[Music] [Becca Dobyns] Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. My name is Becca Dobyns, and I am the Senior Manager of Video Production at Adobe. And I'm currently based in Los Angeles, California.
[Rachel Siemens] Hello. My name is Rachel Siemens, and I am a Product Marketing Manager on the Frame.io team here at Adobe. And I'm currently based in the Northwest. We're excited to dive in and walk you through how our in-house creative and marketing teams use Frame.io and other tools like Adobe Firefly, Premiere Pro, and Workfront to collaborate effectively so we can ship high impact creative quickly.
In a surprise to, I'm sure, nearly none of you watching, today, nearly every enterprise scale marketing campaign involves creating high quality video content on faster timelines and with tighter budgets. And nearly all of those campaigns repurpose that video content for a variety of applications and platforms from broadcast TV, streaming platforms, and social media to websites and direct marketing emails.
As part of a large marketing organization ourselves, we know how challenging it can be to create video content at scale. We've earned recognition for our unique content creating video case studies about customers from Princess Cruises to Disney+ content to highlight their use of Frame.io. These videos yield hundreds of assets across many formats and involve creative contributors, project managers, marketing stakeholders, all working together to produce video that drives results. In other words, we understand our customers because we are our customers.
If there's anything we've learned, it's that marketing organizations have to maintain high standards on compressed schedules. For example, when we shoot a customer testimonial, our talent is often doing their job as we capture them in action. Our challenge is to respect their time and stay out of the way while also trying to deliver something that exceeds the requirements of our creative briefs. Really, there's no difference than making spots with elite athletes or highly paid actors on busy sets.
We've walked in your shoes, experienced your pain, and as a result, have focused on designing new and novel ways of reducing time and travel, shortening review cycles, and decreasing friction along the way, which equates to giving us more time to focus on the creative aspects of what we're making.
But because we also produce a product, our ethos is that as we create our videos, we want to show our customers, not just the video itself, but how we get how we get it done. With that, it's our pleasure to walk you through our guide to crafting efficient, effective video for marketing campaigns so you can benefit from the many shortcuts we've discovered and avoid the speed bumps we've encountered. Let's start at the beginning.
Video production is incredibly complex, and pre-production is one of the most critical stages when you're setting up your project. In the pre-production stage, for example, you have tons of different planning materials that include things like location photos, lens tasks, call sheets, casting sessions, inspiration boards built-in Adobe Express, designs from a production designer, shot lists, scripts, or even initial storyboards or reference images crafted with Firefly. The list can go on and on, on the different types of assets you need to align early on in a video project. Adding to this complexity, often not all of your collaborators are going to be in the same place or even the same time zone. Marketers and producers, directors, cinematographers, art directors, set designers, and casting agents might never be physically together throughout the entire process. What you need is that one place that brings everyone together for all your assets to live, so stakeholders and you can effectively collaborate and work in progress on the content you're aligning around. A centralized hub that's secure so that you can ensure that only those who should have access to sensitive creative IP can get it, but also a space that is available to work in at any hour of the day or night no matter what time zone.
Frame.io is that hub. Purpose-built for creative, it's the synapse point between assets, process, tools, and stakeholders. This creative workflow layer keeps everything secure, centralized, and organized in one place in the cloud. By reducing the amount of time it takes to find, share, review, and approve assets, Frame.io helps you increase your content and collaboration velocity while saving time throughout your entire production workflow. The best part is that by minimizing the time you spend on organizational tasks or finding assets, the more time you get to focus on the quality of your final product. What's more is that because Frame.io is part of the Adobe family of tools, streamlining your content supply chain has never been easier. Ops and marketing folks use Workfront for the big rocks like strategy, planning, resource allocation, and task assignments. Then creative teams take those larger tasks from Workfront and break them down into Frame.io, which has been thoughtfully built to handle the recursive iterative nature of creative content production while also providing robust support for collaboration with any and all stakeholders like marketing, legal, leadership, and more to drive towards final approval. Finally, marketers use Adobe Experience Manager to distribute that final creative you collaborated on in Frame.io across various channels like websites, paid media, and email.
Let's dive into the how.
One of the benefits of using Frame.io is the ability to put all of the information that's necessary for content production into your Frame.io project. The flexible folder structure allows you to organize your files the way that works best for you. And if you've established a way to organize your projects that you love, you can create a template for future projects so they're always structured the same way, which means that you can worry less about how to approach a project each time. You already have your game plan in place. It's just the players who have changed.
From creative and marketing leadership to directors, writers, cinematographers, location scouts, art directors, really all of your creative collaborators, Frame.io lets everyone who needs to be a part of the marketing strategy and creative execution talk to each other in one place. You can invite creative leaders and contributors to use Frame.io as a central repository for their ideas and assets, then add brand and marketing contributors to give them visibility into the work in progress creative to ensure that it supports the brief or the goal of the campaign and complies with brand standards across all creative assets. The earlier all contributors and collaborators are aligned, the less likely there are to be disagreements that affect timelines later on in the process.
