CLODAGH MCCARTHY
Post Production Supervisor
"The adaptability and the responsiveness of the team at ioGates is what really keeps me coming back."
Clodagh has only used ioGates for a few years but highlights no less than 6 features when we asked her why she uses ioGates.
1. Built in presets and transcoding capabilities
ioGates has built in presets and transcoding capabilities that allows it to utilize media in a few different ways.
For instance, if you have press presets setup, you can use the same export for editorial media as you are using for your daily streaming site. That cuts down on the workload quite a lot because traditionally, the DIT would be creating the initial transcodes from the footage. And then an assistant editor would have to take those transcodes, the editorial media and do an additional export for the purpose of daily streaming for executives.
But that step in the process can be eliminated when you’re using ioGates.
So, it has an impact on both workload and on budget for the project. Because it does roll a couple of functions into one.
That means that the assistant editor on the project can focus on doing the most crucial work, which is assisting the editor and making sure that the project is managed properly.
It’s such a crucial role in the chain, and some very costly errors can be made here.
2. Automated distribution processes
One of the things I really like about ioGates is that the way you structure your folders allows you to automate the distribution processes quite solidly.
Say, for instance, you have:
A broad distribution for your dailies media,
Assemblies are only going to a select few.
Music cues are going to another select few.
Promos are only going to the network.
Then you can set up a folder structure that allows all of those things to happen automatically, when media is added to the folder. That’s a nice function.
3. Massive upload capabilities
The other thing that I think is a real bonus is the massive upload capability.
In theory, you could utilize ioGates to deliver both the master media and the proxy media, because of this service.
I think people will start to utilize these high speed transfers a bit more and plan to offload much larger file sizes into ioGates, than they have in the past through other streaming sites.
4. Slow internet is no problem
When we were shooting in Atlanta, there were some locations that had really slow internet. Almost slower than a residential connection. It was something like 10 megabytes upload/sec, where we are used to working with 500 to 1.000 megabytes upload/sec.
It was a drastic reduction in speed, and we sent a crisis email to Jesper on Friday night.
He came back so quickly with such a thorough, detailed response as to how we could adapt our export settings as to what kind of presets should be created within the system, and how to best upload and download using the desktop app.
Over the course of the weekend, we had refined our process to the point that we were getting dailies up overnight, and in time for the editorial team who starts working with them the next day.
5. Amazing support
The adaptability and the responsiveness of the ioGates team is what really keeps me coming back. You feel like they understand your needs, they are willing to work with you to make the system function the best they can for your needs and for the project’s needs.
6. All for a great price!
And all of that is done at a very reasonable cost compared to a lot of other services out there.