How Simplicity is Transforming Video Production

June 14, 2013, 08:09 AM

https://www.aotg.com/how-simplicity-is-transforming-video-production/

How Simplicity is Transforming Video Production By David Peto, CEO, Aframe Here’s a news flash for all you editors, production experts, and creatives: You have won the biggest technology battle in the short and happy history of our industry. So stand up and take a bow. And please, for all our sake, go assert your power loudly and often – because we need you now, more than ever.
What battle, you say? For decades the big cheese, the kingpin in production circles was the CTO of a studio or a production company. He (and it was always ‘he’ back then) called the shots. Vendors sold their technology to the CTO, only to have them basically tell editors and producers what products they had to use. Unfortunately, user friendliness – what it was really like to use that tool – was either low on the hit list, or omitted entirely. The measure of a worthy product was the number of items on a feature list, not how these features were delivered to the end user.
This forced an entire industry to put up with clunky, hard to use technology. The problem is, we’re creatives and what we deliver is judged ultimately on its creativity. Producers would find themselves wasting time and effort tweaking arcane settings hidden deep in the bowels of a product, just to achieve a desired look. Instead, they should have been spending that time conceptualizing how they could achieve an even better look than they previously had time to think about. Somehow the tool itself became a giant diversion from the primary mission of our deliverables, forcing us to focus our thought processes on using the tool rather than producing the creative.
Today social media and the “consumerization of IT” have rewritten mainstream computing as we know it. Maybe it was Facebook, or maybe it was the iPhone and the “Bring your Own Device” trend. In our personal lives today we expect to access our bank accounts and credit cards when we need them, how we want and where we want without hassles. Naturally we expect our work lives to function in the same way.
Yet, amazingly, the professional video industry is one of the last to embrace this concept; that ease of use equates to productivity and, ultimately, better creativity. However, we are seeing important signs of a breakthrough. The balance of power between the CTO and the end user has shifted and users are more often telling the CTO what works for them, and what doesn’t. In other words user adoption is becoming a key factor in the decision making process. This isn’t anything new in other industries, but it represents a dramatic shift in ours.
The launch Adobe Anywhere and other recent debuts are clear emblems of the way that ease of use is transcending complex, lengthy feature lists. With all of that said, we can’t expect the future of our industry to be delivered on tools that simply offer style over substance. It’s clear that new products need to innovate in their feature sets yet they need to be delivered to the user in an intuitive, logical way.
Products that don’t score well with users are quickly left behind – perhaps slowly, because their diminished revenues lead to slower product refresh cycles. But, ultimately, feedback on forums like AOTG and elsewhere is being heard. Clunky dogs that are feature rich but ugly to use are not the ones that win today, and they certainly won’t tomorrow.
At Aframe we spend ridiculous amounts of time and development effort simplifying the user interface so it doesn’t stand in the way. We’re built on some seriously heavyweight technology, but that’s expected from an industry built on feature lists. What helps us win business is the appeal of the simple way we deliver our functionality to the people actually using Aframe. While we’re only one data point in an astonishingly vast array of industry suppliers, increasingly when we’re vying for an important account, we are seeing the voice of the end user in the meeting.
It’s imperative that the professional video industry performs a radical rethink of the user interface for most products used in the most saturated corners of the market. Production companies and post houses should consider what ease of use means to their teams and the genuine benefits simplicity can offer to their core creative offering. This means actively evaluating the features and functionalities of existing equipment vendors as well as those in planned future purchases, whilst seriously thinking about the usability of those features for the actual end users.
In the end, it's a mistake to think of simple, easy to use interfaces as an addition to a technical feature set. Simplicity and ease of use makes it a people thing. And creative people are our most important asset.
Author’s Bio: David Peto, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Aframe
David Peto is CEO and co-founder of Aframe, which he started in 2009 after building one of the largest post production companies in London and witnessing his customers’ disillusionment with the cumbersome solutions they were forced to use to be creative. Today, Aframe owns cloud infrastructure in the UK and across the US that serves thousands of users including the BBC, MTV, Red Bull, Shine Media and Blink Films with time and cost-saving cloud video production and asset management solutions.
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Here’s a news flash for all you editors, production experts, and creatives: You have won the biggest technology battle in the short and happy history of our industry. So stand up and take a bow. And please, for all our sake, go assert your power loudly and often – because we need you now, more than ever.

#aframe