Accelerating video review.

Football fans across Los Angeles were thrilled when the Los Angeles Rams returned to their home city after a 20-year absence. Just five years later, the team made history by winning the Super Bowl LVI championship. Fans turned on their TVs and rushed to social media to watch the celebrations.

Rams fans want to see the latest news, highlights, analysis, and media in multiple formats every year — and they expect to see a lot of that content delivered through video. Managing producer Taylor Gilkeson works with a video team of just a dozen people to deliver hundreds of videos in multiple formats every year.

“Some people might not expect visual storytelling to be so important in the world of sports, but for me, it’s the most important thing,” says Gilkeson. “We’re dealing with unpredictable content. We can’t control the game, but we can create stories that make the fans feel more connected with everything that’s happening at the LA Rams organization.”

Like the players on the field, the LA Rams video team aims for speed. Fans expect to see highlights throughout the game and interviews immediately after. They also want insightful content to keep them excited about their team during the off season. The video team uses a video workflow based around Adobe Creative Cloud apps, particularly Adobe Premiere Pro and Frame.io, to edit, review, and deliver the content that fans love.

“It’s challenging to create all of the content expected for such a large and high-profile market, so we continue to improve efficiencies wherever we can,” says Gilkeson. “Our jobs wouldn’t be possible without Premiere Pro and Frame.io. From content creation to review and distribution, the Adobe workflow helps us work faster.”

Speeding up video reviews tenfold

The LA Rams video team creates approximately 70% of the Ram’s video content in-house. During the off season, the team works on content like Behind the Grind —an ongoing series that profiles individual players in eight-minute documentaries. When games are on, editors create dozens of videos, including highlights, analysis, interviews, hype videos, and other content for use in stadium, on broadcast television, or across social media. The Rams typically ingest about 1,200 assets each game, but that number can vary dramatically. The 2022 season opener, for instance, resulted in closer to 3,800 video assets.

The video team can drop any clips – from broadcast game footage to interviews to smartphone video shot from the sidelines – into the same editing timeline. Editors use motion graphics templates (MOGRTs) created in Adobe After Effects to add and customize transitions, titles, scores, lower thirds, and other information for videos. Since gameday video is often shot in less than ideal conditions — noisy stadiums, crowded locker rooms — editors also work with Adobe Audition to clean up audio.

But the biggest time-saver for the Rams is Frame.io, which enables fast and efficient video review. Typical game videos have anywhere between six to ten reviewers, but high-profile videos or partner content can involve many more.

“Even the highly polished television content needs to be out within 24 hours, otherwise the results of the game start to become irrelevant,” says Gilkeson. “Frame.io has really saved us because it allows us to streamline our reviews tenfold. The platform saves me six hours a week alone on content reviews.”

Gilkeson attributes the time savings to the flexible mobile accessibility and the ability to gather all feedback in a single location.

“Before, we relied on email. We’d get all these email threads from reviewers full of branching conversations and contradictory notes. It was up to the editor to keep track of everything,” says Gilkeson. “Now, everyone’s making or viewing comments in one app, right on the same video. It really makes a difference when you’re reviewing video on mobile. I love having the video review and collaboration platform on my phone. I can send off my notes in minutes. I’ll even review my own video through Frame.io in case I get a new idea when I look at it with fresh eyes.”

Faster video distribution

While the video collaboration platform streamlines reviews, the Rams video team also takes advantage of it to distribute footage and finished pieces. Editors can share videos with external partners as a downloadable presentation with expiration dates to control access. The video team also uses the platform centralize storage of their footage, which makes it easy to share files internally or with video freelancers for smoother collaboration.

The Rams video team is starting to take advantage of Camera to Cloud as a way to get game footage into the hands of editors faster. “Camera to Cloud is going to be huge for us because the faster we can get a highlight out, the more likely our clip will be the one to get the big engagement on social media,” says Gilkeson.

Reaching sports fans with creativity

The Rams might release each video in half a dozen edits and formats: broadcast-ready highlight reels delivered to ESPN, 15 second previews for Twitter, and 1x1 videos for Instagram. Auto-reframe has become a go-to feature to keep the focus of each video in frame, no matter what the format. Media Encoder is also essential to output video for any screen size or resolution.

Artists also work with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects to create any graphics needed for video. When a player joins the team mid-season, for example, artists can quickly edit him into a Rams uniform so that he’s wearing the right team colors when introduced on the big screen.

With the efficiencies gained through the video workflow, the Rams video team has more time to spend on video pre-production, from planning briefs to getting buy-in from partners. They also spend time training themselves on the latest cameras or editing technologies, or finding inspiration by exploring what other teams across the league are doing.

“People need room to be creative,” says Gilkeson. “Working with the Adobe video workflow, we free up time to focus on the narrative and tell stories about the Rams that will get fans excited to support their team.”