Speaker 1: So we were at NAB, got a bunch of videos out about each individual company that we saw. So in this video, I want to talk about four specific tools that focus on collaboration and post-production workflows and more specifically editing, having a team of distributed editors or collaborators and how to share files, manage files, organize everything you got. Some of these are specifically digital asset management. So it's sort of like taking all of your stuff, all of your media, how you can handle it. And other ones are a bit more specific to just sharing specific project files. So we kind of got a couple of different options here of different workflow styles, but they all relate to editing and working remotely across a distributed team. So anyways, let's just jump into it real quick. You're watching Video Brand. Special thanks to our sponsors that helped make our NAB coverage possible. Got Massive, which is really handy for sending really large files very quickly. Metricool, which we use to schedule out all of our social media and use it as our social media dashboard. Open Reel, which helps create marketing videos really fast and easy. AdSpective, which you can use to dynamically insert ads using AI into videos. And Vestige, which adds invisible watermarking to videos. You can learn more about all our sponsors down in the description below. And now back to the video. First one, this one is sort of the newest and kind of most interesting. A lot of new updates or a lot of just interesting ways that they're handling things. So this company is Altion.

Speaker 2: And the idea behind it is a frictionless environment where any kind of content creator, whether you're an independent or a small studio, can easily get into a content management system that a lot of the enterprise studios of the world would already have.

Speaker 1: Super, super interesting with what they're doing. So it is sort of a full content management system. And their mentality, their idea is everything storage, cloud-based, cloud-centric, cloud-first.

Speaker 2: My firm belief is that as we see internet connections increase over the years, we're going to be using the cloud as sort of your local SAN or your direct attached storage. So we really want to get people into that mindset of having content locally on the cloud always.

Speaker 1: So you basically can get user seats. Pricing is very affordable. It's about, I think, $12 a user seat. And then you get as much storage as you need. And they do have different storage options. So a couple of things I like about them. You can get different pricing on storage. I believe it's about $20 to $25 a terabyte a month of storage for online storage. That's the type of storage that you have instant access to. You can get those files, download them right away. You don't have to wait.

Speaker 2: One of our biggest partners is IBM. So all of our cloud content is stored on IBM Cloud Object Storage. We will be potentially multi-cloud later on this year. But we won't ever have it to the degree that we're leveraging your local SAN or your local NAS environment. Because again, we really want to encourage people to come to the cloud first. But if you do already have an existing SAN or an existing NAS environment in your office or in your workspace of how you're doing your workflow today, we're seeing a lot of users use that as local scratch disk storage. So everything starts in the cloud, comes back to their NAS, they use that project, and then they wipe the NAS at the end of the project, knowing that everything is safely secured and our online storage are archived here.

Speaker 1: The thing that I like is they give you other options. So let's say you have a project that is now archived, or maybe you have a project, there's two different options. You've got your online storage, and then you've got your near-line storage. So that is, you're working on the project maybe, but you don't need instant access to it. So if you need to get those files, you'd have to wait about 20 minutes for them to come online if you need to download them. And that's a little bit less money. And then there's an archive-level storage, and that is, you're not actively working on the project, but you don't obviously want to keep the media around. But you can pay for a lesser-priced storage volume. And I believe that is about $6 a terabyte a month. So a big savings of archiving your media, you're not losing it. You're just archiving it. The thing is, if you need access to that media, like to download it, you've got to wait like 12 hours or something at the most. So it's just not instant access, but it is a good option. So everything's sort of organized by projects. And the idea is you would upload all of your media, your raw media. It's got some tagging options. You can preview proxy files. It'll also generate proxy files. So you can do that proxy workflow, upload your media, download the proxy files, start editing, and then relink it to the high-res online files. Once you're done editing, it has Final Cut and Premiere panels integrations. So you can upload your project files to the cloud, have them sync. With Premiere, it has a cool feature where if you are working on a file on your computer, you have your media downloaded. If you add like a song or a photo or something outside of the Alteon system, it'll give you a flag of like, hey, this file is not in Alteon. Would you like to upload it to Alteon?

