How Remote Collaboration Removes Barriers in Media & Entertainment

Remote collaboration is a critical component of digital workflows for companies that want to consolidate and simplify their media production process. With a remote collaboration solution; production, storage, and distribution are all streamlined while project contributors can ostensibly work from anywhere, even across the globe. However, before you can collaborate remotely, you first have to centralize and cloud-enable your content.

Legendary Pictures Utilizes Remote Collaboration

Legendary Entertainment is a leading media company that owns, produces, and delivers content to mainstream audiences. In aggregate, Legendary Pictures-associated productions have realized grosses of more than $17 billion worldwide at the box office.

For a time, Legendary Pictures stored their data using a variety of methods: data were kept on-site in different storage mediums and formats, as well as stored in expensive cloud storage services – accruing hefty costs and becoming a pain to manage. Instead of maintaining expensive storage silos, Legendary Entertainment condensed its data to one cloud storage provider, in turn benefitting from fast, high-performance hot cloud storage at a fraction of the cost. Further, the removal of storage silos enabled Legendary Entertainment to retrieve, access, and collaborate remotely in digital workflows. Because of this, when the Covid-19 pandemic arrived (and many of us shut ourselves indoors), Legendary Entertainment was able to continue production while social distancing by “editing in the cloud.” Thanks to remote collaboration, they were able to complete some impressive (and lucrative) projects during the pandemic.

How Does Remote Collaboration Work?

Remote Collaboration turns workflow barriers into benefits in two distinct ways. Cloud centralization of media workflows, or the process of storing data (in this case, media and content) in the cloud establishes one place where all content lives, yet can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection. This ability to access media workflows from one centralized cloud eliminates the difficulties in navigating media file storage, waiting for tape or cold storage to upload, and emphasizes workflow integration amongst a team of editors to operate seamlessly.

With an established centralized cloud to access media and projects, content can then be edited from the cloud. By leveraging Remote Editing, media and digital projects can be retrieved from the cloud into a non-linear editor, then re-uploaded to the cloud. In this way, the cloud central version of the project is always the “official version.” Between a team of editors, this allows for instant collaboration without fear of losing uploads, updates, or worrying about version control–all while being able to work separately from the same workflow. These two components, cloud centralization and remote editing, work together and serve as the mesh for efficient remote collaboration.

Perhaps the greatest value to remote collaboration in the cloud is cloud storage’s ability to endlessly store your data. With media files that can take up massive amounts of space, M&E firms never have to worry about running out of room or having to delete files. Because Wasabi’s cloud storage is bottomless and tierless, with inexpensive pricing and no fees to receive your data from egress or API calls, anyone leveraging Wasabi as the foundation of their remote collaboration solution is saving significantly, receiving and transferring their data instantly and without transfer charges.

What types of partners are needed to create a Remote Collaboration workflow?

Wasabi provides simple, efficient, and inexpensive cloud storage to help create your remote collaboration solution in tandem with media managers and compute partners. In addition to a cloud storage provider, consider a Media Manager application to act as a hub for media files to be sorted and viewed by your content editors. Some of our Media Management partners are Adobe, Imagen, and Iconik.

A Cloud Compute partner enables an efficient transfer of media to and from the cloud. Compute software allows remote collaborators to retrieve media for editing without having to wait to download from the cloud, making the backend mechanics of remote collaboration work effectively. Some of our compute partners include Vultr, Hivelocity, and Limelight.

To learn more about remote collaboration, check out how Ryan Media utilized Remote Collaboration workflows with Wasabi to deliver major content projects in record time.