TACTIC 4.0 adds more advanced data connection technology and greater configurability to help organizations design their own unique digital workflows

Toronto, Canada – May 7, 2013 – Southpaw Technology, the developer of open source TACTIC, today announced the launch of its latest version, TACTIC 4.0. The upgrade includes improvements to TACTIC’s data connection technology,  a new plug-in architecture and configurable HTML5 themes, all of which will help companies customize the way they make, move, store and share digital data across heterogeneous computing environments.

TACTIC has long combined robust file management and versioning with workflow and project management features to move digital assets (aka data, content) through the creation process more efficiently and securely. TACTIC 4.0 builds on that functionality in an entirely configurable way.

Many companies have legacy infrastructures that include disparate databases, file systems and applications. Rather than forcing companies into a specific workflow that may require replacing some or all of that infrastructure, TACTIC 4.0’s extended data connection technology enables companies to map onto any database or file system, no matter how new or old, and to interact with the data in those systems. The addition of customizable HTML5 themes allow developers to design templates and interfaces that provide a unified, intuitive and branded way to move data across teams, departments and organizations. In short, TACTIC 4.0 will let companies design their own custom workflows to solve any number of internal data challenges.

“If there is one thing we’ve learned, it’s that every company has its own internal digital workflows to handle various tasks, none of which can be supported by a one-size-fits-all solution,” said Gary Mundell, CEO of Southpaw Technology. “Yet, we’ve also learned that each company has the same problem – they all have tons of digital files, and they need more efficient ways of moving those files through their system without having to replace their massive infrastructures. With TACTIC 4.0, we’ve given companies completely customizable software for solving their growing data challenges.”

TACTIC 4.0 enables companies to design any solution that incorporates workflow elements. These solutions may be as vast as enterprise-level Digital Asset Management systems, Business Process Management systems or Project Management systems, or as finite as a new workflow for connecting new orders with specific files and tasks.

Updated Data Connection Technology:

TACTIC 4.0 adds an updated data connection technology to its powerful APIs,  allowing developers to mine data without programming from multiple databases and file systems, whether they’re brand new or a decade old, and to interact with that data in views and forms.

New Plugin Architecture

TACTIC’s plugins allow anything in TACTIC to be packaged up and “plugged in” to any other TACTIC server, such as additional tools, widgets, project configurations, custom APIs, themes and much more. In addition, any developer who is a member of the TACTIC community can upload their own plugins to the TACTIC community site for others to download.

HTML5 Themes

TACTIC 4.0 has now been opened up to allow developers to start with a clean HTML5 slate and develop their own custom, branded interfaces for interacting with and moving data across teams, departments and organizations.

© 2013. Southpaw Technology Inc. All trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

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Overview

Legend3D is the leading 2D-to-3D conversion studio in the industry. The company was founded in 2001 by Dr. Barry Sandrew, and has grown exponentially since they started to provide 2D-to-3D conversions in 2009. As its team and project load has grown, so too have the amount of digital assets that need to move through the conversion process and the inherent complexity of that process. To help manage the process, Legend3D turned to Southpaw Technology and their production asset management system, TACTIC.

This case study outlines Legend3D’s use of TACTIC and the results they are achieving by having a flexible production asset management system in place.

Legend3D – Leaders in Conversion

Legend3D began its work as a digital intermediary, focusing primarily on colorization. Five years ago, the company realized there was an opportunity to support the growing market for conversion of 2D films to 3D. It started providing conversion services to its studio clients and has quickly become a leader in the field.

To date they have completed conversions for Disney, DreamWorks Animation, Warner Bros, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Hewlett Packard, MTV, and many others. Within a year of doing conversions, Legend3D went from a studio of 30, to having over 300 employees. The company attributes its blistering growth to its commitment to providing the highest quality conversions of any company in the industry.

Creating An Efficient Conversion Pipeline

Streamlining production pipelines is critical in any production, and that is especially true for conversion work. Legend3D started with just the one conversion project in late 2009: Alice in Wonderland. From there they were immediately able to ramp up their conversion production to five simultaneous projects, a remarkable accomplishment. They were able to scale up quickly because they had a good handle on their workflow.

The only way to create an efficient workflow is to understand the entire pipeline process. If people are only thinking about the steps immediately before and after them in the pipeline, they do not have the entire picture. Companies tend to focus and tackle one area of the pipeline at a time. Instead, they need to be asking, what is the goal of each piece, and how does it affect every other piece of the pipeline? In other words, companies need to understand, and drive efficiencies across the entire pipeline.