Speaker 2: So let's say I have 50 new items. So it's music files or graphics that I created locally on my system that aren't synced up to the cloud yet. Within the NLE, I can actually hit sync, and it's aware of what's not in the cloud, and it'll only push that content there.

Speaker 1: Which is great when you're collaborating and someone also opens that project file. They're not going to be like, hey, where's this project file? Can you email me? That's happened to us all the time when we're sharing project files between different editors. So cool features there. Other cool feature that I really like, it uses IBM Aspera. So that is a super fast upload system designed for extremely large files. So like video files. So when you're uploading your files, it is using that system, which helps speed up the upload. Again, also helps with this whole cloud-centric workflow. And the other thing that I really like, it's maybe a little thing, but this is something that I wish Frame.io did, and they don't, is you can send request links to other people to upload to your project. So this is something, I don't know why other platforms don't do this as much, but like, yeah, we work with cinematographers, other freelancers, and it's just like, I want to give them a link and be like, hey, here's a link to upload the files that you shot. So then it gets into our system and then we have instant access to it. So with Altion, you can do that and send out a link, get people to upload files. And then it also has a lot of the features that you would find in Frame.io of review links. You can upload versions of your edits, share the links out, get client notes, client feedback, and then you could bring those comments in to your editing project file and have those changes there. The other thing that is also really handy about the storage pricing is that it's all inclusive. That includes egress costs. So that's always a little thing that kind of goes under the radar when you're looking at storage pricing and you're like, oh, it's only like 0.000 cents a gigabyte a month. But the thing that they get you with is that's just for storage, but there's extra costs for egress, which means you are taking the data out of storage. So anytime you're streaming something or playing something or downloading something, that is egress costs. If you're paying for your own storage, those costs can sneak up on you besides just the hard costs of what it costs to store your data there. So with Altion, all the prices that I mentioned earlier, that includes egress costs. Now, as a digital asset management tool, if you have a lot of files of being able to categorize, add metadata to your files, it's got some tagging features. It has some ability to add some metadata to your files. When I spoke to Matt, the CEO, he did say some other AI features were coming, and we talked about some ideas of what could come.

Speaker 2: A little bit far off from AI, but I think as an editor's toolkit, to be able to have AI assisting in, hey, somebody was talking about blue skies. Here's 100 clips of blue skies that's in your media library. I think that's going to be very helpful as we look into the future for metadata tagging.

Speaker 1: So some of the ideas of being able to use AI to tag images or classify images, like if you want to find a specific face or you want to find all your shots with blue skies or with the building, that would be coming. And other features that he did say were coming are having to be able to have transcripts in there. My dream asset management solution is just to have a central spot where I can put all my media there, especially interviews or other archival clips that we pull, and have transcripts and be able to just search across the entire library and just see a selection of every time someone mentions whatever word we're searching for across all the media. So he did say transcripts are coming and the ability to search through them, but it is not available right now. Also, one thing he did say was also coming is Resolve integration. Right now it's just Final Cut and Premiere. So yeah, overall Alteon, really, really cool, really exciting what they're doing. I'm going to mess around with it a little bit more, see how it works and sort of what the good use cases are of it. But yeah, that was one of the most interesting remote collaboration tools that sort of made a big launch at NAB. All right, next one I want to talk about is Iconic. And so this one we use internally for everything we switched over and it pretty much manages all of our storage. Iconic is in some ways similar to Alteon, but it is a lot more flexible and has a lot of more different options and how you want to use it. Where Alteon was like, everything's cloud storage and use our cloud storage. Iconic is we don't care what storage you use. You can bring whatever storage you want to bring. So it can map out local storages or your hard drives, your NASes, your network area storage. It can map out those local drives or you can connect it to whatever cloud storage you want.

