboration prior to the pandemic, we made small and key changes to meet an increased demand in our talent and work. Additional provisions were also made to our connectivity and to the hardware required to support more endpoints.

What are some of the tools you’ve been using?
Streambox, UltraGrid, HP Remote Graphics Software, Frame.io, NIM, Wiredrive, and Sohonet FileRunner.

Have artists been dialing into your servers or working locally?
To ensure security and minimize the potential for client data exposure, we mandated the use of zero and thin clients for all team members working on a creative level. This is carried out through a variety of security measures put in place.

For production management, we embraced secure L2TP VPN connections. This allows remote workers to work within the corporate network as if they’re physically at the workspace. Any access required to tools like NIM is achieved in a similar secure fashion.

What are some pain points of working this way?
Fortunately, because we had the existing infrastructure, it wasn’t as painful as it could have been. The most challenging part was acquiring the additional equipment needed to scale up and handle the new and increased volume of requests. Once the additional equipment was acquired, it took us less than a week to implement and deploy.

What about the positives?
Like other industries, we have found an increase in overall productivity. Our creative talent has enjoyed the freedom, flexibility and convenience of working from home.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
Remote workflows are already working very well. Like anything, there’s room for improvement, such as the ways in which everyone collaborates. As the industry continues to evolve this remote model, virtual platforms and tools will become more powerful and seamless. The increase in broadband speeds and 5G cellular technology will make it easier for partnerships around the globe.

Take the creation and adoption of LED walls and in-camera VFX for example, which forever changed modern television and filmmaking. I believe these workflows will only further our effort and ability to bring to life whatever we can imagine.

Alkemy X’s Bilali Mack

What services does your company provide?
Alkemy X is an independent media company working in entertainment, technology and advertising. We specialize in VFX, design, animation, live-action production, original development and branded content.

Have you been working remotely during the past year?
Yes, the company has been working remotely since March 2020. Our technical team worked around the clock to adapt our robust workflow to be entirely virtual and seamless, which of course led to unique challenges when meeting deadlines with the delivery of cinema-quality files.

How have your remote workflows evolved from March of last year until now?
There is certainly better integration and development of workflow and communication. Now that we have overcome the initial technical barriers, we are able to focus our time and efforts on continuing to elevate the work rather than battling slow internet service or unexpected security permissions. We’ve also started to regain some of the teaching opportunities for our artists that were initially lost to the remote workflow.

What are some of the tools you’ve been using?
Currently we are using Shotgun, Slack, Zoom, Foundry Nuke, SideFX Houdini and Autodesk Flame.

Have artists been dialing into your servers or working locally?
Artists have been logging in remotely to our secure, on-site systems in NYC.

What are pain points?
Communication, culture and career development have probably been the most difficult challenges from the remote work standpoint. While I do make it a point to maintain a virtual “drop-in” policy with our team, it is difficult to replace the happenstance interactions and collaborations that occur over a shared lunch or encounter in the kitchen.

What about the positives?
With great challenges come great opportunities. In many ways we have become very efficient with time. Diversified talent has also been a great new addition to the way we work, given that we are no longer tied to geographical requirements when it comes to staffing non-tax-incentive-based projects.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
If we could do partial remote and partial in-person, that would be great. While there are major benefits when it comes to working remotely, there is certainly a creative shorthand that is dissolved without the face-to-face interaction on a regular basis.

Zoic Studios‘ Saker Klippsten

What services does your company provide? 
Zoic Studios specializes in visual effects for episodics, film and commercials. We also have two sister companies, including Zoic Labs, which specializes in software development and advanced visualization, and Zoic Pictures, our original content development division.

Have you been working remotely during the past year?
Yes, Zoic Studios reacted quickly and transitioned all three of our offices to a fully remote workflow virtually overnight in March of 2020 and have remained remote since. Our partially remote pipeline made this transition easier than most, but it was through the tireless efforts of our entire team that we were able to maintain operations seamlessly during this transition.

How have your remote workflows evolved from March of last year until now?
At Zoic, we are using Teradici PC over IP, however, since going fully remote, our process has evolved to become more efficient in several ways. We have narrowed down meetings to more focused groups rather than larger full-team groups, which has enhanced overall productivity. We are also now able to hold larger meetings that bring together the entire company from all of our locations across North America. Employees also now have much more accessibility to senior management in other offices and overall can be much more communicative with each other.

With the emphasis on Microsoft Teams within our remote workflow, we can be more unified as a company. Having the ability to be connected through this platform allows us to be less reliant on email, where the communication can sometimes break down and information can get lost. While we always remained connected with our offices, a fully remote workflow has allowed us to spread work more easily across different offices and artists.

What are some of the tools you’ve been using?
Microsoft Teams has been a game-changer for Zoic Studios. It allows us to hold full-company gatherings that allow us to continue building our culture, such as lunch-and-learns or companywide town halls. The democratization of collaboration with the platform has brought the company together rather than siloed us into our separate offices. With the MS Stream for desktop, employees can also record meetings that they are not able to attend and follow up with feedback later. Teams also has proved extremely helpful for training and deploying new workflows companywide.

