Rory Peck streamlines Awards workflow with Ci Media Cloud Platform

Sony’s Ci Media Cloud Platform has made the process of contributing and judging video entries for the annual Rory Peck Awards more efficient, flexible, and easy to manage.

How we helped

The Challenge

  • An increasing volume of content received in different formats, qualities, and media
  • The negative impact on the production workflow drove the need to move to a digital cloud-based platform

The Solution

  • The Ci Media Cloud Platform allows Awards entrants to upload broadcast-quality content to a shared workspace
  • Judges can access and view entrants’ submissions on any device, including smartphones

The Outcome

  • Ci has streamlined the entire Awards workflow, allowing internal and external users to create, share, and review video content
  • Awards organizers are able to reach more freelancers and manage more entries

Not only has Ci revolutionized our workflow here at Rory Peck, it has meant that we can reach more freelancers, manage more entries, and allow more stories to be told.

Kate Garner, Manager, Rory Peck Awards

Honoring freelancers around the world

Established in 1995, the Rory Peck Awards honor freelance video journalists, filmmakers, and cameramen and women working independently in news and current affairs, often without the formal support of a large media organization. Every year, the Rory Peck Awards celebrate their extraordinary films, reports and footage and demonstrate why freelancers deserve support and recognition.

Moving to an all-digital platform

The steadily increasing number of submissions had placed greater pressures on the Rory Peck Trust to manage the efficient running of the Awards:

“We would be sent content in different formats and qualities, and this would really impact on our production workflow,” explains Kate Garner, Manager, Rory Peck Awards. “We had an interim system between tape and cloud, where digital files would be sent to us on USB sticks, hard drives, and DVDs. We found this increasingly complicated over the years, due to the increasing number of entries to the Awards competition. For that reason, it became really important to move to a digital platform.”

Easier content sharing and collaboration

To make the processing and judging of submitted content easier and more efficient, the Rory Peck Awards resolved to implement a new workflow solution centered on Sony’s Ci Media Cloud Platform.

“Ci streamlined the entire awards process for us, from entries through to judging and the event itself,” says Kate. “It’s enabled internal and external users to create, collaborate, and share video content within one shared platform.”

As Kate explains, Ci has simplified the workflow for entrants, judges, and the Awards’ organizers alike: “The File Request feature enables journalists around the world in various situations to upload their broadcast-quality material to our workspace. The Media Box feature stood out to us the most. It allowed us to completely update our judging process. It’s meant that we can send out the material in advance for judges to watch on one central workspace. Judges can also view it on their phones. Working in news, you see that is an easier platform for them to view content on.”