When it comes to creative review, consistency is the key. Yet, even today, many creative agencies and production studios use a mixed bag of solutions to manage workflows, consolidate feedback and facilitate approvals of their digital media projects. This can be a nightmare for project-related communication – making delays, inefficient workflows and budget overruns all too common.
Canadian company ReviewStudio offers a real-time, mobile-friendly collaborative platform for creative project groups to share, markup and approve digital content including videos, images, and PDF files. Unlike most generic project management applications, the tool offers a unique “media-centric” approach that presents all project communications and management tasks directly in the context of the media being produced.
ReviewStudio develops services and software tools for marketing, education and creative teams who need a faster and easier way to view and review comments on their digital media projects. ReviewStudio offers a visual and collaborative approach to collecting and consolidating feedback and approvals, keeping everyone on the same page throughout the course of a project.
Their clients come from a wide variety of creative disciplines – including marketing, digital production, videography and photography, design, and education. ReviewStudio gives them innovative tools to collaborate effectively and realize the full potential of their creative efforts.
An Enthusiastic Frontrunner
Stuart Feldman is a Co-founder and President of ReviewStudio. With a background in both the fields of architecture and computer graphics, Stuart started his career as a co-founder of Lightscape Technologies, a pioneering 3D visualization software that gave architects and designers the ability to accurately visualize, analyze and present their virtual 3D projects under real-world lighting conditions.
After the acquisition of Lightscape by Autodesk, Stuart became a senior project manager at Autodesk for design visualization software and later managed a project to extend the availability of 3D tools (“Virtual Photography”) to marketing professionals.
Through his roles at Lightscape and Autodesk, Stuart developed close relationships with many design, production and advertising agencies and became very familiar with the specific workflow issues in coordination and collaboration that all these organizations were dealing with.
Born of Necessity
ReviewStudio began as a project to help the art production staff of a major motion picture address their challenges and get timely feedback and approvals from multiple stakeholders spread across three continents. Poor communication and a lack of effective collaboration were having a severe impact on their production schedules and budget. In response, the ReviewStudio team developed a simple, web-based solution for uploading, sharing and reviewing digital comps – significantly streamlining the review and approval cycles.
Since that initial solution, the ReviewStudio team has continued engaging and collaborating closely with clients to address their needs. “We have now expanded,” notes Stuart, “to address a much broader range of creative workflows in advertising, film and video production, education, and publishing.”
An Emerging Leader in Creative Project Management
ReviewStudio’s innovative approach to media-centric project management helps creative teams deliver their projects on time and on budget. Some of its most important features and benefits include:
- Simplicity: An easy-to-use, non-technical markup tool that lets collaborators and clients immediately review, markup and approve a wide range of digital media files from any web browser or mobile device. Users have no need to purchase, install or learn specialized tools or software to provide clear and effective feedback.
- Agility: Accelerated design and production cycles through centralized content display and markups. Collaborative threaded discussions help avoid multiple iterations by centralizing feedback from all project collaborators. An integrated version tracker makes it easy to follow and compare the progress of a project from early design to finished deliverable.
- Dialogue: Project team members can hold live online review presentations where all collaborators can view, discuss and markup content together. This functionality helps to resolve issues faster and avoid communication errors.
- Reference: The platform maintains a complete, searchable record of all content-related communications and activities that take place over the course of project development. This helps team members stay organized and avoid conflicts by providing a verifiable audit trail of all review activities.
Unique Methodology is the Key
ReviewStudio’s distinctive advantage is that supports both the independent and synchronized collaborative review of digital media.
Independent reviews allow clients or collaborators in different locations or time zones to view content and provide feedback independently at their convenience.
Synchronized reviews allow teams to work together from remote locations to brainstorm or discuss various aspects of a project in live real-time review sessions. A team member can synchronize the playback of a slide-show or video with any number of online participants and stop on any frame to discuss and markup the content together.
This combination of independent review and real-time conferencing makes ReviewStudio particularly well-suited for the iterative and collaborative nature of creative project workflows.
Upcoming Endeavors
In the coming year, ReviewStudio is extending their project management workflows to facilitate their adoption by educational institutions and agencies working with large numbers of clients and projects. They are also focusing on their APIs and integrations with popular project and asset management platforms while extending their support for emerging media formats such as immersive 360 images and videos.
Stuart attributes ReviewStudio’s success to its team’s extensive experience in the creative production environment and deep understanding of client workflows. He concludes, “We are very engaged with our clients and see the ongoing development of ReviewStudio itself a highly engaged and collaborative effort to meet their needs and goals.”
Source :-The 10 Best Enterprise Collaboration Solution Providers 2017
