If you’ve just started working from home and feel a bit lost, then a new “Workflow From Home” series on YouTube may be something to watch to keep post-production humming as smoothly as possible.

Frame.io’s CEO, Emery Wells, wrote recently on the company’s blog: “Just a few weeks ago the new reality brought on by COVID-19 was unfathomable. Alas, here we are living through a global pandemic, together. “Together” is the key word.” Aware that “Now more than ever it’s time to support one another”, Frame-io followed its CEO words with a series of actions, offering, until the end of March, “2TB of free extra storage capacity for the next 90 days” to help accommodate work from home workflows, and also announced support for “educational institutions, non-profits, and healthcare organizations that have been impacted.”

If you need the extra storage offered by Frame.io get in touch with the company. On the other hand if you run one of the businesses mentioned above, says Emery Wells, “we will offer a free Frame.io Enterprise plan for 90 days.” The contact email for those interested in knowing more is [email protected].

Aware that many professionals are facing challenges “as productions postpone their shoot schedules and/or you’re figuring out how to shift post-production operations to a distributed team” Emery Wells says “Frame.io was really built for this moment. For the past 5 years we have enabled teams to work together seamlessly from across the hall or across the globe. Like many businesses that have been trying to lend a hand during this time of crisis, we too want to do our part. As a product that enables distributed work, we know we’re in a position to help.”

Workflow from Home… as smoothly as possible

Helping means, besides the actions mentioned above, to launch a new “Workflow From Home” series on YouTube, hosted by Michael Cioni, Frame.io’s Global SVP of Innovation, designed to walks users through everything they need to keep post-production humming as smoothly as possible. It’s a brand new video series developed as a response to the COVID-19 outbreak and transition to home offices.

The series is specifically designed to help teams who’ve been working in brick-and-mortar facilities quickly transition to a remote workflow. Productions have ground to a halt, but the truth remains: consumers want to keep watching new shows, so studios need to find ways to keep putting them out. The craving for content might be stronger now than ever before.

In fact, it was just reported that industry analyst Omdia predicts “up to 50% increase in digital content consumption and 12% growth of the online streaming industry” as a result of the virus. VPN usage has also exploded, as more and more people work from home and need some kind of safe connection to their company’s servers. Millions of people staying home has increased the use of the Internet, both for work and leisure, to levels never experienced before.

The ultimate test to the Internet

This is the ultimate test to the Internet, and the recent news that Netflix and YouTube are reducing the quality of their streaming, offering only standard resolution, while games companies will slow game downloads to minimize traffic congestion due to the coronavirus outbreak, suggests that the information superhighway may not be able to keep up with all the demand. Recent data released by Verizon shows that gaming is the main culprit in terms of traffic increase, having spiked by 75% against only 12% increase in Netflix’s video.

In the midst of all these news, the  “Workflow From Home” series aims to helps professionals, many of them not familiar with this new landscape, to work from home. Cioni writes: “Our goal is to identify the steps and dive deep into how you can shift from an on-premises workflow with centralized network storage to one that’s based either partially, or entirely, in the cloud.” The guide, which launched Monday with an intro from Michael Cioni and the first episode, Setting up at Home, will cover:

• Everything from editing, to visual effects, to conforming, color grading, and mastering in the cloud.
• The differences between entirely cloud-based and hybrid cloud workflows, and what’s best for you.
• The how-tos: how to determine your internet bandwidth; upload and organize your assets in Frame.io; share assets and collaborate with your team, and so on.

Besides the videos on YouTube, Frame.io has created a microsite – https://frame.io/remotework/ – which will be updated weekly with new videos exploring how to enable a remote workflow from start to finish, with the goal of helping folks get up and running in response to the new realities we’re now facing.