That brings us to the issue of access. Frame.io makes it easy to control who has access and what kind of access they have to parts and pieces of a particular project. You can control everything from whether someone can upload or download assets, whether they're able to share assets or work in progress with others, and whether they can leave comments on assets or just view them. Let's use our own company, Adobe, as an example. We have offices all around the world from which our marketing and in-house creative teams regularly collaborate. On top of that, we also work with multiple global agencies, freelancers, and contractors. And all of those creatives need different access to brand guidelines and media, like video or product libraries, templates, fonts, colors, logos, animated titles, you name it. Creative managers like myself often want a high level of flexible control so we can effectively manage everything from library access to file transfer authorization to edit and comment access, all in service of ensuring consistency across the many different creative entities our team manages.
Beyond that, when we're in the thick of creating new video assets, it can be unnecessary and distracting for our friends in marketing and other stakeholders across the company to have deep, unfettered access during the entirety of the creative process. In this case, we found it helpful to restrict access to specific points along the life cycle of the project until we've reached a point where decision needs to be made or stakeholder feedback is required in order to move forward in the project. This is easily accomplished in Frame.io by creating a folder or link that's exclusive for their review at a particular moment in time.
Frame.io enables you to quickly upload a wide variety of file types, video files, audio, PDFs, spreadsheets, design files, JPEGs, whatever is relevant to your project. So every possible type of asset you might need to share with your pre-production team or stakeholders is readily available and impeccably organized. Producers, project managers, or coordinators can add all the relevant production-related documents to their Frame.io project. Maps, instructions, call sheets are all accessible in a central place to allow the crew and clients or whoever needs the information to access it. Our producers also like to create a production book that serves as an overview for clients or marketers who might be attending the shoot, noting who the various department heads are, what they're shooting at which location, and other relevant information that might give them a helpful overview throughout the process of production. Once all of your initial project files are in Frame.io, you can then organize them using custom metadata fields and collections. These features allow you to assign tags to your assets and then group them together by whatever criteria you like. This makes organizing specific parts of a project, like location scouting, easy by letting you group clips or stills by location, scene, or time of day, for example. You can create collections for casting by role and filter by how many stars you rate their performance. You can use collections to organize wardrobe or production design ideas. Really, whatever organizational structure works for you can be built in Frame.io. The possibilities are limitless. Time to talk about production.
By day one of your shoot, there are even more people who've been looped into the project. You likely have an editorial crew onboard, and visual effects might be in some previous stage. There may be a need to have the production collaborating with either or both of these departments while the shoot is ongoing. Or in the case of a more complex shoot, you might have a second unit in a location other than the main unit and want to have a collaboration between both of these units. You might also have stakeholders, for example, an agency team, producers, or marketers who are unable to attend the shoot because of scheduling or because production wants to keep travel costs down. Or you might wish to reduce your carbon footprint by decreasing the number of people flying to a given location. We use Frame Camera to Cloud to maintain the connection between people and teams who may not be on set or on location with us. The Camera to Cloud workflow allows us to send footage directly from the camera to Frame.io so stakeholders can monitor the production on their mobile devices or computers and provide feedback no matter where they are. Another nice benefit of Camera to Cloud is that because we can directly transfer from our cameras to Frame.io, there's less urgency to manually backup files, which reduces the time we spend on media management and shipping hard drives to our post production teams. Not to mention the worry that those hard drives might be delayed or lost in transit. The results, editors can immediately download dailies and begin assembling cuts and can even give critical instructions to someone on set to ensure that they have what they need for the final product. Or in the case of coverage for live events like sports, music, red carpets, the time between capturing the moment and sharing it on social media can be reduced from days to hours or even minutes.
As a product marketer who often creates briefs and has a vested interest and responsibility in ensuring that the final output supports my GTM strategy, I find a lot of value in being able to be a fly on the wall during the production period. With Frame.io, I can see what my counterparts on the creative side are capturing and leave comments on specific assets if necessary. For example, maybe I want to ensure we capture a particular sound bite that highlights a specific value prop for an even more specific persona. I can communicate that all within Frame.io and feel secure in the knowledge that my creative colleagues are on set, and they're getting my feedback instantly. And with the platform's award-winning apps for iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV, I can access that material from anywhere I may be. Another advantage is that on set crew like directors, producers, or script supervisors can view what's being shot on their mobile devices, eliminating the need to crowd around a video village. It's especially handy for directors who need to monitor what a second unit is doing in a different part of a studio or at a different location.
