‍CHALLENGE: Sift Creative, a fully remote production & post production team, faced bottlenecks covering professional tennis, golf, and other mainstream events. Facing slow internet, often dictated by freelancer location, large workflows with many moving parts, and reliance on external hard drives, it was difficult for Sift to stay agile, scale easily, and remain focused on the creative tasks that drive business. At scale, managing a local server system and cloud storage buckets on AWS also required stifling commitment.

WHY SUITE? Sift Creative chooses Suite to establish a fully remote global workflow, enabling real-time media access with file streaming directly from the cloud. Integrated with iconik, Suite connects team members & key collaborators to working assets instantly, helping Sift Creative capitalize on trends and viral moments, while keeping files tagged and accessible. Suite Connect also enables Sift to ingest media from remote collaborators anywhere in the world directly into Suite, and share final deliverables to clients without ever bringing media local.

KEY INSIGHTS:

• 30+ remote users, 100% cloud-based remote workflow on Suite
• Editors in North America, South America, Europe, and Australia
• On-site coverage of ATP tennis events, major golf tournaments & more
• Pre-caching files on Suite optimizes workflows for remote creatives
• Reduced project turnaround time by 4-5 days using Suite Connect

“We can meet any deadline. It’s so easy to get media into the hands of the people who need it to create.”

- Jordan Bolt, Head of Production, Sift Creative

On the tennis court, success is often linked to footwork. Fundamental movements that enable powerful returns and game-clinching winners down the line, the better player’s approach to the ball often defines the match. Similarly, media teams experience their own high stakes circumstances, facing deadlines, ambitious expectations, and plenty of granular workflow challenges off the court.

For Sift Creative, a full-service media agency covering professional tennis, golf, and other sports, as well as producing branded content for some of the world’s most well-recognized athletic brands, efficient remote collaboration defines success. Like good footwork, reliable in every scenario, Sift Creative's cloud workflow on Suite ensures everyone connected to the edit can approach it with winning confidence.

Content with Global Reach

Unlike sports leagues that have a designated calendar season, ATP tournaments & qualifying events occur year-round in locations across the globe, ranging from Australia, France and other locations in Europe, United Arab Emirates, United States, and nearly everywhere in between. With so many locations on the schedule, keeping remote collaborators, and media, organized presents a unique challenge for Sift’s Head of Production, Jordan Bolt.

A former Director of Photography, Bolt knows his way around a timeline—and always kept close watch of the technology supporting the post process. As Sift’s team grew in size and its focus expanded beyond tennis, Bolt’s role also morphed; now, he’s the technical mastermind behind the team’s fully remote operation.

Tasked with establishing post production workflows that ensure Sift stays on track, Bolt’s role is key. “It's hard to have a home base when everyone is in a new city every single week,” he says. “Prior to Suite, we lacked infrastructure and technology. There was a big snowball effect with productions going fully remote and we were just trying to catch up. Now, I focus entirely on how to make productions, and how to serve our clients better with technology.”

Outdated Workflows & Bottlenecks

For a team of 30+ global collaborators—many of whom have never met in-person—the tech stack Bolt selects is critical to maintaining project timelines and maximizing the team’s creative efforts. “We have people in North America, South America, Europe, Australia,” Bolt notes. “Our team is literally all over the world, we’re a melting pot.”

For years, the team shipped hard drives and relied on Dropbox or WeTransfer for media sharing, both slower-than-you-need solutions for efficient remote post production. “Our workflow was rudimentary,” Bolt reflects.

Bolt’s initial effort to streamline the fully remote workflow at Sift involved spinning up a centralized server with remote machines, but the task soon became overwhelming as a one-man IT department. “We had a 190-terabyte system connected to remote desktops and virtual machines… but when we started to expand, we hit bottlenecks,” Bolt explains. “As the only person managing the technology, it became a lot of work and difficult to scale.”

Intuitive Editing: Why Sift Chooses Suite

The server-based, “remote in” workflow worked for a while but eventually created more headaches than efficiencies, leading Bolt to explore cloud-based solutions. “We considered managing our own S3 Storage and spinning up machines with EC2 instances in AWS, but I would have needed to hire a DevOps team, software engineers, IT managers. It was too much for our production company that wants to focus on the creative,” Bolt says.

Bolt then began testing Suite head-to-head against its biggest competitors. “We did a direct compare/contrast between Suite and [a competitive solution],” Bolt says. “Suite was the better fit. I really enjoyed engaging with the team at Suite and felt like I better understood the product. The price point, the speed, and the functionality were just better. Suite is reimagining the cloud compared to other solutions, and the ease-of-use is better for our editors.”

Sift’s creatives quickly noticed the benefits of file streaming on Suite and soon completed a full adoption of the storage platform. Rolling it out to the rest of the team was simple, and by eliminating missteps and hiccups onboarding new remote members or maintaining oversight of media, Bolt gained confidence. More importantly, Suite keeps his creatives focused on the edit. “Suite is turnkey for my editors,” Bolt says. “I can send the invitation [to join Suite] and editors can walk through the install without ever having to reach out to me. That speaks volumes.”

