At NAB this year, we wanted to do something different…..Not talk about faster workflows. Actually, run one.

We set up on the booth in Las Vegas and filmed interviews and short pieces throughout the day, everyday. At the same time, we had our editor, Ash, working remotely in London.

The goal was straightforward. Capture, edit, and deliver content in near real time. No staging a controlled demo. Just run it as we would on a real production.

Here’s what actually happened.

Simon:

"As soon as we started recording in Las Vegas, I would message Ash that we are going live and he would confirm that he could see the footage was already coming into in CREE8 and on to his timeline as a growing file. We weren't uploading this afterwards or transferring it across, Ash was receiving it in seconds, as it was being captured.

At the same time, he was already opening it up in London, pulling selects and starting to build the edit while we were still filming the next piece.

We were getting final edits  out within about 30 minutes of it being shot which was amazing"

Ash:

"From my side, it didn’t feel like I was working remotely Normally there’s always a delay somewhere amd you’re waiting for footage to come in, or for someone to tell you it’s ready, or dealing with uploads that aren’t quite finished.

Here, the footage was just there as a continuously growing file directly in my timeline - I just hit ‘extend edit’ every 45 seconds and I’d have more content coming through. 

You’re opening something that’s still recording, which takes a second to get used to. But once you’re using the content, it’s exactly like any other working file.

I could start building the edit straight away amd by the time one interview wrapped, I was already part way through cutting it. We were even showing that live at NAB during one of the sessions.

You end up working continuously. You’re not batching things up or waiting for the next step. You’re just moving as the content comes in."

Simon:

"That was the bit that stood out. It didn’t feel like remote production.  I could speak to Ash and he was 5,000 miles away but he might as well have been in an edit suite right next to me. 

What was impressive was we weren’t trying to move faster or do anything much different than I have done in previous shoots like this in my career. We’d just removed the parts that slow things down and once you do that, the speed comes naturally."

Why this matters:

Most production workflows are still built around waiting.

Waiting for files to transfer. Waiting for ingest or waiting for DIT to finish before the next stage can begin.

That structure made sense when everything was physical. It doesn’t make much sense anymore.

What we ran at NAB shows a different way of working. We were  capturing, editing, and delivering almost at the same time. And we could pull in teams from different locations working on the same media, without copying or moving it around.

It’s a small shift in setup, but it changes how quickly a team can move. And right now, that speed is what teams are being judged on.

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE: