ENVY Remote drives collaboration with a Signiant assist

In June, Signiant highlighted the pandemic’s effects on ENVY Post Production’s workflows and Signiant’s role in helping navigate them. Technical operations director Jai Cave, explained, “We successfully moved an entire facility fully remote from offline to finishing post in a matter of weeks, so we have been able to deliver on our projects without disruption.”

ENVY’s ability to adapt to and weather those chaotic months demonstrates the value of cloud technology and more specifically Media Shuttle’s ability to help companies continue working even under the most challenging circumstances. The pandemic accelerated the industry’s migration to more holistic remote collaborative workflows, ENVY among them.

At the end of November, they introduced ENVY Remote, a full-service production collaboration platform uniting personnel across departments and locations, making it easier to manage post production projects.

Your remote environment: Up close and personal

2020 emphasized the need for efficient, inclusive, and easily-built remote production capabilities. ENVY Remote offers a rich suite of features covering a wide range of needs, each drawing on ENVY’s experience and knowledge-base.

Under a single secure login, ENVY Remote unites remote editing, file exchange and organization, live chats, calendars, review links, storyboards, notes, and tasks. It’s all within one platform and interface, available on both desktop and mobile devices.

Designed for multiple users across varied locations — both on-site and remote — ENVY emphasized organization and control via an array of project management features. Teams can:

• Remotely access their Avid workstations
• Add specific categories and tasks
• Assign tasks to individual team members
• Add edit and production notes with versioning control
• Create virtual storyboards
• Import comments directly into Avid
• Live chat with the team

Via ENVY Remote, editors and producers can both access editing systems and work within the same project simultaneously. Changes are visible in real-time, so that supply chains aren’t bogged down by the need to send versions upon versions of a file back and forth, over and over again.

Signiant from the Beginning

ENVY Remote automates the creation of Media Shuttle portals. When a new project is created, a Media Shuttle portal and folder template are created, complete with administrative permissions that can be tailored as smoothly as the folder structure.

“Once a project is created,” Cave explains, “[ENVY Remote] will fire out texts to users with passwords, emails, and instructions. So, the process becomes reasonably self-service as far as the user is concerned.”

Teams are provided access to their client store through Signiant Media Shuttle, with a template of folders already setup. From there, clients can do whatever they need. They can rearrange, reject, or augment the template and continue to add new folders as necessary.

With all these production benefits comes production complexities: there is a lot of content moving around — both large files and thousands of smaller ones — and a substantial number of applications to take into account. This is where ENVY had to think about integration and file transfer.

ENVY Remote offers a more integrated way to work

APIs, and Workspace Integration

Integration is vital to enable a platform like Remote. With Media Shuttle APIs connecting other applications and platforms, ENVY Remote harmonizes a wealth of needs and tasks to help creatives do their jobs with as much efficiency and synchronicity as possible. What makes ENVY Remote so unique is that it’s not attempting to replace or supplant the tools that organizations trust and rely on. Rather, it creates a hub — a virtual collaborative space — via which access to all necessary solutions and personnel is simple and intuitive. 

Leveraging Signiant Portals

When working with ENVY Remote, users need a secure and efficient way to move content into and out of the platform. As noted on their website: “[ENVY Remote’s] Files service, uses Signiant to give the team secure access to their Client Store, allowing them to upload music, voice-over, and other files directly to the edits.”

 “All projects have secure access to [the Client Store] internally, but now users working on the project remotely have direct access to it via Media Shuttle,” Cave elaborates. “This allows them to upload content to editors and the wider team who may be working on-site or remote.”

While methods vary when it comes to ingesting larger files — some producers still opting to ship their footage and dailies via drives — ENVY has seen increased use of Media Shuttle for rushes transfer to ensure assets get safely and securely to ENVY.

“There are three advantages to Media Shuttle,” Cave explains. “Full acceleration is a part of it because people want to get things as quickly as they can. Security is a really big part of it, too. Signiant is a brand that people trust, and it offers a lot of flexibility.”

“Clients could use a Dropbox account or WeTransfer to do certain things, but then it’s a separate entity. And it doesn’t actually link in with our infrastructure on-site,” Cave continues, “For us, this remote aspect is like an extension of on-site. With Media Shuttle, we can set up the portal so that you don’t have these separate entities in the mix.”

Online file-sharing tools can offer a lot of limitations and potential security risks. Dropbox and Sharepoint file size limits restrict M&E companies working in 2K, 4K, 6K, and 8K. Those limits are magnified when assets must be moved into a facility as complex as ENVY. Dropbox and Sharepoint simply weren’t designed for the unique challenges in M&E.

Signiant technology is woven into ENVY’s platform on a foundational level.

ENVY and Signiant understand the power of remote collaboration

With the industry’s new normal, businesses are making remote collaboration and distributed production a permanent part of their workflows. Offering a more adaptable way to work, these strategies open up new avenues and opportunities for M&E organizations to take advantage of.

Enterprises need solutions that make it easy, fast, and secure to access their assets, connect their teams no matter where they are, and manage complex supply chains. ENVY Remote – with its Media Shuttle integration – is an elegant example of this.