Speaker 3: So one of the things we're really proud of here at Iconic is that we're storage agnostic. And what that means is no matter what on-prem storage you're using, we don't care. As long as you can amount it to a machine and see it, we can also see it and ingest from it.

Speaker 1: Backblaze, Amazon, Google, IBM, Azure, whatever storage you want to bring, it can map out and connect to those storage units. And then it's got a central digital asset management one spot hub. And the thing I do like about that is it uses checksum. So regardless of like, if you have a file stored on your hard drive, that's mapped to Iconic. And that file is also stored on Backblaze and Amazon. It knows what file is the same. And so it doesn't have duplicate files. It knows like, oh, this is the same file and it's just stored in multiple locations. It is one asset on Iconic. And it just shows you, oh, this is like the media file, but it is stored in like these multiple locations. So that's one thing I do really like about it. Metadata, you can add whatever metadata fields you want. You can just add as many as you want and tag and categorize and organize your files however you like. It does also integrate with Google AI. So you can also use that to use their image processing to categorize and tag and find generic images in your video. If you have like a lot of stock footage type stuff and you want to have some basic generic

Speaker 3: tagging. And you can open up the metadata panel in that search view so that you can see, hey, this is exactly where it matches. So you can see if that hit is relevant to you or not. We're not quite there in terms of showing you if you do kind of like a find in page where it highlights, but that'll be a part of our future plans.

Speaker 1: It also integrates with Rev.ai, which it uses to generate transcripts. So you can also have transcripts attached to your files. You can share any of your files, create share links. People can download the files. You could also create share links to a folder and have people upload the files. And because it's very flexible, you can kind of designate, oh, people upload the files and like, where do I want the files to be saved and what storage unit. So you can connect a bunch of storage units and sort of have wherever the files are uploaded, have them saved. Yeah, it's really a Swiss army knife of stuff. You can send out review links, you get feedback, get notes on the files. It's got a Premiere integration system, which are what I mentioned with Altion. You can load in your files in Premiere. If you add an outside file, it'll be like, hey, this file is not in Iconic. Do you want to upload it? And so you can upload it.

Speaker 3: Now, let's say you try to drag something from your desktop that Iconic does not yet know about. It'll say to you, hey, I don't know about it, but I'll try to keep track of it for you. And the moment you try to upload that project, it'll bark at you and say, you probably should upload this content so that when a remote editor opens this project later on, they can also relink the high res and proxy for this asset.

Speaker 1: I will say Iconic can get to the point where you need someone with a little bit more technical knowledge. It has an API where you can also program more stuff, stuff we haven't tapped into. I've sort of reached the limit of technical knowledge I have with what to use it with. Their support's very helpful, but multiple points where I've asked about workflow things and they're like, yeah, you could build a custom solution with that, but you'd need someone who knows some more programming knowledge to do that. So it's both very flexible and powerful, but also maybe a little bit too powerful if you're looking for something that's very user-friendly, whereas Altion is very user-friendly and very simple interface. Iconic can get a little crazy. Just as a story of how we got into Iconic, I bought a Synology NAS to consolidate all of our files, put them on one central spot. And the idea was, okay, I was thinking this could be a server and I wanted a way to organize all of our media on the server so all of the remote editors could have access and find files and access the server through a friendlier interface. So I found Iconic that way. But the thing with Iconic that I did not realize at the time is if you have any local storage devices that you're using, so like the Synology NAS or even just a regular external hard drive, you can't remotely share the files directly from the drive. The file has to be uploaded to some form of cloud storage in the drive, and then your remote editors could access it that way. So you do have to keep in mind, and this is something we learned that it does depend a lot on cloud storage. So everything has sort of been going to backblaze for us. And this is also where those egress costs that I mentioned where Altion bakes that into the pricing so you don't have to worry about extra egress costs. For us, with this bring your own storage pricing, every time someone does download the file, we are paying for egress costs. And so it's something that like on top of the Iconic fees, the storage fees have been creeping up, especially when we add more and more files to it. And I'm not a programmer, so I don't have an easy way to just have some stuff auto delete. Yeah, I will say that that has been one thing that has been creeping up on top of the user costs of Iconic, the storage costs higher than expected. So one thing to keep in mind. And then this one, we didn't do a video with them, but this is PostLab. We didn't do a video with them, but I have a video about PostLab because we did use PostLab for a while before switching to Iconic. I like PostLab. It is a little bit different than what we talked. It's not a storage management, it's not an asset management system. It is strictly for collaborating and sharing Premiere and Final Cut Pro project files. And Avid Media Composer projects as well. We had to switch because it is only for Mac right now. And then we got some more people on the team that also use PCs. And so it didn't work for us anymore. But overall, it's a great system. They didn't really have any PostLab updates. They had some updates on their other products under the Hedge umbrella, which is the company that makes PostLab. But yeah, I would say check out some updates in the description below of PostLab itself. Definitely worth mentioning if you're watching this because you're looking for remote collaboration solutions for editing. It's still really good software. If everyone is on a Mac, that's the main thing. The other thing that was good with PostLab is they have integration with LucidLink, which is they just had it mounted as a virtual drive, but it's powered by LucidLink. And so the other company that we did talk to is LucidLink. And so if you don't want to go through PostLab, you can just get LucidLink directly. LucidLink is a little bit, well, it's a lot. It's totally different than what we just talked about, but it all has to do with collaboration. It is basically a virtual hard drive that you mount on any computer and it shows up as a hard drive like any other hard drive.

