How Creative Agencies Can Ingest Freelance Video Faster and With Fewer Headaches

The ultimate competition is almost here: The Super Bowl. And by that we obviously mean the fierce rivalry between brands, advertising houses, and creative agencies to produce the most talked-about Super Bowl commercials.

But as they kick their freelance video and remote media workflows into high gear, the majority of creative agencies face similar challenges when it comes to collecting content from freelance or remote videographers:

• Enabling remote videographers to submit content easily, so you’re not asking them to babysit slow transfers or retry failed transfers.
• Providing a low-maintenance file transfer vehicle, so freelancers can easily submit content without complex software installs or technical support calls.
• Establishing a secure content submission workflow that doesn’t require antiquated Protocole de transfert de fichiers (FTP) technology or direct access to storage.
• Collecting and organizing heavy files in storage, which can be be a time-consuming task akin to herding cats.

In this post, we’ll examine how cloud-based file transfer helps creative agencies (and media companies, and really anyone else who needs to move large amounts of video) better manage freelancers and the content they provide.

• Creative Agencies and Freelance Video: The Challenges (and Solutions)
  • Paying freelancers to babysit or retry failed transfers
  • Dealing with nonstop technical support calls
  • Securely getting submissions into storage
  • Keeping content submissions well organized
• How MASV Helps Creative Agencies (and Anyone Else) Work with Freelance Video

Creative Agencies and Freelance Video: The Challenges (and Solutions)

Unlike film production companies, which often require a massive amount of file transfers in a short window, creative agencies who work with freelance video typically have a much more regular (and punishing) schedule of near-constant file transfers from both in-house and external stakeholders.

Here are some of the most pressing issues they have—and how cloud-based file transfer can solve them. 

Paying freelancers to babysit or retry failed transfers

Using freelancers can be cost-effective, but freelancers aren’t free—far from it. The best ones charge a solid hourly or per-project rate.

But slow and unreliable file transfer can blow up the freelancer model in a hurry. That’s because:

• When file transfers are slow, organizations often need to pay the freelancer to spend time ensuring the file transfer completes successfully (many freelancers charge for file transfer time).
• When an unreliable file transfer service fails, freelancers must start the transfer over again and watch it to completion—which can cost organizations even more.

If your agency doesn’t pay for the extra time, retrying file transfers quickly becomes super annoying for freelancers because they’re not being paid for that time. And the best freelancers will take their talents elsewhere if they don’t enjoy working with your company.

How cloud-based file transfer can help: It’s in every creative agency’s advantage to give remote contractors or freelancers the best file transfer experience possible. So why not make the experience easy?

Put bluntly, fast, reliable cloud-based file transfer helps creative agencies retain freelancers who may otherwise go elsewhere because it’s way less irritating and takes less time than other file transfer experiences.

Cloud-based file transfer is also far less prone to file transfer failure than other types of file transfer.

• Cloud-based file transfer services like MASV use a relay system that first sends files to the cloud before the destination.
• This system can match or even exceed the speeds of other file transfer solutions, but with far greater reliability. That’s because if there’s an outage on the creative agency’s side, files are securely kept in the cloud and delivered when systems come back online.
• Cloud-based transfer will continue a job even if there is a network interruption—the system will relentlessly retry the transfer, possibly until the end of time, until it’s complete.

A cloud-based solution with no limits on file package sizes also means creative agencies also don’t have to ask freelancers to compresser les fichiers before sending.

Onboarding while dealing with nonstop technical support calls

A longstanding beef many organizations have with legacy file transfer such as Aspera, Signiant, or FTP is that it’s complicated to install, often requires plugin and firewall updates, and can be complex to operate as a user.

• Onboarding freelancers onto these file transfer platforms almost always requires time-consuming support calls from the freelancer to the creative agency, wasting both time and money in the process.
• The legacy onboarding process often requires IT approval—further slowing down turnaround times—and know-how to guide the freelancer through software downloads, plugin installations, and any required firewall updates.
• The complexity of these platforms also means freelancers usually need to sit through training and tutorials, which they would rather not.

Long story short: Asking freelancers several states or countries away to install and learn complex enterprise software (often in just a couple of days, on a deadline) is usually a recipe for disaster. And it doesn’t do your relationship with the freelancer any favors, either.

How cloud-based file transfer can help: One of the hallmarks of cloud-based file transfer is its ease of setup and use: Users can start sending or receiving files in minutes, without any software, firewall, or plugin installations or updates.

• Web-based, drag-and-drop file transfer tools are so easy to use they practically eliminate the necessity of fielding support calls from remote workers (who don’t need any training or tutorials to start sending files).
• Agencies can set up a web-based file upload portal—essentially a webpage that can upload content to the cloud via drag-and-drop tools—so freelancers can start sending files via a web link to your portal without even needing to sign in (although organizations can also require freelancers to sign in before sending files).

Securely getting submissions into storage, without managing permissions on multiple platforms

Organizations that work with hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of remote freelancers across wide swathes of the country (or the globe) can face challenges getting all their content into one storage location quickly, smoothly, and securely.

• Granting remote contractors direct access to cloud or networked storage can be a huge security risk, for obvious reasons. It also comes with a significant risk of accidental content deletion by anyone with access to storage.
• The alternative often requires someone at the creative agency to receive footage, then manually upload it to storage—which can take hours every day.

How cloud-based file transfer can help: Cloud-based file transfer offers no-code integrations with popular cloud storage such as AWS S3, connected on-prem storage like a Synology NAS, and even media managers such as Frame.io.

Users can then set up file transfer automations that automatically send footage to these predefined storage destinations without any manual intervention at all.

It’s even possible to quickly configure a one-to-many transfer workflow that automatically sends content to multiple destinations simultaneously.

File upload portals can also act as a secure, centralized point of ingest to all your storage locations:

• Agencies just need to configure storage integrations in a portal once, without having to grant freelancers direct access to storage or manage permissions across multiple platforms—improving efficiency and security.
• Cloud-based file transfer such as MASV comes with enterprise-grade security and compliance tools out of the box, unlike legacy tools like FTP.

Keeping content submissions well organized

Receiving freelance video from multiple remote contractors can also present a significant organizational challenge if the right tools and rules aren’t put in place (and enforced).

• Receiving a large volume of files around multiple projects every day can be difficult and time-consuming to manually organize by project, producer, or client.
• Inconsistent naming conventions or file types, depending on which freelancer uploaded the content, can cause further organizational chaos within a storage repository.

Creative agencies also need a way to collect important metadata attached to each video clip, to help video editors locate and understand the context of each clip when it’s time to produce polished video.

How cloud-based file transfer can help: As mentioned, web-based file upload portals can include powerful efficiency and organizational tools. Those no-code integrations and automations we mentioned earlier essentially remove any need for manual organization on the creative agency’s part.

Un exemple concret : MASV clients can spin up as many Portals as they need for free, so it’s easy to set up a Portal per client, per project, per freelancer, per producer, or per anything else to keep things well organized.

Portals also come with custom metadata forms and file upload rules:

• Forms can be pre-populated by the agency with parameters/values such as project, contributor, and other information, with fields left blank for clip-specific info.
• File upload rules can be implemented that force freelancers to abide by specific naming conventions and your required file formats and structure.