Zack Arnold: Award Winning Editor

Just as our industry continues to adapt to new working from home (WFH) conditions, redesigning workflows for this new remote reality, we have had to adapt and develop our products and services to match this new demanding environment. With creative working practices likely to be permanently altered, we are taking a long term view of our investment into what is required to make our customers successful in our current reality. 

During lockdown, we approached top Hollywood film & television editor Zack Arnold to give us his honest review of using our real-time, remote review tool, ClearView Flex in a home working environment. The positives, the negatives--we wanted to hear it all.  

Zack Arnold (ACE) is an award-winning editor (Cobra Kai, Empire, Burn Notice, Shooter, Glee), a member of the American Cinema Editors, a documentary director (GO FAR: The Christopher Rush Story), and creator of the Optimize Yourself program & podcast. His program and podcast helps editors achieve their own version of success in Hollywood (without sacrificing their sanity in the process.)

In Zack’s article he runs through the entire process of receiving the Flexbox, getting setup, collaborating with teams and clients: the whole shebang. His feedback is invaluable in helping us achieve our aim for Flex to provide the same seamless, high-quality and secure experience for users working from home as it is in a facility.  

We like to keep the communication channels between our customers and our product team open and transparent. Feedback like Zack’s is what helps us drive the product forward and helps us ensure that we are delivering solutions that solve real issues and help us make the requisite improvements that make everyone’s experience better. 

Inspired by Zack’s review we are implementing clearer instructions on getting setup effective immediately. We appreciate that whilst our support team are available 24/7 by phone it is sometimes easier to help yourself online first. We’re working on an update to our website with clearer links to our Help Center which we’ve been building out over the course of this year. 

Additionally, since the beginning of stay at home orders, we’ve been looking at ways in which we can optimise our services now that fewer of our customers are streaming direct from their facilities. We’re looking at new hardware models designed for home use and have been tweaking the service to deliver new features to compensate for the performance issues some customers experience due to the overstretched home internet infrastructure. For example our new super-low bitrate option allows users to drop their bitrates to around 1Mbps for extremely low bandwidth streaming options.

Over the summer, we have a slate of features being deployed to our install base to increase colour bit depth, colour chroma, colour space, and audio channels.  In parallel, we are deploying the supporting service offerings (managed bandwidth and security services) to improve the performance of all real-time tools these creatives need while working from home.

We are focused on four feature primary types: security, playback, quality and collaboration, and we continue to strive to improve in all these areas.