Introduction

Brat TV, a digital network and production company catering to the Gen-Z audience, faced a significant challenge in scaling their post-production operations. As their viewership grew and their workload increased, they realized that their existing drive-based workflow was no longer sustainable and they needed a more efficient solution to manage their data. DigitalGlue's creative.space shared storage platform centralized their media assets and allowed them to collaborate in real-time across their post production applications.

Background

Brat TV is a digital network and production company that draws its name from “The Brat Pack” of ‘80s cinema. Its TV-quality programming such as Chicken Girls, Total Eclipse, Mani, are posted every day to YouTube and tailored to the Gen-Z audience. The Brat TV YouTube channel has more than 3.5 million subscribers.

Challenge

Brat TV's post-production team was juggling a fleet of hard drives and managing numerous versions of the same data across them. Each member of their team worked from their own copy of the media assets. This cost them 12 hours a day across their four Assistant Editors who were copying multiple terabytes of RAW camera files and editorial proxies a day.

The existing drive-based workflow led to redundancy and uncertainty, as every transaction needed to be meticulously documented to manage drives with spreadsheets, so they could track down where they are and what is on them. This workflow became unsustainable as they scaled up, and Brat TV needed a centralized location to store and access all of their media assets.

Solution

Brat TV implemented creative.space, a storage solution that allowed them to consolidate all of their productions into virtual Spaces that users could mount to their desktops and collaborate on together. This created a single directory structure for each production which could then be archived to LTO tape for future use. With creative.space's service-based business model, Chase Logan, Brat TV's Head of Post Production, was able to convince management to invest by demonstrating significant monthly savings and increased productivity.

“Ever since the earliest adoption of using creative.space in our workflow, it's been a step in the direction of what I like to call the 'Holy Grail' of Post Production, which is integrating Media Asset Management with workflow... It's been a tool to integrate a bunch of different workflows into that Holy Grail of one workflow."

Taylor Bynum
‍Director of Post Production Operations, Brat TV

Results

By centralizing media assets on creative.space, everyone was able to access the data simultaneously, eliminating 12 hours a day in labor costs. This meant that the storage paid for itself within the first month, since creative.space is offered as a managed service that BratTV pays for monthly. Three years later, BratTV is estimated to have saved over 10,000 hours.

Migrating to creative.space led to additional unexpected benefits. With immediate access to production assets, previously silo'd departments were able to collaborate in parallel and the time savings allowed them to pursue new revenue opportunities, resulting in advertising deals with major brands.

Conclusion

Adopting the creative.space platform has allowed Brat TV's entire team to access media assets significantly faster than the multiple drives they were previously using. Creatives are able to work in their preferred applications and quickly exchange bins and sequences. By streamlining their workflow with creative.space, Brat TV's post-production team was able to centralize their data and improve their collaboration processes, resulting in more efficient workflows and increased revenue opportunities.

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