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Contents:

Introduction

The Deliveries tab is where you create and upload all of your videos. Essentially this represents the Project’s post-production phase. 

You need to create a delivery for each individual video that the Project requires. There is no limit to the amount of deliveries a Project can host.

There are currently four types of video delivery that can be chosen:

• Edit — all video edits that are not 100% animated

• Animation — covers all animations

• Social Cutdown — exclusively for delivering social media edits of pre-existing videos

• Video upload — a generic slot provided for delivering videos direct to the client that may not fit the normal types.

Creating new deliveries

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To create a new video delivery, hover your cursor over the blue “+” icon, then select one of the video job types from the dropdown menu.

For each video delivery, you will be required to provide multiple data points. The accuracy of this data is important for two main reasons: 

• so that your team (and your client) can have the best information at their disposal on their current projects.

• so our management team can accurately monitor our video delivery loads. Good data here will help our system to have a reasonable understanding of your current and future workloads.
  It will also help with scheduling appropriate times for each deliverable, with all team members knowing how much time and how many changes have been allocated.

Each video delivery requires the following information:

• An appropriate name — Try to be as clear and unique as possible. Don’t be against using longer names. After you have created your delivery job, this name will be the job’s primary identifier — for both your team and your client.

• No. of revisions required — this defaults to “2”, but is flexible. Base your decision on our in-house revisions and revision workflow guidelines. 

• State — choose the state team that will be responsible for delivering this video. This may appear obvious at first, however it is possible for larger Projects to have multiple videos being delivered across differing states.

• Production Date — Indicate when you expect to start working on this deliverable. For the most part, that will refer to when the video is being edited — the pre-production and filming events are covered in other tabs.

• Duration — Estimate the amount of edit time it will take to produce this video (including all of the production elements).

• Due Date — Indicate the deadline for delivery. The client may not have set a specific deadline, but you will at least be setting one for yourself and communicating to the system when you expect to have this done.

• Production Elements — this indicates some of the specific elements that will be required to bring this video together in post-production. Depending on which type of video delivery you are adding, these may either be selected by default or excluded as an option

  The three available production elements are:

  • Edit time

  • Animation

  • Color grading

Production elements vs Delivery type

This table shows which production elements are available per video delivery type.

Your deliveries are now “booked”  

After you have created one or two video jobs, these jobs and their data will now be visible to you with the status = “booked”.

Most of the data you have set up will be clearly visible. There are two exceptions:

• The video delivery type is represented by an icon on the top-left of the video thumbnail. If you hover your cursor over this icon, some pop-up text will confirm the video type for you.

• If you added any general comments, these will be visible when you hover your cursor over the notes icon.

The additional options icon on the right shows:

• Update details —  All of the job details can be revised and updated at any time prior to the scheduled completion date. For example, you should monitor and revise your expected production dates to ensure our system has a reasonable understanding of your current and future expected workload.

• Upload — When your video is ready to deliver to the client, this is where you start the upload process.

• Delete — speaks for itself! Removes the whole job from the project, including all data associated with it. Be careful with this, as deletion is irreversible and any uploaded videos will be lost. 

Video statuses

Your video jobs will likely progress through the following statuses:

• Booked— As you have seen, this is the status when a video delivery is first created.

• Video uploaded— The video has been uploaded to the VMSX system, but it has not yet been delivered to the client. Usually, it is the editor who uploads the video, giving the Producer an opportunity to quality-check the video before delivering to the client 

• Delivered— The video has been delivered to the client. We are waiting for feedback.

• Changes— The client has submitted some change requests for the video.

• Changes scheduled— We are currently working on the changes (or at least the work has been scheduled).

• Changes uploaded— The video has been revised, based on client and producer feedback. It has been re-uploaded into the VMSX (usually by the editor)

• Approved— The client has approved the video. Job done!

• Archived— You can archive a video at any time after a video is approved, essentially marking the video as completed. After 14 days, an approved video will be automatically archived.

Pre-production documents

Feature released Sept 15 2022 

When managing a project with a large number of pre-production documents, you can attach pre-production documents to your edits here (as well as the shoots in Filming Details tab). 

For example, if an editor needs to find a storyboard, they can go straight to the storyboard added to their edit job. 

How do you do this?

• Select the Pre-Production dropdown associated with the shoot You will get a list of all the project’s pre-production documents.

• Select all the documents that relate to this shoot. Click Submit. 

