Tech Review: Remote Editing with Strada

I was recently invited by some colleagues over at Strada to test a new way to get footage and send cuts over the internet. As an editor and assistant editor, I’m always intrigued by opportunities to improve any part of my editorial workflow. We crossed paths some months ago as I started talking to people about Shortlisted, so it was exciting to have an opportunity to contribute to their own project. I really do think what they’re doing will revolutionize the way distributed teams think about using the internet to collaborate. You can find the full BTS video after my review.

The Test Workflow

For the test, I was the remote editor receiving footage from a production currently in progress, and send back a completed cut by the end of the shoot. If that sounds impossible or extremely expensive, that’s because it was, before now. Strada has created what they call Strada Agents, which create a very easy to use direct transfer network between local and remote hard drives — no uploading and downloading to cloud storage in between. When they finished shooting the first part of the production, an interview, the on set DIT was able to transfer low res proxies directly to my hard drive. I was able to start viewing and cutting down the interview while they began shooting the b-roll on set. By the time they finished b-roll I was able to send a cut of the interview itself. Just before they finished packing up for the day, I sent them a draft with the b-roll and music cut in, and then did one more pass to clean up some cuts and mixing.

My Editing Strategy

How did I edit so fast? Well aside from the transfer with Strada being super fast, I started organizing my music before the footage started coming in. I listened to the music options while the production was happening and wrote down mood notes, so that when it came time to edit, I already knew what tracks would fit with what topic. I also set up my timeline to use bus tracks so I could quickly mix multiple audio channels on a track level. I knew text based editing would be the fastest way to cut down an interview, so I chose Premiere for this edit. It was way faster to just read the transcript and cut and paste sections of the interview to get to my rough cut as quickly as possible. 

The Unexpected

I anticipated there would be some hiccups in testing a super early version of a breakthrough technology, and there were, but the feedback I was able to give allowed the Strada team to have everything fixed by the end of the day. I even had some surprises in how this new process pushed me to rethink how I organize my files on my local hard drive. I have my own patterns for how I organize my folders on my hard drive for projects where I am working solo as both the editor and assistant editor. But when I gave the Strada team access to my local folders, I immediately realized that even though the folders are local to me, I still need them to make sense to someone who has never seen them before, and who isn’t necessarily an editor. Then on the other end, when I export a cut, I usually QC the export after it comes out of the NLE, and before uploading it. With the Strada platform, the file in the Cuts folder becomes immediately available for viewing for any connected user. This obviously creates an opportunity for an awkward interaction if you’re discovering a glitch in the cut at the same time as your external client, which I did. It was a great lesson in how I will need to shift my thinking on treating local folders for Strada-linked projects. The easiest solutions would be to label folders that are Strada accessible or create a directory within each project that is exclusively for Strada accessible folders, so the collaboration is worry free.  

Strada is the Future

Overall I found the Strada workflow to be a real leap forward in delivery technology. It took about 5 minutes for the first camera angle of the 20 minute interview to transfer to my hard drive from the time I was told it was on its way. I could actually see a file downloading to my drive as it was transferring. For such a cutting edge experience, it felt effortless to be on the receiving end. The files went right to my media folder for the specific project. Using dropbox, I usually have to set up a catch folder on my mac’s internal drive, wait until every individual file downloads to copy it to my project drive. If I use google drive, it’s even worse. For bigger projects, like a short film, I usually have to wait for a drive to be copied and shipped to me. With Strada, I could have any amount of files transferred directly to my drive, and both the client and I can know exactly how it’s going and when it’s done.

When I Would Use Strada

I am definitely going to make this my first recommendation over shipping a drive for future projects. I think for social media work, I would use this for on-going client work, and offer dropbox for the smaller one-offs. For longer term clients this offers an opportunity to create an accessible media library that myself and the client can both access on demand. For shorts, I could even see convincing the DIT to start sending me the raw dailies after the first day of shooting, instead of waiting until production is over, where we lose the opportunity for the editor to support the production. With such a frictionless delivery process, and the speed of a direct transfer, the Strada Agents could really open up new avenues for collaboration.