Because proxies and original camera files contain the same time code and metadata, editors can start cutting with proxies while the shoot is still in progress. By using the C2C proxies as soon as they receive them, they're able to later link back to the OCF camera files later. The C2C ecosystem also supports software apps that allow you to immediately apply LUTs so editors can receive color corrected dailies without waiting for drives to be shipped and the dailies to be processed in house.
This allows them to contact someone on set to request additional takes before they've moved on to the next setup, vastly reducing the need for reshoots or to assure the director that they have what they need so they can move on to the next setup with peace of mind. Directors can also choose their favorite key takes as they're shooting, making use of collections to rate and group their selects. This results in a closer collaborative relationship since editors have a clearer view of what the director is looking for, which speeds up the rough cut process. What Frame.io also does is allow the team members to have proxies in their pocket so they can easily deliver assets to a different team working on different tasks. Imagine you're creating a video, but there's also a web landing page that needs those assets. A producer like myself or a coordinator can immediately send those assets from Frame to the web team so that they can begin working with them days before when they might ordinarily receive those assets.
High quality creative is a differentiator for any brand in today's market. So when you're investing in a video shoot, ensuring that your director's creative intent is evident in the final product is key to a successful marketing campaign. The real time logging feature in the Frame.io Camera to Cloud workflow is yet another tool that makes it faster and easier to achieve that outcome. Real-Time Logging incorporates a handheld or camera mounted device that lets directors or stakeholders simply push a button to indicate whatever reaction that button is mapped to. One button can be mapped to indicate a great take, another to indicate an unusable take, another to which keyword highlights a particular value proposition. As the editor receives the dailies, they immediately know which takes to focus on and which to ignore. Our creative team uses this feature extensively on interview-style productions in partnership with marketers like myself and directors. For example, our editor knows which takes I like in terms of the subject talking about a particular feature or value prop, as well as what our director likes about the way the subject say expresses something. They might also use this feature to flag a technical problem in a shot that had an otherwise good sound bite. Editors and assistant editors no longer have to wait for drives to be shipped or dailies to be processed to begin cutting. The clips in Frame.io only need to be imported into the editor's NLE. Directors, clients, and stakeholders can begin to see rough edits or sequences as they're still shooting, giving them the ability to capture additional angles or performances. Or if there's demand for a quick cut to go to social media or broadcast clips, those can all be finalized and delivered within hours or even minutes.
The time savings of Real-Time Logging can literally be measured in days, especially when combined with Adobe Premiere Pro's speech-to-text feature, which gives you searchable transcripts automatically. It's now possible for an editor to search for whatever word or phrase a marketer wants to highlight or easily find the exact take that the director likes. Our team has found that with this workflow, RTL, and speech-to-text, we can literally save up to weeks on a given project. We've actually conducted shoots where we've left set with a rough cut already 90% done. This value extends beyond just speed. It means that our director has the creative control and opportunity to shape the rough cut even before leaving set.
Beyond the shoot, there are often a wide variety of creatives producing assets that find their way into the finished video. Depending on the size and scope, this can include things like titles, motion graphics, animations, visual effects, sound effects, music, social media, or landing pages. Some or all of those assets are likely in various stages of production at the same time and require exchanging or repurposing assets for the many deliverables required across your campaign. Keeping track of where assets are and how to access them is one of the more frustrating and time-consuming aspects of post-production. Frame.io allows you to centralize assets within a project in the cloud and to upload or download them no matter where your collaborators are located. You can create dedicated folders containing frequently used assets, such as logos, brand specifications, or animated titles, and that allows my creative collaborators to access or share them without someone needing to first download and then distribute. Additionally, post-production producers or project managers can also easily track where assets are stored in case questions arise from stakeholders, letting their creative stay focused on their work without interruptions from nosy marketers like myself.
Frame.io is known for its super fast industry leading upload capabilities. Whether transferring assets or cuts from Creative Cloud apps like Adobe Premiere Pro, Lightroom, or After Effects using the built-in web uploader or by using our desktop Transfer app to preserve file folder structure, the upload speed is twice as fast as other cloud storage providers.