Another key tool that we have adopted within the last year is Epic’s Unreal Engine for its realtime filmmaking capabilities. We have been using Unreal for visualization, virtual art, animation and virtual production. We have already leveraged it across a wide range of top series, including Superman and Lois and Stargirl for Warner Bros., AppleTV+’s See, Amazon’s The Boys and the upcoming Netflix series Sweet Tooth.

Have artists been dialing into your servers or working locally?
We use Teradici PC over IP to remote into our workstations located at our private data centers.

What are some pain points of working this way?
While overall we have found tremendous efficiencies with this remote workflow, we unfortunately don’t have full control end to end of the internet connection, which can be a major challenge when working with such large file sizes.

In the early days of the pandemic and our fully remote workflow, employees struggled with the capacity available from their local internet providers. This meant that in the early months, a great deal of time was spent upgrading internet capacity at home offices.

Maintaining social connectivity has also certainly been a challenge with remote workflow. Seeing people on a screen is nice, but it lacks the spontaneity of the happenstance meetings that used to occur in office kitchens and common areas.

What about the positives?
Zoic has made it a point to heavily encourage a healthy work-life balance. It can be easy to get consumed working long days when your workstation is at home, but that is detrimental for employees and can lead to burnout.

Also, with the travel and commuting time being removed, employees have enjoyed more personal time for family, health and hobbies. There are also, of course, environmental benefits of being at home, which is something that we’ve experienced collectively across the globe during the pandemic.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
Solve the speed of light problem! In all seriousness, latency is the number one problem for artists working at home. It would also be a major game-changer to have less expensive, higher-quality software available to support realtime video playback, an improvement we’d love to see in Microsoft Teams.

MTI Film’s Larry Chernoff

What services does your company provide?
General post production services for episodic one-hour dramas, film restoration, remastering and Avid remote editing for television series.

If you’ve been working remotely during the past year, what are some of the tools you’ve been using?
We have been focused on several technologies for different purposes.

For Avid editorial, we have set up a data center that uses PCs for Avids and Parsec software for connectivity from the remote location to the data center.

For online editing, we use Parsec to connect our editors to our facility and a simple VLC player to connect clients to the streams we send them via Teradek “Cube” encoders.

For color correction, we use Teradek Prism to encode directly from the color correctors and on the receiving side, clients are viewing on their iPads using Teradek’s Core viewer. The Core viewer has ASC color correction that allows our colorists to profile and match the iPad to our Sony X300 monitors.

For final QC, there are several methods including Cube, Prism, Clearview and T-VIPS.

Have artists been dialing into your servers or working locally? If so, what are some of the pain points of working this way?
Occasional loss of connectivity or playback quality due to poor bandwidth on the client side is the only pain point.

What about the positives?
During the pandemic, it has allowed work to continue with little interruption.  It has proven to be invaluable to producers who have a lot to do and do not want to spend their time travelling.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
If everyone had at least 50mbs of solid download connectivity to the net.  The more the merrier.

Ataboy’s Vikkal Parikh

What services does your company provide?
Ataboy is a design-driven content creation studio that creates visual content for brands and agencies. Our team uses design, animation, live action and VR/AR to connect brands to their audiences.

Have you been working remotely during the past year?
Yes, besides shoots, which we’ve been doing as a combination of both remote and in-person.

How have your remote workflows evolved from March of last year until now?
It’s evolved from a makeshift solution to a robust production pipeline. We’ve experimented with various technologies over the past year and created solutions that work well for our clients and our teams. From trying various cloud storage options to installing fully remote desktops, we’ve fine-tuned these services to fit our needs. Our Clean Classics collaboration with Adidas and agency Annex88 was created entirely in this remote situation.

What are some of the tools you’ve been using?
We use a combination of the enterprise cloud solution from Dropbox and on-site storage solutions, namely Synology. For the desktop, we’ve been relying on virtualized Microsoft Azure using Teradici. We achieve remote rendering with Fox Renderfarm. For communication, we’ve primarily been using Slack and a combination of Google Meet and Zoom for “face-to-face” meetings.

Have artists been dialing into your servers or working locally?
We’ve taken the hybrid local-and-cloud approach using Dropbox. All the artists have been working off the Dropbox folder that syncs to the cloud and the Synology at the studio.

What are some pain points?
The biggest challenge is missing the in-person conversations and collective brainstorming. We have achieved it using remote tools, but there will always be something missing there. Being able to just walk over to an artist and have a conversation versus the chat and video call fatigue. It is real. We are not wired to be in a bubble.

What about the positives?
Some of the perks are saving on the commute time and flexibility in the work hours. Some creatives work better at night, and some like to knock out the most challenging things first thing in the morning. This offers the opportunity to do that and work at your creative peak, with the support from the infrastructure we’ve built.

What would help make remote workflows easier in the future?
I think having the flexibility to work remotely is a great option, and it’s something we should hang onto going forward. And, yes, it’s true that being able to collaborate in person makes things a lot easier, but it’s still nice to have the tools and the knowledge to do it remotely and do it well.

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Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 20 years.