Welcome to article four of four, focusing on how you can use video to create the perfect customer engagement experience. If you missed them, be sure to check out part one, part two, and part three.
Choosing video might be easy, but executing a video strategy is far from simple. Video is technically challenging and creatively complex. For video to deliver on its promises, a new set of storytelling techniques has to be learned and technologically empowered workflows constructed that will allow volume demands to be met without breaking the bank.
Storage, access and file sizes are front and center. You’ll need help and cooperation from your IT team to address and resolve these challenges. However, don’t abandon all control over the decision-making process.
The technical solutions that are chosen will impact the workflows you can deploy to achieve those creative ends. Ultimately, it will impact the degree to which you can engage with video to aid your marketing and CX strategy. This article will give you a primer on the technical side of what will make your use of video possible.
High-quality video takes up a lot of digital space. For example, a standard ProRes 422 HQ file at 1080p and 30fps is around 1.7GB per minute of footage. To make matters worse, video files are dense. Compared to other media assets, they have a high ‘bitrate’ (the number of bits per second required to transmit a file in real-time).
If you’re going to expand your use of video, you’re going to need to expand your IT infrastructure — it’s as simple as that. This can be done on-premise, in the cloud, or using some combination of the two. Likely, a hybrid approach will be the most flexible and effective, particularly now, when many people are working remotely. But what that actually looks like will highly depend on what your IT system looks like today.
Building IT infrastructure that’s able to match the demands of video at scale should be a conversation you have with your IT team. They will ultimately be responsible for parsing the distinctions between different cloud providers, and how they interface with your existing architecture.
The value you can bring to this conversation resides far more with the kinds of video-specific software tools that will improve your team's interactions with the storage solution built by your IT department, so be prepared to share a list of must- and nice-to-have software you plan to use for video production.
The issue of sorting, filtering, ingesting and managing video files is not new, and multiple generations of purpose-built tools exist to augment and improve the workflows that are possible. If you want to master video, you need MAM. So, what is MAM?
Evolving out of older DAM (digital asset management) tools, MAM (media asset management) has been upgraded to meet the demands of video. Critical to the interests of your IT infrastructure, quality MAM can compress video files down to just 2% of their original size — greatly reducing storage demands, and enabling workflows that include remote editing and collaboration.
In reality, there is a wide range of software solutions on the market called MAM, DAM, VAM, PAM, CAM and a whole host of additional acronyms. There are significant differences when it comes to functionality. However, these differences are not uniformly captured by what the software is called, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll be using the term MAM. When looking at media asset management tools, you should be looking for any type of software that has these three main things to help you:
1. Centralized access to video assets: A good MAM will centralize the access to your distributed network of video assets. Generally, this is delivered through a web browser or integrated features within editing tools, such as a Panel within Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects.
For more basic MAM tools, centralized access will be limited in focus to either archive or production environments. The leading-edge of MAM creates dynamic archives — an interface that merges both production and archive environments — allowing you easy access to whatever material you need. This is critical if you want to optimize your workflows and easily repurpose older video files for new projects.
2. Metadata management and creation: One out of every ten hours spent at work by editors and other creatives is wasted looking for assets. Metadata is key to accessing the right file when it’s needed. The problem is standardization and time.
MAM can automate the creation of basic metadata, standardize the creation of advanced descriptive metadata, and even deploy cutting-edge object detection and natural voice recognition technology to augment manual processes.
Using detection algorithms and AI-enhanced review processes, a good MAM can deliver such detailed metadata tags that video files can be searched with the same level of transparency that ‘Ctrl + F’ provides to text documents. For example, it allows users to search for things like "brick building with fire escape", "two people with a cat", "dark-haired girl smiling", "microwave in background", etc. The kinds of efficiency and workflow changes this makes possible are hard to overstate.
3. Streamlined and secure collaboration: The centralization of access combined with compression technology allows MAM to transform your approach to remote access and collaboration. The size and bitrate of video has slowed the adoption of collaborative cloud access to editable video files. However, when properly compressed as proxies, this is no longer the case.
Proxy editing can be achieved using built-in tools within standard editing software. What MAM brings to the equation is two-fold. First, it allows multiple editors to access the same proxy simultaneously, transforming remote access into collaborative access. Second, centralizing access makes the process far more secure, allowing you to set permissions, watermark video files, and review access and edits.
Getting technology right is critical to the practical success of your video engagement plan. However, the real reason it’s worth addressing here are the workflow possibilities created that can unlock creativity within your video marketing and customer experience strategy. There are three basic elements to your workflow success:
1. Remote access and collaboration: Creativity blossoms when experimentation is allowed. What’s more, highly skilled employees expect opportunities to work from home, and the best talent may not reside within an easy commute distance of your offices. For both of these reasons, you need collaborative access to cloud-based proxies in order to maximize your access to talent and allow that talent to deliver to the best of their abilities.
It should be noted that the current situation demands the need to deploy WFH capabilities. However, the ability to accommodate WFH workflows should have already been on your list of video production priorities, and an end to social distancing shouldn’t change that.
2. Repurposing of assets: The larger your archive of video assets, the more likely you’ll be able to reuse or repurpose material you already made or purchased in the past, rather than paying for new material. Some footage you have can be used again and again, and clients will thank you for bringing this level of efficiency and cost-savings into their system.
For example, if you start a project by creating longer, multifaceted videos, material from those videos or their outtakes can be utilized again to make unique but related shorter videos.
Additionally, an older video can later be tweaked for reuse on different platforms. For example, Instagram only allows videos of 60 seconds or less, and on Twitter, the max is just over double that at 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Facebook users enjoy longer videos but are much less likely to watch lengthy videos than visitors to YouTube are. With a different optimal length for each platform, it's sensible to adapt your videos to multiple versions of different lengths.
Being able to monetize client archives and put them to good use again and again comes down to metadata and archive access — both things delivered by investment in high-quality MAM.
3. Efficiency and automation: The more elements of your workflow that can be automated, the more you’ll be able to focus on creativity. You want to make it quick and easy to share projects, remove manual steps in ingest, reduce the number of copies created and simplify communication. By doing this, you’ll reduce costs, increase how effective people are and free them to focus on adding value where it’s most needed.
Centralizing your access to assets is, again, key to simplicity. The less movement between different environments, the more efficient the system. Deploy technology to automate ingest, metadata creation and more. Make sure tools integrate wherever possible and deliver end-to-end simplicity. A good MAM is the central element of this kind of efficient, streamlined workflow that will really let you scale your operations when needed.
Your success in deploying video starts with technology but goes far beyond it. Ultimately, you need to make the right creative choices and encourage a culture that is willing to experiment and learn. Video’s role in marketing and customer experience strategies is still evolving. By doubling down on the right technology, you will be in a position to become a trendsetter. The challenges of growth through video are actually an advantage. You and your competitors face the same hurdles. Solve them today and grow tomorrow.
In the spirit of solving hurdles, we recently sat down with four of the world’s largest creative agencies - FCB, Wavemaker, GMR and Mustache - to learn how they’ve adapted to the new realities of producing video content. Thanks to the incredible insight each gave us into their remote video production workflows and customer successes, we've been able to create the go-to playbook and report for any creatives producing video right now;
The Future of Video for Creative Agencies, by the World's Largest Creative Agencies
Click here to head back to the main hub and read the rest of our customer engagement series. Or book some time below with Gabrielle to find out how Curator can streamline your production workflow and increase your ability to move, manage, and monetize your assets, leaving you free to spend more time creating. 👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