Frame.io is not only the fastest, most polished, and easiest way to share work in progress, it's also the best way for creatives and stakeholders alike to give feedback that's accurate and actionable. Because Frame.io accommodates for many kinds of assets and file formats, you can easily leave feedback directly on video frames, as well as photos, script pages, character designs, audio files, briefs, and more. In Frame.io, all incoming feedback is directly tied to specific points or moments on the asset itself to keep feedback in context and actionable. Another time saver is the ability to create version stacks of assets. By stacking the most recent version of an asset on a cut on top of the previous one, there's no confusion about which is the correct version to view. But it's also simple to look back at an earlier version and evaluate them side by side using the comparison viewer to ensure all feedback was adequately addressed. The platform is also super easy for less technical clients or stakeholders to use. If Rachel, for example, needs to provide guidance on whether the story supports the brief or whether the brand or product is being correctly displayed, I can easily invite her into the process without requiring her to possess a lot of technical know-how because Frame.io's intuitive design. What all of this leads to is a reduction in misunderstanding between creatives and stakeholders, centralized assets and work in progress material that is both accessible and secure, and more focused meaningful reviews, all of which result in faster approvals and higher quality deliverables for the various teams that I work with across marketing to deploy in their campaigns. Sharing pre-release content is always a major security concern for our customers, whether they're BMW with a new car design or Disney with footage from a popular film franchise. That's why Frame.io was designed with security in mind. For example, when it's time to share a link for review, you can designate the link as invite only. For those who are granted access to the project, you can adjust access controls at the account level. In fact, Frame.io comes equipped with a whole slew of enterprise-ready security and governance features to ensure that any and all intellectual property shared through the platform is secure. When it comes to delivery, things can get complicated fast. Say you're ready to hand off finished hero video, seems simple enough. But marketing needs versions with and without titles and potentially in many languages. Your campaign team may need shorter cut downs that might live on landing pages or get inserted into emails. You might also be delivering assets to the social media team for organic and paid social media activities. They'll need versions with and without a logo, in 16:9, in 9:16, in 4:5, in 1:1. By the time you're done, you might have hundreds of versions of that one hero video that you need to deliver to multiple teams across marketing. In short, creative teams often have a complex matrix of deliverables that they need to be able to give to different marketing teams who require multiple variations of a single asset so that they can plug them into various places and platforms that they own. That's why organization is critical, and that's where Frame.io can help.
Our team has created a folder structure for deliverables that lends itself to organizing the chaos. It's simple to create and intuitive for the end user to access. Imagine you have an ad where the finished creative was called workflow. In the folder called workflow, you can place the final ad along with all of its various formats. You can see on the folder how many items it contains, and you can give the marketer or distribution person a link to that folder along with permission to download the assets, and they've got exactly what they need without having to hunt for anything. If a change or update is made on an asset, you can simply add the most up-to-date version into Frame.io, eliminating the tedium of manually swapping out versions within folders or managing links for your stakeholders. The most recent asset sits nearly on top of the version stack, so there's no digging through file names to see which one is really the final version. Additionally, I can build collections for all of the various marketing and creative teams that need them in just a few clicks. For my social media team, for example, I can include all the variations they need grouped by dimension or platform. And because collections update in real-time, anytime a new variation is complete, I can simply update the metadata of that particular asset, and it will be automatically added to the social media team's collection without me having to go through the manual process of updating it myself. What's more, all of the same permissions you get with the traditional share flow apply in this instance as well.
For large and often distributed marketing organizations, having a central library that anyone working on a campaign can access is a massive time saver. From logo and title treatments to motion graphics to images and so much more, an organized repository of approved creative, which can be used throughout the content production process for a campaign, is something that just makes sense. Once again, folder structure, custom metadata, collections, and permissions can help members of large teams find exactly what they need without having to hunt for the right person to ask or plow through complicated directories or multiple cloud storage tools. With Frame.io, marketers can reference the many assets used to produce campaign deliverables for reuse across different presentations, demos, and to create new collateral, or even as inspiration for new projects. Having an intuitive, well-organized place for assets at various stages of content production can save someone hours or even days. Rather than having to spend time tracking down assets from previous campaigns, there's a clear path with Frame.io's project structure that cuts out time wasted just trying to find what you need. As touched on earlier, the metadata powered framework enables faster and more accurate search using either out of the box metadata or the customized fields you assign. Creating collections for future use is especially handy because collections update in real-time as new assets are added.
When we look back at the stories our customers have shared, their findings are consistent with our own experience that a more connected workflow fosters a better creative environment. Just as Frame.io has helped our team, it's also helped hundreds of organizations spend less time wrangling logistics resulting in tangible savings, all while giving creative collaborators more accurate feedback and more time to make their work the best it can be. And because we want your creative workflows to be seamless, we're continuing to deliver integrations like the comments panel for Premiere Pro and our connection to Lightroom and other Adobe Creative Cloud applications. Additionally, we're shipping connections with Fusion that deliver a more consistent content review experience and promote a unified workflow between the creative operations managers, marketers, and other stakeholders that live in Workfront and on their creative counterparts that have standardized on Frame. From the earliest stages of ideation until and even beyond final delivery, Frame.io gives marketers and creatives the flexibility, security, and central space to work more efficiently and effectively across teams. With Frame.io, creative teams are able to consistently deliver high impact innovative content at record speeds, equipping marketers like myself with campaign creative that is not only of high quality, but also helps to differentiate my product in a crowded market.
Thank you, everyone. [Music]