Anthony Lopez, Legend3D’s director of information technology has made a career out of deciphering production pipelines, having done it now for a number of studios. When Lopez first came to Legend3D, he spent a lot of time going through every step of the company’s production workflow. Lopez admits that spending the time upfront to define your pipeline can take up to a few months, but if you go through every single process, the rewards are well worth the work.

Having done similar exercises in the past, he has become an expert at breaking down critical pipeline components. Lopez explains, “You have to know and understand what you want your pipeline to be if you want to run a profitable studio. “

Lopez outlines four key components for successful pipeline implementation:

1. Talent: Without talented individuals it doesn’t matter about a pipeline. This is not confined to the artists, but includes the entire company working together to increase production efficiencies. That includes everyone from the producers, coordinators, and programmers. They each play an integral part in the pipeline.

2. Infrastructure: The right storage and server solutions are important. Companies need to think into the future when building their infrastructure so they create a scalable solution.

3. Collaboration: Departments need to collaborate. If only 20% of the production team is collaborating it will fail. There are too many disconnections which mean added waste and expense.

4. Tools: Tools are a huge component of Legend3D’s production process and Lopez notes that they have built a number of proprietary tools to help automate and streamline their production process. However, the single largest tool they use is TACTIC, a production asset management solution.

TACTIC at Legend3D

TACTIC was developed by Southpaw Technology, a company co-founded by two veterans of the visual effects industry: Gary Mundell (CEO) and Remko Noteboom (CTO). Both have worked extensively with large-scale productions at a wide range of studios. It was the limitation of existing tools that finally lead the pair to build a system that they hoped would work for others.

TACTIC is a web-based system that combines asset management, project management, workflow management and communication tools in one unified system. Its flexibility enables it to adapt to any workflow, mine data from any application, creating any type of report, and be accessible from any location.

Lopez maintains that their use of TACTIC is a key component to their success. Legend3D installed Southpaw Technology’s TACTIC production asset management solution on everyone’s system in the company. “TACTIC can do whatever we want it to do, we just needed to know what we wanted it to do first,” explains Lopez.

The company uses TACTIC to monitor the production in real time, and to produce up-to-the-minute reports, such as status reports and productivity reports. They also have it built into every department in the company, including their administrative and accounting functions. With everyone in the company using it, it has become a backbone for every facet of Legend3D’s work. “We view Southpaw as strategic partners and have worked side-by-side with them to create the system we have today.” He believes Legend3D’s growth has been in part due to the success they have had implementing TACTIC into its pipeline.

Lopez maintains, “We have been able to leapfrog two years of development by trusting TACTIC’s capabilities. It is such an extensible tool. It has been able to do everything we’ve thrown at it and allowed us to adjust quickly to problems.”

“TACTIC is a very open, flexible and powerful tool when used correctly. The important thing is that studios first need to understand their pipeline before TACTIC can be effective,” explains Lopez. “Unfortunately, most companies have gotten accustomed to having applications define their process because the tools have been so restrictive. But with TACTIC it can be the other way around, studios can define their process, and implement TACTIC around it.”

Lopez continues, “To be successful you need to break down all the parts of your pipeline and figure out how it works in your own studio. Once you understand that, TACTIC will do whatever you need it to do, and much more. Every studio is different, and every studio has a different approach to their pipeline, and TACTIC is built to be the translator between pipelines.”

The ROI of an Efficient Pipeline

Thanks to their detailed tracking, Legend3D has been able to increase their total shots per day by 10-fold, which Lopez directly attributes to efficiency and improvements by everyone in the production process. The increased efficiency is not only at the artist level, but includes everyone in the production pipeline. From production staff and data management teams to accounting and business development, the entire company is more efficient.

Legend3D is now able to track a single daily shot and compare it to any other day. This enables the company to see variances in productivity on a daily basis and know the precise status of each shot. Legend3D uses TACTIC to track daily correspondence with their clients, and develop custom delivery logging pages that help log every version of a shot that gets distributed. This customized naming convention process has helped them eliminate tracking errors on shots.

“With TACTIC, we are able to track the exact amount of time we spend per shot and per task, which not only helps us monitor the production in real-time, but has also helped us in project bidding and accounting,” notes Lopez.

TACTIC is the interpreter between pipelines and in 3D conversion that is critical,” explains Lopez. “With TACTIC as the interpreter it doesn’t matter about the workflows. TACTIC becomes the translator between the pipelines.” As a result, every person involved in the production is free to focus on their work, not on the mundane tasks that tend to bog productions down.

