Six ways media review will make you more productive

We’re making a big investment in media review – something recently highlighted by our acquisition of Cospective. We’re working together to create the best review technology available to the creative industry, as we genuinely believe it can help teams to deliver their best possible work. Here’s how.

Using media review in your creative process is one of the best ways to speed up production and reduce time spent on iteration.

Uploading a video for review may sound more time-consuming than sending out an email, but when it comes to approving content, it’s quite the opposite. With media review, you can share more information more concisely, you can develop a better understanding of intention via visual communication, and you can make your plans considerably more transparent.

Video is a powerful short-cut to smooth communication and prompt client sign-off. Here are six ways that using media review will boost your productivity.

A richer feedback format = lower effort for reviewers

Video is a powerful way to communicate about works-in-progress, as it captures not only visual and written communication but also sound, motion, and timing. Including this contextual information as part of your feedback adds precision and detail that isn’t possible over email or a messaging app. Struggles to describe a precise section of an abstract image become a thing of the past. And because session participants can see the piece in motion – and even hear what’s happening – they have a better overall understanding of what’s asked of them. They understand the feedback in the context of the work, not as a disassociated chunk of text that can sometimes do more to cloud, rather than elucidate, meaning.

Using media review, you and your teams can communicate large quantities of information very quickly. A picture speaks a thousand words. Video and sound convey all the context of a short novel before anyone’s even made a note.

Collaborating in one place makes for faster workflows

The problem with collaborating via phone, email, instant messaging, SMS…is that everything very quickly becomes displaced. You spend as much time collating feedback into one easily accessible document as you do addressing that feedback.

Media review keeps everything in one place. There’s no need to take a screenshot, upload an attachment, and then compose an email explaining to what each of your marks and scrawls refers. Your collaborators don’t have to read and interpret a written message in an IM, then refer back to the asset under discussion elsewhere to decipher that feedback. With media review, they can see what you’re saying on the asset itself, with on-screen annotations timestamped to the relevant video frame.

With the precision of media review, you can find the frame, detail, or even pixel you’re interested in and discuss it in context, all within a single environment and interface.

That means less work for you, less room for miscommunication with clients and stakeholders, and more time to reiterate and get things right.

Collaboration is more efficient than linear messaging

With email or even instant messaging, the conversation happens in threads or chains, each person taking turns to have their say. Wading through replies can be time-consuming, and the linear format makes it difficult to refer back to previous points without filling a screen with text. And it’s all too easy to lose crucial details as they get buried beneath masses of new feedback.

Media review eliminates many of these issues. It collates and organizes feedback in a highly visible way, opening it up to anyone connected to the platform (rather than just those cc’d in a thread). Everything’s visible at a glance, and as a result, work happens faster. Not to mention, your team gets to feel more like just that: a team.

You can review from wherever you happen to be

Media review on a browser-based platform like ftrack Review makes it easy to give and receive feedback anywhere that you have access to the internet. That could be on your smartphone on the way back from a meeting, when working from home on a family computer, or via a tablet as you wait for your flight to take off. It makes the feedback process more fluid, which is vital in today’s increasingly busy workplaces.

It caters to creative expression

Creative people are expressive people, and sometimes writing just won’t cut it. It can lead to frustration and confusion when you push someone more prone to communication via brush and easel towards a computer and keyboard. Media review offers a broader palette with which to work. Arrows, emojis, speech bubbles, doodles – whatever the right form of communication is, there’s more scope to adapt to it via media review. Just check out some of these doodles made via a Wacom pad via cineSync for Pacific Rim 2, and imagine trying to communicate some of this via email!

It eliminates follow-up admin

Taking notes, sharing notes, and determining the next steps are all part and parcel of face-to-face meetings, and they can take up a lot of time and resources. It’s the typical problem of “work about work”.

Using media review means everything under discussion, along with the actions to be taken and who will perform them, is captured in a digital platform that’s accessible to everyone who needs to see it, whether they’re internal or external to your organization. And with tools like ftrack Review, even those unable to join a session can access a downloadable PDF of every comment made alongside imagery and timecodes, keeping them involved in the discussion. Users can also set up email notifications, keeping people informed whenever the conversation moves forward.

Media review makes the discussion itself the follow-up admin. There’s no need to collate and redistribute: your conversation is the next step.

About ftrack Review
ftrack Review supports a wide range of media formats, the ability to attach files to feedback, powerful version management, and more. Each account has up to 250GB of cloud storage to keep everything safely stored in the same place. As it’s browser-based, users don’t need to download anything to dive in. They simply receive a link to join the session, then start giving their feedback.

About cineSync
cineSync is the industry’s most-trusted media review and approval platform. It offers fully real-time, synchronized remote review and integrates with the industry’s most commonly used tools to help productions from pre to post. If you’ve ever watched Game of Thrones or the Avengers, you’ve seen a project that’s benefited from cineSync.

Media review puts your team, your clients, and your projects in the same collaborative digital environment, wherever you are in the world. See how much time it could save you.

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