Challenge

Before Suite, SixTwentySix relied on its server in Los Angeles for on-prem work and shipping physical drives to enable remote work. Skewing more toward remote work and busier pipelines, this boutique, full-service creative, production, and post agency sought a more efficient way to collaborate with its growing roster of global artists.

Why Suite?

Using file streaming on Suite, SixTwentySix is able to establish a cloud-based workflow that enables easy onboarding and simple file access for its distributed team of editors. Centralizing media on Suite has resulted in faster ingest, faster project timelines, less time spent managing files, and the ability to easily expand its roster of global talent.

Key Insights

• 3+ hours saved per project with direct file ingest into Suite
• Eliminated costs & time spent shipping drives
• Instant onboarding unlocks global talent pool
• Suite serves as the studio's primary server for active projects
• Single source of truth eliminates prepping drives & duplicate files

“It’s Suite first—that's our working server.”

— Alexander Ramos, Head of Post Production, SixTwentySix

Creativity That Fuels Culture

Starting out making music videos in, SixTwentySix earned its stripes in the media industry supporting the culture of rising artists. But this Los Angeles-based studio is growing up. Now, as a full-service creative, production, and post house, the team at SixTwentySix is taking that experience and applying it to whatever its clients can dream up. “It’s not that we stopped making music videos, it’s that we started doing a whole lot more,” they say.

Today, SixTwentySix’s portfolio includes projects for Dunkin’, Pacifico, Netflix, Megan Thee Stallion, and more. More work, however, means more coordination, and tapping into a larger roster of talent to get the job done. So the team brought on Head of Post Production, Alexander Ramos, to streamline the team’s creative and post workflows.

Bringing experience using Suite from past gigs, Ramos already knew the answer. “I used Suite even before I jumped over to SixTwentySix… it’s more efficient than [other competitive solutions] and it’s so easy to use.

Just three months after taking the job, Ramos' team had fully adopted Suite's file streaming technology to support their global creative efforts, saving precious time, money, and enabling remote work that wasn’t possible before.

A Better Way To Collaborate Remotely

Prior to adopting Suite, SixTwentySix’s post workflow was reliant on people coming into the studio in Los Angeles or shipping drives to remote collaborators. “We were spending too much money sending drives,” says Ramos. “We’d send files to the color house, to VFX artists... all separately. I knew there was a better way of working remotely."

For the core team based around the Los Angeles office, having some remote flexibility is a huge plus—especially when LA traffic is bumper-to-bumper. And since the team is using remote contractors more than ever, Ramos knew that supporting remote work for everyone would make it easier for the group to reach its creative potential.

“Not everybody is able to come into the office every day. With Suite, someone can work from home without things getting bogged down,” says Ramos. “Another editor can easily access those files and pick that work back up. It’s more flexible than what we had before… and it’s showing up even in terms of drive management and cost savings.”

The Cloud-Native Workflow with File Streaming

SixTwentySix now ingests all media directly to Suite and uses file streaming to create an active workspace for all of its video editing, VFX, and motion graphics jobs. The team doesn't have to ship hard drives or make people come into the office to access media, and collaborators using creative applications like Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Houdini, Nuke, Cinema 4D, and others can edit from anywhere, directly from Suite, as if it were a local disk.

“It’s Suite first—that's our working server,” says Ramos. “So, when we receive finals from a client, like graphic art cards or color prep XMLs, we upload that data to Suite—that’s our first instinct. Everything else follows.”

Uploading media directly to Suite also provides Ramos full project oversight, the ability to curate the correct file structure for each individual project, and helps ensure only the right collaborators have access to certain assets.

“Instead of giving our artists an entire drive with a bunch of RAW assets, we can organize what we need to share directly within Suite. When an artist is done working, they just kick out their renders, put ‘em in a dated folder, and share where they live. Then, the next collaborator and access those and update the cut, all within Suite.”

In other words, Suite is where creative work happens.

Building for Growth and Remote Collaboration

SixTwentySix relies on a growing roster of global artists, making easy onboarding and access control must-haves. Getting key creatives involved quickly and securely is critical to the team’s success, just the same as maintaining easy collaboration between team members, no matter where they're located.

“I want to make sure that it’s a collaborative process,” says Ramos. “With Suite, adding people to a project is super straightforward and it’s been easy for everyone to pick up. I’m also able to give people specific file and folder permissions, read-only permissions… that’s a necessity for us.”

Suite behaves the same as a local drive and file streaming lets creatives access files instantly, so once artists are added SixTwentySix's Suite drive and given the appropriate permissions, the team can dive right into a familiar workflow, work their magic, and pass projects to the next person seamlessly.

Tangible Time and Cost Savings

Ingesting media directly into Suite, the team saves “at a minimum” three hours on every project. Stack that up across multiple projects in the span of a month—and that's dozens of hours of time back on the calendar.

That's time spent on the creative, time spent collaborating; time not spent waiting around for the latest versions of assets to arrive in the mail or dealing with admin work to ensure everyone has what they need. “That’s important time for us,” says Ramos. “Now, we’re not missing a beat. That’s a big reason why we made the jump to Suite.”

Courier costs, time spent cloning drives, and delays waiting for assets to ship add up quickly when projects involve people working from multiple locations and require multiple revisions. Using Suite has completely eliminated the need to shuttle drives, removing those recurring costs (and time lost) from the bottom line.

Global Collaboration At Any Scale

Apart from the time and cost savings SixTwentySix has experienced from using Suite, one additional payoff is a little less tangible. “Suite legitimizes our workflow,” says Ramos. “I can have somebody start in Europe instantly. Before, I didn't have that option. That flexibility is priceless. It creates the opportunity to tap into artists across the globe.”

Using a few recent projects to outline this global reach, Ramos explains, “We used a graphics team in Argentina; a ‘Houdini mastermind’ in Brazil; an asset dev and texture artist in Detroit; a team in Miami who worked on lighting and logo transitions; and other key players in Los Angeles, who never actually had to step foot in the office.”

“These are jobs with lots of deliverables, lots of assets being stored on Suite," he continues. "Even with people everywhere and all these moving parts, we’ve been able to build super clean workflows.”

A Foundation For Future Success

Bringing Suite into the fold just a couple months after starting at SixTwentySix, Ramos has been able to completely revamp the team’s post processes and enable remote work that actually moves the needle. Collaborators can hop into a project instantly. Timelines are faster. There are cost savings on every project.

And it didn't take a complete workflow overhaul to make it happen.

“The biggest surprise was really how easily it integrated into our workflow,” he says. “We didn’t need anyone to come a give us a big spiel—it was just download it, add files, boom, boom, boom, and we’re up and running.”

As SixTwentySix continues to expand its roster and take on more complex post production work, Suite’s file streaming remains the foundation that makes the studio’s distributed model possible.

For other post production studios who haven’t yet made the jump, or are working from the cloud using different competitive solutions, Ramos says, “You gotta get with the times. It’s too convenient not to use. We’re in a global world now… if you're gonna try to work with talented people, you really need Suite so everybody can collaborate. Kudos to Suite for building a great product and being a great partner in supporting our creative process.”

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Learn how Suite's file streaming can impact your workflow here.