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Background

Based in Toronto, Canada, Astral Media (now known simply as Astral) is Canada’s largest radio broadcaster and is a major force in premium and specialty TV programming in Canada. Every day, hundreds of shows are promoted and “aired” by Astral and its vast network of affiliates to viewers across the Canadian market.

Sitting between the Programming Department (the department that locks in the show schedule for the month) and the Operations Department (the department that broadcasts the shows every day) is a small team of 12 talented motion and print designers collectively called the Graphics Department.

The responsibilities of the Graphics Department at Astral are vast. All production of On-Air, Off-Air and Multi-Platform graphics come through this department. That means, the team creates and ensures consistency and quality of all on-air branding, interstitials, and motion graphics for their own shows, all website graphics, print ads, and promotional material for their shows, and all graphics that go out to their affiliates. There is usually a ton of coordination that takes place, from sourcing media from studios, to obtaining approvals on graphics, to managing a number of sub-contractors when there is overflow.

To add to the complexity, Astral has been growing exponentially and transitioning from tape to digital content, both of which are forcing Astral to re-think how they approach the management of their digital assets.

Astral’s TACTIC for Asset Management

With their rapid growth and move to digital, Astral’s Creative Department was suddenly challenged to find a solution that was capable of organizing terabytes of digital content, and giving all departments greater visibility to that content in order to speed the iterative process across the organization.

After looking at multiple solutions, they decided to employ TACTIC for two reasons: flexibility and price. Other solutions were simply too geared to film or visual effects production, and not flexible enough to adapt to their specific workflow. Or, they were geared to handling on-air needs only and were simply too expensive. No other solution on the market was capable of integrating so easily into their processes for the price.

Astral’s first step with TACTIC will be the creation of a secure media library consisting of thousands of images and assets. As content is ingested, it will be tagged with an array of information, including legal descriptions, ratings, whether it’s linear or on-demand, date of first run, what channel it will be on, genre, series identifier, synopsis, country of origin, delivery size, and much more. That information will not only assist in the searching capabilities of the library; it will reside with the asset and be passed along to subcontractors and affiliates to inform them of the asset’s proper use.

Recognizing that new solutions often run into adoption issues because they present a new workflow, Astral is working closely with Southpaw to create a user interface on top of the TACTIC library that will make the experience of searching, finding, tagging and using assets far more comfortable for all users in the organization.

Streaming Workflow

Managing and providing access to the TACTIC media library is just the first step in the process of streamlining Astral’s creative workflow. The second step is to employ TACTIC’s powerful project management and workflow features to automate many of the tasks that happen manually today.

TACTIC is able to interface with its traffic systems to get key information associated with each asset. TACTIC will cross-reference assets based on new programming lists, keywords and info fields, and will automatically notify the Creative Department and other stakeholders as to what is still missing. When all assets are assembled, triggers built into TACTIC will automate the process of packaging a complete set of assets related to the title and delivering them to the appropriate people.

A secondary, but equally important plan, is to use TACTIC to support Astral’s creative brief process. Given TACTIC’s flexibility, a user interface is being designed to mimic the information needed by the Creative Department for their creative briefs. As information is entered, it will automatically create a project in TACTIC. Managers will then be able to take that and assign tasks, notes and resources to it, as well as assets. As resources and timelines are assigned, TACTIC will automatically inform everyone as to what is needed by when and by whom.

Looking down the road, Astral hopes to use TACTIC in the Interactive Department as well, allowing them to tap into the same media library, with all of the associated notes and file histories. This will simplify the sharing of assets across departments and minimize duplicated work.

End Goal

At the end of the day, the goal of TACTIC is not just to simplify asset management and automate manual tasks. Utimately it is to improve openness, inclusion and oversight across Astral. In an organization as large as Astral, those goals are what make TACTIC indispensable.

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TACTIC lets you create digital workflows to speed the way you make, move, store and share digital data across your team, department or enterprise.

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Toronto, Canada – Feb 6, 2012 – Southpaw Technology, a leading developer of production asset management (PAM) technology for content creators, announced today that it has created an open source version of its production asset management system TACTIC TEAM, for Mac OSX users. As of today, individuals and small teams working on Macs and producing 2D/3D files, visual effects, video and more can download TACTIC TEAM for free and start using it instantly to manage files, tasks, projects and workflows.

Every feature available on the most recent Windows® version of TACTIC TEAM (v3.9) is now also supported on Mac OSX. Since TACTIC TEAM is open source, individuals and teams can download the software and start using it for free.

