Adapting to Remote Work During the COVID-19 Crisis

COVID-19 has brought on a tsunami of new concerns and disruptive changes to work life . While many modern companies are familiar with remote teams, many more have been forced to jump ship into their sofas and adjust to working from home for the first time as an entire team.

Now, more than ever, we appreciate the tools that help us stay connected to our teams when we can’t work in the same space. Understanding that this is new territory for some, we want to offer extra support.

Free iconik to Help Teams

If your team is trying to adjust to working away from the office, let us help. Request a free trial with $300 worth of credits. With this, a team of 5 users could use iconik for 30 days

Watch Our Remote Editing Demonstration

We hosted a webinar to show what remote editing and real-time collaboration looks like in iconik as our team created a video from their homes based in the USA and Sweden.

▶ Watch the webinar now

We address a lot in this this video:

• Ingesting media
• Making everything available from the cloud
• Proxy workflows
• Tagging media with custom metadata fields
• Adding annotations
• Review and Approval processes
• Having multiple editors use a Premiere Pro project

Google is one company that has been recognized for its early response to COVID-19. Beyond encouraging their people to work from home when possible, they have set up a fund to offer sick-leave to part-time employees or vendors who suffer from symptoms of the novel coronavirus.

Google Developer Studio, an internal team of 150+ creatives, has been using iconik to help facilitate remote work. iconik allows their distributed teams from multiple continents to find, organize, and share media and Adobe Premiere Pro projects. The proxy workflows has made it easier for editors on slower internet connections to work from home.

iconik has made it much easier for our team to find and organize footage. Thankfully we had already implemented iconik as a crucial part of our team's workflow prior to needing to go remote, it has made the transition much easier. We're now transitioning to having our content creators record from home and deliver to our remote editors, and iconik is making it much easier to achieve this- Ray Tarara, Google Developer Studio, Operations

We Care for Remote Teams

Dispersed teams was a major trend that helped birth iconik. The four industry trends that inspired our team to build iconik at the start were:

1. Businesses are moving to the cloud, and the intermediate step is hybrid cloud for large amounts of data.
2. The global datasphere is massively growing
3. The natural language of 1 to many communication is video
4. Remote teams are on the rise 👈

Recent events have put a spotlight on the iconik features that allow people to work with media from anywhere. We want to help bridge those gaps between distances and departments.

If you are looking for new ideas for media workflows, here is what we’ve seen others do

Access Media Everywhere

As self-isolation expands and delights introverts the world over, team members need to have tools that let them connect with each other from their laptops or phones. A parent at home with sick children can use iconik in any free moment to add to the conversations around their team’s media.

With the hybrid cloud model, teams can have access to their entire archive from anywhere even when the hi-res files are stored locally. Complex Networks is one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Media Companies of 2020 according to Fast Company. They are what a modern entertainment company looks like.

With hit shows like Hot Ones and Sneaker Shopping, their content reaches the coveted 18-34-year-old male audience and is a top 3 entertainment network for females 18-34 in the US, per comScore. To keep 800TB of that content available to their sprawling team across six locations, they use iconik. Cinesys Oceana worked with Complex to implement a custom project-based workflow and archive solution with iconik.

Even as offices close, and cities restrict where people are able to go, the teams at Complex are continuing to work with their content.

File Sharing

Asking for a video or image seems like a small thing until it’s you looking for 20+ minutes to find it. The International Military Sports Council , or CISM , is the 2nd largest sports organization after the Olympic Association. They have a global network spanning 138 nations. In order to easily find and share their media, they began a project to digitize and index 70 years worth of content in iconik.

If anyone requests video from a past event, the CISM team is able to easily find and share it, even from their iphone.

Beyond a Link

Easy sharing is one thing, but keeping control over your media and maintaining security is another thing. Luckily, we do both those things well for our customers by giving them:

• The ability to share with anyone, whether that be an internal user, or an external stakeholder who receives a link in their email
• Extensive rights management to allow or restrict user actions like what data they can see about media
• Shares with optional passwords and expiration dates

Editing Video Together

Passing media and projects between teams is necessary for video production. Sending huge files , however, can present a problem for those with a standard broadband connection. Proxy workflows in iconik allow our customers to pass files and projects back and forth at a fraction of the size.

Translation LLC is a New York-based brand development and marketing firm. Its tailored cloud solution from BASE Media Cloud uses iconik to keep its creative team connected as they help ambitious brands like NFL, NBA, and Budweiser harness the power of culture through their unique mix of experts in culture, technology, and storytelling.

“We bring a lot of unique perspectives together in our teams, and solutions like iconik and BASE Media Cloud leverage that by keeping our team of 17 creatives constantly connected to the media they produce. Having everything available in the cloud allows us to stay efficient and flexible.”- Nick Petillo, Director of Information Technology

The iconik panel for Adobe Premiere Pro puts every piece of content next to your timeline. This video shows how the iconik panel quickly resolves missing files when teams share projects.

Review and Approval

You never know where key stakeholders will be when corresponding about media. Having tools to review and approve media in the cloud keeps the creative process moving along. Our customers can invite others to add time-based comments and mark assets as approved or rejected, even if they are in the middle of binge-watching “The Witcher” on a tablet in bed.

Everwell needed a way to work with new editors and producers on the fly. From ingestion to approving final versions, they needed tools to allow them upload and review new video from anywhere. Before they were shipping harddrives with new content to headquarters where it would be added to the on-premise storage. Now, their teams upload raw content straight into iconik and can continue creating remotely.

We’re in This With You

This situation is tough. No doubt it’s painful for many in our industry, but we know creators can take the worst of times and use it for fuel to inspire and engage people with stories. Even in quarantine, our story, and yours, goes on.

Our entire iconik team wishes you a healthy and productive year.