Speaker 4: So when I look right here, and just to kind of get you guys oriented, this green desktop here, this really represents, this is a physical computer in this booth. It's right here under this desk. So I think green as in grass, it's right here in Las Vegas. This blue desktop here represents a virtual machine that happens to be based in Germany. And what we're doing here at the show is we're showing these two different locations to really represent collaboration over distance.

Speaker 1: The thing is, it is a virtual drive. So the drive does not actually exist on your computer. And so it is basically a virtual hard drive of unlimited size. And you're just paying by the terabyte. I think it's about $70 or $80 a terabyte, which is a little bit on the higher end. But it is the most real-time, real sync, virtual hard drive option out there. It's different than if you're like, oh, you just do Dropbox or you just do Google Drive. It is different than that because with those, especially with like large files, large video files, if you have the video file in your synced folder in Google Drive and you're like, okay, play this, it's got to download that entire file first and cache it before I can play it. And so if you're on bad internet, or also if you don't have the storage space to cache all of these gigabytes of files, it's a bad experience. And so Lucidlink is different because it is slicing up these media files and then playing them back in real time and just streaming just whatever you need to happen in the moment.

Speaker 4: You can have a file that is a terabyte in size, but we're just delivering the individual fragments as requested by the front-end application that is fundamentally different from what anybody else is doing here.

Speaker 1: And so when we used it with PostLab, your media files that you're editing with, like inside Final Cut or inside Premiere, those media files can live in your Lucidlink drive. You don't have to like cache them or anything. And the experience with, if the internet is fast enough, that happens in real time. It's like a seamless experience. It behaves like it is a hard drive mounted on your computer with the files all there. And the whole experience just sort of happens in real time. So it is a great way if you're just need to collaborate, have people on a shared drive and playback media file remotely and just have a virtual hard drive that anyone can access. Works great for that. It's awesome for that. So yeah, that was pretty much it for our roundup of remote collaboration, remote editing tools. Check out the video files for each one with demos and more info and in-depth stuff. This is sort of a roundup highlight of the three slash four different tools that we covered at NAB that are really good for this kind of stuff. If you got any specific questions or anything about what we covered, let me know in the comments below. Happy to answer as best I can or reach out to them and see if they can provide some clarity. So yeah, I hope you found this useful. If you did, please give this video a thumbs up and check out our whole playlist of all of the other NAB stuff that we covered. Thanks for watching. I'll catch you in the next episode.