The Power of the Cloud: Feature Callouts

Suite is now the central source of truth for all of Sift's working assets, so Bolt and his team can stream media directly from the cloud to any computer in real-time—and remote editors anywhere can access the files they need instantly. Thanks to Suite's powerful cloud platform & key features, Sift experiences wins at every level.

First up, the ability to ingest media from anywhere in the world with Suite Connect. Given the global scale of Sift’s content creation, Bolt is required to receive media fast and share it between collaborators in disparate locations, a task that previously took hours or days to complete. Using Suite Connect for file transfers simplifies everything.

“It's been great to get rid of the variety of transfer tools we used initially,” Bolt says. “Using Suite Connect, we can eliminate those end points. We’re able to easily provide an upload link, and once media hits the system, we’re able to work—no more shipping drives, no more WeTransfer. Even when you’re working with someone who doesn’t have direct access to Suite, like clients, I can easily send a link to download files straight from Suite.”

Next, Suite’s on-demand caching and pre-caching: “If somebody has really strong internet, they can play video directly from Suite and it’s automatically cached ‘on-demand’ for the next time,” Bolt explains. “Pre-caching has really been best practice. Editors can choose what to pre-cache on an external hard drive—and they’re off. That has changed the game for editors who don’t have the same solid internet speeds as the rest of the team.”

Finally, when Bolt needs to bring on new editors or scale the team quickly, Suite enables easy onboarding and permissions, eliminating questions and getting editors straight into the timeline. “We can expand the team at the snap of a finger. It’s amazing how quickly we can get a user up and running,” Bolt says. “When we need, let’s say, four extra editors, it’s as easy as sending an email, adding the correct permissions, and—boom—those editors are good to go. We saw the return on that very quickly, Suite saves us so much time with onboarding alone.”

MAM Integration: Suite & iconik

One of the most impactful features of Suite is its ability to integrate effortlessly into any creative workflow. For Sift, this means pairing Suite with his team’s iconik media asset manager (MAM) to supercharge the company’s ability to sort, access, and utilize media assets. “iconik is our media asset manager, and we use an iconik storage gateway (ISG) to connect it to Suite,” Bolt explains. “There’s no guessing about file locations, file names, or anything like that... you can pop into iconik and see everything exactly as it is in Suite, it’s an exact mirror.”

Suite Connect: Sift’s Babolat Project in Dubai

Now, here's a real-world example from Sift’s extensive portfolio. On a recent commercial shoot in Dubai for the tennis equipment company, Babolat, Sift’s production team worked with numerous sponsored athletes to capture content.

The catch? They had just a few days to turn the project around…

“We had a team fly out to Dubai, shoot everything, then upload it to Suite that same night. Once everything landed in Suite, our editor started working; we were able to get a V1 draft to the Babolat team within 36 hours," Bolt says. "It used to take two to three days... to start working. Now, you can send the upload link via Suite Connect… and there’s no need to wait for drives to be shipped from Europe, Asia, or wherever the team is working.

"Suite saved us time & we were able to hop into the project faster. That really proved how we can actually work from anywhere. We can meet any deadline. It’s so easy to get media into the hands of the people who need it to create.”

Final Thoughts

Embracing file streaming and instant connectivity, Sift Creative has since decommissioned its local storage & servers, opting to centralize all working assets on the cloud with Suite. “We don’t run anything locally anymore,” Bolt acknowledges. “Everything is serverless.” Choosing Suite provides Bolt and his team of dispersed remote editors a new solution to some of the biggest problems they faced as a dispersed creative agency.

“There's a lot of tradition in post production—but, if it weren't for big changes in technology, allowing new ways of thinking into the space, we wouldn't have the movies & productions we celebrate today,” Bolt says. “It’s the same for cloud storage… using it opens up doors to be more collaborative with people all over the world, from different cultures, who can offer new perspectives and ways of creating. It never hurts to think outside the box.”

Sift Creative now stands on the cutting-edge of post production workflows, file streaming media directly from the cloud, connecting team members across any distance, and accelerating project timelines by multiple days with direct-to-cloud file transfers. Bolt and his team are one-step ahead of the game, finding benefits, enhanced security, and better project oversight on Suite. “Reliance on the cloud will continue to grow and so will this collaborative way of working. Give it 10 years, people won’t even be able to recognize the industry,” Bolt says. “Using the cloud can be a mysticized thing, but knowing that Suite's cloud infrastructure is secure and reliable—that you can house your really important files on it—offers peace of mind for my company and its owners.”

With Suite as the backbone of its "borderless" workflow, Sift Creative has improved efficiency and unlocked new creative potential. No longer limited by slow file transfers or outdated infrastructure, Bolt and his team can focus on what matters—delivering high-quality content that strikes its audience like an ace up the middle.

‍

‍

Ready to accelerate your creative workflow?

Click here to learn more.