Best Collaboration Tools For a Quick Recovery Post Strike

Hooray - the strikes are over! It’s been a turbulent year, but as the wheels of our industry begin to turn once again, Sohonet looks at the best collaboration tools that filmmakers need to help them ramp up operations quickly, and ensure distributed teams remain aligned and costs are kept to a minimum.

Project Management

Whether you’re working across one or many projects, having one, centralised platform to manage tasks, helps you prioritise and streamline your team's work and minimise deadlines and overruns. We’d consider using one of these centralised platforms, depending on your teams needs:

Asana

A user-friendly platform to track, organise tasks, streamline workflows, and meet deadlines effectively.

Trello

Visualise projects intuitively using boards and cards for seamless task management.

Jira

Tailored for meticulous issue tracking, particularly suitable for software development.

Smartsheet

Harness collaborative work management enriched with powerful features to enhance project efficiency.

Messaging

Slack

Effective and seamless communication is paramount for remote teams. Our top recommendation is Slack, a platform renowned for its user-friendly interface, robust security features, and engaging functionalities that not only enhance teamwork but also ensure the confidentiality of sensitive conversations.

Design Tools

A great design collaboration platform can transform your team's creativity, streamline issue resolution, and offer project transparency. It also simplifies feedback and approvals. Some top options include:

Miro

A dynamic platform for real-time brainstorming and collaboration, regardless of team locations. It fosters creativity through online whiteboard features.

‍Figma

‍‍A real-time design tool that enables global design teams to co-create seamlessly, with instant updates and comments for efficient collaboration

File Sharing

In the creative realm, the efficient sharing of files is vital, especially when dealing with large and sensitive data. To meet this essential need, we strongly recommend focusing on tools that provide both security and user-friendliness, all while seamlessly integrating with your existing security protocols.

FileRunner

For lightning-fast file transfers that are not only affordable but also incredibly user-friendly, look no further than FileRunner. It's highly regarded for its simplicity, and unique no-download, no-install setup, making it the perfect choice for creatives looking to send large files, quickly and securely through their web browser. ‍

Diary Management

Meeting tight deadlines and coordinating a globally dispersed team with demanding schedules can be a formidable task. Fortunately, there are excellent diary scheduling tools available that can seamlessly integrate into your workflow, simplifying your workload.

Calendly

Our preferred choice is Calendly, a widely acclaimed scheduling app. It excels at automating calendar management, making your scheduling process nearly effortless and significantly enhancing your efficiency.

Real-Time Collaboration

In today's dispersed creative landscape, keeping your team aligned on vision is essential. While offline workflows have their place, they can slow down collaborative decision-making just as you are trying to get your projects moving again. That's where a real-time solution becomes crucial, not only to save time but also to preserve creative intent and budget.

ClearView Flex‍

ClearView is an Emmy® Award-winning real-time review platform that provides creative teams with a user-friendly tool to stream live, encrypted video & audio with sub-100ms of latency from any source (edit/ VFX workstation/ camera/ video village…) via HDMI, SDI or NDI to up to 40 viewers on tablets, phones, laptops, or Apple TV. This not only enhances collaboration but also helps you save both time and money.

Offline Review  

In instances where schedules clash or when an offline communication approach proves more efficient, a secure and asynchronous review tool is invaluable. It empowers stakeholders to collaborate at a time that suits them, minimising disruptions to their workflow.

ClearView Rush

For this purpose, our recommendation is ClearView Rush, a secure near-time review tool. ClearView Rush offers options to review dailies, cuts, and other production assets. It enables annotations and facilitates key creative decisions as a team, all within a secure, near-time framework. This tool is designed to support creatives from both the production and the studio, bridging the gap when they can't physically be in the same room at the same time.

Selecting collaboration tools that align with your team's unique needs, guided by factors like ease-of-use, reliability, security, cost-effectiveness, support, scalability, and features, is key to a swift recovery post strikes. By harnessing these tools effectively, you'll not only boost efficiency, and cut costs and timelines but also fortify your ability to thrive in an industry that thrives on creativity and collaboration.