“Once we launched our open source system, we began receiving more and more requests for Mac OSX support from individual and small teams,” said Gary Mundell, CEO of Southpaw Technology. “We’ve always said we would provide that Mac version when we could do so without sacrificing any functionality or performance. Today, I’m happy to say we’ve achieved that goal. And what’s better, with our new open source model, we can provide TACTIC TEAM to Mac users for free.”

Available to companies under the Eclipse Public License, TACTIC is a highly flexible web-based production asset management system that cures the headache of complex digital content creation. By combining digital asset management with project and workflow management, TACTIC keeps files secure, teams on track and projects on schedule as more and more digital content is created. TACTIC is currently being used by content creation teams of all types and sizes, including teams, studios and entire organizations in feature film production, visual effects, game development, advertising, marketing, and creative services across a number of industries.

To find out more about TACTIC, visit www.southpawtech.com/tactic

To download TACTIC Team for OSX, visit community.southpawtech.com/get-started

About Southpaw Technology Inc. Southpaw Technology provides production asset management solutions (www.southpawtech.com/solutions) to the media & entertainment and enterprise markets. Available via commercial or open source licensing as a web-based solution for Mac OSX, Windows and Linux, TACTIC combines all the asset and production management functionality teams, departments and companies need to keep digital productions on track and on budget, including asset management, project management, workflow management and communication tools. Customers include Procter and Gamble, Lockheed Martin, Saatchi and Saatchi LA, Nissan North America, Astral Media, Legend3D, GENER8, 2G Digital, Inhance Digital, ToonBox Entertainment, and many more digital content creators. For more information, please visit www.southpawtech.com ###

© 2013. Southpaw Technology Inc. All trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

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To try it out for yourself, head over to our download page. As open-source software, it’s completely free.

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Toronto, Canada – Nov 14, 2012 – Southpaw Technology, a leading developer of digital asset management (DAM) technology for content creators, announced today that it has launched Southpaw Solutions, a comprehensive suite of new offerings designed to extend the functionality of the company’s open source asset management software, TACTIC. These solutions, which handle common yet critical asset management challenges in many organizations, are built on top of TACTIC’s core architecture, yet can be tailored to each company’s unique IT environment and content creation workflow.

The exponential growth of content means that corporations are faced with the massively complex task of managing thousands of interrelated digital assets as they are being created, and once they are created. What’s more, most companies have their own unique methods of creating and storing those assets. Rather than imposing a strict set of rules on how to create and store that content, TACTIC and the Southpaw Solutions offer each organization a flexible, tailor-made way to manage “work-in-progress” assets and final assets.

“Thousands of companies have downloaded our open source asset management system since we launched it last August,” said Gary Mundell, CEO of Southpaw Technology. “Now those same companies are coming to us for custom solutions that can be built on top of TACTIC and that can handle some of the critical challenges of managing content creation within their organizations – challenges such as getting legacy data into databases where they can be organized and managed, syncing databases located in different places, and automating the movement of assets through their specific creation process. Since our software is now free to download, our experienced engineers are able to quickly tailor our Southpaw Solutions to meet any organization’s needs.”

The first Southpaw Solutions for TACTIC to be offered include the:

Custom Data Management Solution – Southpaw’s Custom Data Management Solution allows TACTIC to interpret and conform to any enterprise data management schema, and to create branded and tailored interfaces for accessing and working with that data.

Ingestion Solution – Southpaw’s Ingestion Solution offers companies a way to take years of untracked files and data, ingest it into TACTIC, and organize it into a searchable, trackable, highly organized file system.

Sync Solution – Southpaw’s Sync Solution ensures that remotely located teams are always working with or accessing the most current version of a file. It does this by syncing databases and queueing transactions based on timecodes to make sure that multiple databases and file versions, no matter where they are located, can stay organized and current at all times.

Creative Brief Solution – Southpaw’s Creative Brief Solution allows enterprises to set up jobs, tasks and resources in a custom-designed interface, and to manage, track and automate the implementation of those jobs based on company-specific requirements.

Custom WIP DAM Solution – Southpaw’s Custom Work-in-Progress (WIP) DAM Solution utilizes TACTIC’s flexibility and powerful workflow and asset management features to provide custom WIP DAM Solutions for companies of any size, in any industry. What’s more, all workflow features are connected to the assets residing in the database, keeping tasks, resources, and assets all connected as they move across your organization.

Business Intelligence Solution – Once TACTIC is implemented across a department or an enterprise, it can be integrated with and mine data from internal systems, providing powerful executive – level insights that inform strategic decisions.

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© 2012. Southpaw Technology Inc. All trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

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