Studio Automation 101 with Marc, Dan, Lesley, and Rob

Summary

Last week our episode featured some high level discussion about automation in the studio with Marc Berenson. This week Marc is back and he brought friends! In a first for this show we had 4 guests, the team at Stanley Black and Decker that Marc worked with to find ways to automate their repetitive tasks, and save time and effort. As Dan Berzak, head of this efficiency team,  tells us, it’s about leveling not only the playing field, but your own expectations on what you can do. 

Reminder

You can save $100 off your registration fee for the Henry Stewart Events Photo Studio Ops Forum 2022 in New York City on May 4 with discount code CONTENTPOD100. We will be recording a live episode of the show at the event. Hope to see you there!

Register Here

Key Takeaways

• Building off of episode 56, we talk to the team that built a useful and accessible automation system.
• One of the keys to success this team learned is to make scripts and actions as modular as possible.
• Level the playing field, find the lowest common denominator. Don't get too specific.
• If you can get 100 assets 50% of the way to completion with automation, thats better than getting 1 asset 100% of the way.
• Leveraging tools the studio had already, the team was able to improve accessibility to images, speed up the review process, and provide updates in real time.
• The team learned not to overuse tools in each platform, so as not to bake in to many changes.
• Thinking of the entire process as additive is a great way to prevent overcooking your images.
• Marc theorizes that the future of Photoshop actions may be actions that are triggered by keywords or other metadata.

Credits
Produced by: Creative Force - creativeforce.io
Edited by: Calvin Lanz Sound - clsound.net
Hosted by: Daniel Jester - danieltjester.com