Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1334761
BITS & PIECES www.postmagazine.com 4 POST JAN/FEB 2021 WRKFLO SOLUTIONS TO SPECIALIZE IN HYBRID WORKFLOW DESIGN NEW YORK CITY — WrkFlo Solutions is a new provider of innovative workflow management, recruitment and remote collaboration services. The company launched in January with the goal of helping advertising agencies and brands build and operate in-house production more efficiently. Capitalizing on a paradigm shift toward remote teams, WrkFlo Solutions offers a complete solution for building and managing in-house production, spanning technology, security, talent and operations. This includes such tasks as production, editorial, design, visual effects and animation. The company's goal is to streamline the administration of in-house and remote resources, while boosting productivity and reducing costs. "The cause is the pandemic, but the effect has been a significant, permanent shift to the production paradigm, one that requires a new, hybrid infrastructure and ongoing collaboration between on-site and remote artists, project manag- ers and technicians," says WrkFlo Solutions' founder, Peter Corbett. "Even post- COVID, agencies and brands will rely on hybrid workflows that combine on-site staff and technology with external talent and resources. We offer a comprehen- sive solution to simplify the building and management of such hybrid teams." WrkFlo Solutions addresses an often overlooked challenge: security. Huge video and data files are exchanged between in-house and remote workers, often with little security in place. "Freelancers are granted access to company servers with nothing more than a verbal agreement not to share sensitive assets," says Corbett. "We provide tools that allow companies to control access files while enabling full collaboration." In addition to providing turnkey services for managing on-site and remote production units, WrkFlo Solutions assists with freelance and staff recruit- ment across a range of creative, production and technical disciplines. It also offers tools for remote collaboration, quality control, approvals and budgeting. Agencies and brands can opt for ad hoc or all-in-one solutions on a project- or retainer-basis. The company is led by a team of industry veterans whose backgrounds span production, post, engineering, staffing and management. Corbett (Pcorbett@ wrkflo.solutions) has more than 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur and innovator, including founder and/or partner roles with more than a dozen agen- cies, production and post companies. These include Bonfire, Click 3X, Heard City and Sound Lounge. Paul Schneider is an experienced executive producer and post supervisor, who will oversee operations as general manager. Technology and security ser- vices are provided through FlyingMonk, a facility design and engineering firm. Led by Radu Polizu, it has a long history of building dozens of turnkey solutions. Joanne Ferraro, former executive producer at Jump Editorial and Spot Welders in New York, heads talent assessment, freelance procurement and business development. Virtual staffing is offered via Brigade, a specialist in remote editorial, VFX and animation. Headed by Dave Dimeola, it represents a network of more than a thousand editors, producers, visual effects artists, colorists, designers, animators and other often hard-to-find talent. FACILIS DELIVERS NEW REMOTE-ACCESS PRODUCT HUDSON, MA — Facilis Technology (facilis.com), the provider of high perfor- mance shared storage solutions for collaborative workflows, has introduced new products and features aimed at remote access and management. Facilis Edge Sync is a multi-site synchronization product that uses the cloud as inter- mediary storage for synchronizing data to remote workstations bi-direction- ally with on-prem storage. Edge Sync enables media sharing among multiple instances of editing software from Adobe, Blackmagic Design and Avid. "This product not only lets editors at home access the latest media being generated in the facility, but it also serves as an off-site backup for critical proj- ect data," explains Facilis' Jim McKenna. "When media is added in the facility or at a remote location, it's instantly available in every other location as a sparse file that can be restored on demand or on schedule for realtime playback." Facilis Edge is available as an add-on to the Facilis Object Cloud integrated cloud storage product or as a standalone feature, using a customer's AWS S3, Azure or Wasabi cloud storage. "It's really exciting technology," says Jason Vigue of Dallas-based Republic Editorial. "We have a workgroup of 12 remote artists and have been working to further centralize the files everyone is creating. After installing and testing Facilis Edge, I can see how this will really help us move forward into a much more efficient method of collaboration." Facilis FastTracker V.3.7 also incorporates new features for remote access, including a web client that enables browser access through the internet to the internal FastTracker database for preview, tagging and download of source video and proxies. Web ingest workflows enable remote users to upload from home or on location, and automatically make those files available for any other FastTracker user on-premises or remote. FastTracker also serves as a proxy generator for remote access workflows, either through VPN or cloud. Proxies are generated to the cloud in the same path as the source volume, to enable easy relinking for remote editors on Facilis Edge working on projects created in-facility. Edge Sync and Object Cloud features are available now. FastTracker V.3.7 with web access and remote ingest, as well as new transcription and logging features, will be available in Q1. (L-R) Paul Schneider, Radu Polizu, Joanne Ferraro, Peter Corbett and Dave Dimeola