Post House Nice Shoes Releases System To Streamline Production

In its many years as a post house helping commercial clients breathe creative life into their ads, Nice Shoes is now helping agencies, corporations and broadcasters, as well as production and post houses breathe a little easier over casting or final edits with the release of Nice Spots, an intuitive Internet-based system for sharing media from anywhere, anytime.
“Through years of working at Nice Shoes seeing the issues our clients ran into on a daily basis, we developed Nice Spots to solve those problems,” explains John DiMaggio, Dir. of New Media Services. “The system is set up so you can use it in every aspect of production and post, from approving casting footage to final edits and effects.”
This cross-platform system based on Macromedia Flash and ShockWave, and QuickTime, users can simply upload their video and then anyone with password access can view the footage, along with associated metadata, and make comments referring to certain sequences, takes or even individual frames. With an intuitive design similar to email programs, the system is easily customizable for each company and individuals within, allowing different users to view the only the metadata they want.
“Instead of locking the metadata in we allow users to chose what they want to view, so the creative director can see different data than the producer,” says DiMaggio.
While there are other, similar systems for approvals, what differentiates Nice Spots is its archival archival and retrieval process, eliminating the time and cost of dubs, storage and shipping.
You can take your master-quality files and put them up on Nice Spots and store them there. Then three years down the line if you need to reference them you can just do a search and it pops right up. You can view the spot, confirm that it is the one you are looking for and order dubs or download the master file if you are authorized,” explains DiMaggio. “Once you put it up, you have access to all of your material from anywhere, 24/7.”
While no formal pricing structure was announced at the unveiling Nov. 2, users will pay as they go depending on volume of use with no start-up fees.