Few media organizations work in the same location all the time, especially in today’s WFH environment. And this creates a lot of challenges for those working with video — you have to be able to view, edit and produce new video wherever you are, using the tools you’re already using.
That means a lot of video teams are now having to figure out how to use Adobe Premiere Pro to edit video remotely, given that Adobe has one of the top NLE’s on the market.
We at IPV are proud to be strategic partners of Adobe. We recently discussed remote editing in Premiere with Adobe’s Head of Strategic Development for Video, David Helmly in a digital Master Class (definitely worth a watch if you’re using Premiere for editing).
However, the things we covered in that master class are exactly why we’ve designed our MAM software (Curator) to integrate with Premiere via our Curator for Adobe Panel. What we want to discuss here is how Curator, and the Curator for Adobe Panel, can help media teams who are using Premiere build more effective workflows — remote, or otherwise. Let’s get started.
1. Automation of manual tasks (ingest, metadata, proxies, conform)
We don’t need to tell you that managing a video production process is a lot of work (especially remotely). That’s why we’ve designed Curator to automate a lot of the tasks you’re probably doing manually right now.
Ingest and Metadata Creation
Before your editors ever start creating video content with Premiere, they have to be able to find the right footage to edit. After all, if you can’t find video content, how are you going to use it?
That’s why ingest and metadata creation is such an important step for most media organizations. And it’s why we designed Curator to automate this process for you — both taking aways manual steps and drastically improving the outcomes.
During ingest, Curator can automatically tag your audio and video content with relevant metadata using speech and object recognition software. This AI-driven process delivers hyper-descriptive metadata that can be searched on a granular level.
Within a standard process, 1 out of every 10 hours of work done by editors and other creative professionals is wasted looking for material. But using Curator, an editor can jump to the specific sequence of clips they need using search and discovery features — finding a specific person, action or background without having to scrub through the asset. This can be done using text commands, and delivers full transparency to any files to which this process is applied.
Hyper-descriptive metadata not only delivers immediate value to a production environment, it also improves archive access. Either through retrospectively applying this technology to archived material, or just slowly building up assets over time — the outcome is a rapid ability to search archived assets and repurpose them in current projects. This is made even easier by some of the remote access and permission-control settings we will get into later.
Proxy Creation and Conform
One of the biggest challenges (and time consumers) with remote editing is simply dealing with files over basic internet connections. Big files take time to transfer and copy as is — and slow internet just draws things out further.
That’s why we designed the Curator for Adobe Panel to automatically generate 2% streaming proxies right in the editing environment. As Director of Solution Engineering, Alex Ferris, explains, “We automatically create these frame-accurate, timecode accurate proxies of all the high res [assets]... every single frame is available immediately in any Premiere interface for any of the editors.”
This means you’ll never have to transfer a file over the internet — you just work on the proxy. And when you’re ready to conform these back into hi-res, Curator makes it a breeze, whether you want to do so locally or remotely:
Now, every editor on your team has access to the same files at the same time without ever touching the original. And this greatly enhances your ability to collaborate on projects (it also helps with tracking edits — more on that later).
2. Remote access to archive environments
The Curator MAM creates what we call a “dynamic archive” — which means that archived assets can be accessed directly from the editing environment in Premiere (and others).
Using Adobe (and the automatic metadata creation from ingest), these can be searched and imported right from Premiere with the Curator for Adobe Panel:
And since they’re automatically imported as 2% proxies (rather than originals), these can be “spun up” remotely through the cloud on even the most basic internet connection.
Basically, if you can watch YouTube, you can access your video assets. Which allows you to massively streamline project bins. Editors no longer have to import the entirety of a file tree into their project bin (slowing down the operation and load times) — they can just access what they want, whenever they need it.
3. Sophisticated permission-based access (archive and production)
Access is a really important issue for remote workflows. But remote access without the ability to control who can access what (and how they can access it) is a recipe for chaos. Simply put, sometimes you don’t always want everyone to have access to everything. And that’s why we designed Curator with a permission-based framework for accessing material.
Our system allows team leads to decide who can access which files and whether they can edit them or not. And it will do all of this right within Premiere itself — when someone uses the Curator for Adobe Panel their permissions are automatically taken into consideration.
This allows you to provide secure access to remote teams, and helps you manage the creation process just as if you were in the office (or in many ways, better than if you were). When combined with encryption and watermarks, this delivers a streamlined and secure process that will exceed almost any security standards.
4. Improved traceability and collaboration
Tracking who has edited what is a big problem with remote video editing since you’re not all working right next to each other.
That’s why Curator allows you to not only control who accesses what, but also see who accessed what, and what they did with it. This further improves security, but also simply delivers unparalleled transparency to remote access and workflows. And since it’s accompanied by Check-Out and Check-In abilities, along with Approve and Review tools, it gives the team leaders the control they need to track and manage the projects they’re working on.
Check In, Check Out
In Curator for Adobe Panel, the process of checking projects out (or selecting projects to work on in the project bin) and then checking those projects back into the system when done has received a major upgrade.
As Alex Ferris explains,
“When you check a project out, it delivers into your Adobe project bin instantly. Inside, it has sequences and assets that have already been brought into the project... You don’t need to download any of the media and can start editing straight away.”
Curator also lets you choose which version of the project you want to check out, as well as letting you see a view of all of the actions that have been taken on that project.
And since everything is done via proxy, when you’re done with the project and check it back into your archive, your edits are visible to others just seconds later. This makes it easy for each person to see what’s happening and who is working on what.
Approve and Review
Communication is a big problem for remote video teams — specifically, communication via project tools (Slack is great, but it’s not integrated into workflows). That’s why Curator includes the ability for editing teams to communicate on project edits and progress right in Premiere itself.
You can approve or reject another person’s edits, leave comments for feedback right in the editing environment, or even use a sequence from someone else’s project in your own. This makes collaboration and accountability far easier and more streamlined, whether you’re remote or not.
5. Curator builds a simpler, global editing system
Process plays a big role in the finished project when you’re talking about creating video content. That’s why Curator is such a powerful solution for teams using Premiere to edit their projects — it allows you to tie together lots of different pieces that otherwise might be spread out across several different places.
Although you are allowed to store files within a distributed network, Curator allows you to access it all in one simple portal, which greatly simplifies your workflow.
This improves security, collaboration, makes remote access easy, and helps you to see more ROI from archived assets — all while improving flexibility for your team.
If you’d like to learn more about how Curator Curator integrates with Premiere (and other editing software you might be using), schedule some time with Gabrielle below and she’d be happy to help you with your questions. For more information on Curator for Adobe Panel, learn more here.
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