• You have now created direct links to your relevant documents.

What if I haven’t yet created the pre-production document I need? 

You can create new Pre-Production documents directly from your shoot details.

• Click on the small +

• Choose your document type

• The VMS will take you straight to the Pre-Production tab with the new document ready to be set-up. This will automatically be linked to your edit. 

What can the client see?

At this early stage, while the client can see all the pre-production and filming details, they will not be able to see “booked” video delivery details. These details are primarily for the benefit of the production team. However, they will be able to observe how many video deliveries have been prepared — even when the project still has a “draft” status. This information is visible to them on the Client Hub projects view, and it will be summarised within the Project Confirmation Email, . 

Delivering your videos

Once our production team has completed editing a video, they will be looking to upload and deliver it to the client.

Confirm your Project

Firstly, you will not be able to upload your videos without first confirming and activating the Project. To send a Project confirmation email to the client and activate your Project, you will need to visit the Invoices tab. This is covered in the Creating new projects section.

Upload the video to the VMSX

Anyone can upload a video when it is ready to be shared with the client. However, this is usually done by the editor or animator, who will then expect the Producer to assess the job prior to sharing it with the client.

When you are ready, find the “upload” option from the “more options” icon to the right. This currently takes you to the old VMS video-upload interface.

Provide end-of-day notes, add as many appropriate tags as you can come up with, then upload your video. 

After your video has been uploaded, the Project’s delivery job will update it’s status. You will also have an easy way to copy the video’s link for sharing with third parties that cannot access the video via Client Hub.

The additional options now available for this video delivery are:

• View— Opens up a new tab, taking you straight to the video on its current landing page.

• Deliver— Kicks off the delivery email template, which will direct the client to the video project on Client Hub and incite them to provide feedback.
  The Producer can customise a personal message within this email.

• Changes— Takes you to the VMS change request page for this video. From there, a producer can request some internal changes prior to approving the video for delivery to the client. Here you will also find any changes submitted by the client, allowing you to modify or schedule them.

Notify the client

To let the client know that their video is ready for previewing, select the “Deliver” option, customise the delivery email template, and then click send. This email will invite the client to preview their video from their Client Hub account. The email will link directly to their version of the project’s Deliveries tab. From here they can “view” the video on a page that also provides them with a change request tool. This is the best and most convenient method for their team to communicate their changes to our editors.

Getting the video approved

At this point, the video job status will be “delivered”. Your goal is to get the status to “approved” — the client must do this from their Client Hub account.

Change management

If the client provides some feedback, or submits a change request using their Change Request tool, the video job will update its status to “Changes”.

You can access the Internal Changes management page from the additional options icon. From here, a Producer can assess, collate, and schedule feedback for their editors. The system will also provide an email notifying the Producer of any changes requested by the client via the Change Request tool. 

During this video revision process, the various video statuses you may see are:

• Changes— The client has submitted some change requests for the video.

• Changes scheduled— We are currently working on the changes (or at least the work has been scheduled).

• Changes uploaded— The video has been revised, based on client and producer feedback. It has been re-uploaded into the VMSX (usually by the editor).

• Delivered— The revised video has been returned to the client for approval.

Revisions allowance

We clearly communicate to the client how many revisions we will support for a video delivery. The number of revisions is set when you first create the video delivery, and is visually represented by the pencil icons on the video thumbnail. The clients see the same at their end.

When a client runs out of revisions, we should either push for final approval, or start a conversation about changing for additional revisions.

• For some guidelines on revisions management and changes, see here.

• For more on how to add further changes to the Project, see the Invoices & Accounting section.

Final approval 

When a client is ready to give their final approval, we should get them to formally “approve” from their Client Hub account. This will formalise the client’s approval and improve the chances that they won’t return later with further changes. Equally importantly, this also ensures that the VMSX production reports understand that you have delivered this job.

Other metrics, such as the date that approval was received, are also important metrics in our assessment of the weight and success of the project in terms of time, efforts, and income. 

It is in the Producers’ best interests that all of their video deliveries are formally approved by the client in a timely manner, as this will more accurately reflect their past and present workloads and performance within VMSX production reports.

Archiving

After a video has been approved, if a Producer is satisfied with the project they should then “archive” the video. This closes the video delivery and officially marks it as complete. If the video has been approved for 14 days, the system will automatically archive the video, unless the video has been “unapproved”.

Both “Unapprove” and “Archive” options are only visible after the client has approved the video.