Geographic distance can hinder collaboration in the video production process. But with the right set of tools, it’s possible to create high-end video production with remote teams.
The right remote production tools make it possible to collaborate in real time and complete a project without ever meeting in person. These tools allow for fast collaboration, efficient workflows, and quick pivots on creative decisions.
Pre-production tools
- Airtable: The production process often involves data collection. Where are we shooting, when are we shooting? Airtable can provide collaborative databases, forms and calendars for your team to stay organized. Studiobox uses Airtable to wrangle all of our shoot information, stay synced across multiple time zones.
- Slack: When email threads stretch into the dozens and information get’s lost, we turn to Slack. Slack Connect let’s teams from different companies chat in real time, share reference images and notes.
- Scripto enables remote teams to work on scripts collaboratively. Invented at The Colbert Report, Scripto has become the go-to tool for remote writing teams collaborating on talk show scripts, news scripts and even video game scripts.
- Assemble.TV has created an impressive piece of software that allows creative teams to collaborate on project management, production documents and content review.
Production tools
- Broadcast news and sports remote video production has been focused around getting camera feeds to a central studio location. This can be done with a remote crew controlling camera’s, lights and audio equipment on location. The transmission of video feeds back to a studio often requires an encoder on the camera side and a decoder at the studio as well as internet connectivity. Some options that enable this are TVU, LiveU and SkypeTX. These options still require trained video pro' on site controlling gear, but eliminates the needs for a large control room on site, which was the norm for broadcasting sporting events until recently.
- Studiobox takes a novel approach to remote production, by enabling remote equipment control over the internet as well transmission feeds. Our approach is to make remote production even more efficient by providing both the camera feeds and the ability to adjust the cameras, lights and audio ALL remotely. Our software uses Dolby.io streaming technology to provide best in class audio and visual data to the remote operators as well as sub 300 ms latency. This technique removes the need to send any crew members to site and allows talent, companies and studios to outsource video expertise to anywhere in the world.
Post-production tools
- Frame.io has quickly become the standard for video footage storage and footage notes. When editors and producers work together remotely, they need a place to store the massive files of editing footage. These rough cuts often undergo rounds of notes and Frame.io provides affordable cloud storage and timecode based notes so that various stakeholders can weigh in without having to ship hard drives of footage around the country. Studiobox Productions often sends shot footage to Frame for easy downloading for the customers.
- Adobe Premiere, AVID and DaVinci. Since Apple pivoted Final Cut Pro towards amateurs, Premiere, AVID and DaVinci have become the industry standards for professional video editing software. In the last few years, they’ve enable collaboration within the programs, so that editors can simultaneously work on the same projects from different locations.
- Descript is an exciting new AI enhanced editing software. It doesn’t have the same functionality that some of the pro-level software has, but it does introduce some novel new features for interview editing like transcript editing that then updates cuts in the footage, automatic subtitles as well as direct access to stock video libraries. We’ll likely see many new excited AI enhanced functions in the future.
