A Look Back at 2022 with Tejs Rasmussen

From Creative Force, I'm Daniel Jester, and this is the E-commerce Content Creation Podcast. We're getting into that time of year when we start reflecting on the past year. We at Creative Force have a year's worth of product updates, feature releases, and bug fixes that we're pretty proud of. In this episode, I sit down with Creative Forces CTO, Tejs Rasmussen, where we run down his top three releases of 2022. You'll be shocked at number one.

So it's (beep) that is my favorite from this year. I think it's unlocking so much in terms of using your data and having it displayed at the right time and alerting the users with the right information.

Well, you won't be shocked, but it was not what I would've guessed. We also discussed a handful of things you will see from Creative Force in 2023. Now let's take a look back at 2022 with Tejs.

This is the E-commerce Content Creation Podcast. I'm your host, Daniel Jester, and very excited to introduce my guest friend of the show, you could say, Tejs Rasmussen, chief product officer of Creative Force. What's your title anymore?

CTO now.

CTO, got it. Yeah. Okay. So Tejs, I wanted to connect with you on the show and talk a little bit about... We don't talk that much about Creative Force on the podcast, but for the last couple of years, is this our third one of these?

I think so, yeah.

Oh my gosh, wow. So to do a little look, a review of the last year of the releases that we've had in Creative Force, we've had some very exciting things. We've had a lot of housekeeping things. Some small releases that ended up having big impact with our users. So we'll spend some time talking about that. And then I want to talk a little bit about whatever we can talk about for what 2023 looks like for Creative Force.

Let's do it.

So I'm going to start off with the tough question. What do you think was the biggest thing for us in 2022? I mean, video's got to be up there, video L2 is huge.

It's on my list, my top three but it's not the winner.

I'm very interested to find out if that's not the winner, what is. So why don't you take us through your top three? Let's start at number three and we'll work backwards. We'll build up a little bit of anticipation.

So I've of course been here the whole time and I've seen all the pain of when we didn't do something, like when we didn't do it well enough. And I think one thing that I've been wanting to fix for a long time was the category trigger management that we had. We made an update this year where we made it possible to download all triggers and rearrange them in Excel sheet and so on. And within seconds you would have everything remapped. It's not very sexy, I know, but the pain of having to rearrange all that was just immense. And I think that it was so nice for me to get that fixed and get it really over the finish line. It's not like there's a lot of other good stuff. Maybe you have another chop three than me. But I think that one was really nice because it was so hurtful to the experience.

I love that one and it's not one that I would've thought of. It didn't make my top three but for our listeners in Creative Force categories, the category of the product that you bring into the platform is how Creative Force knows which workflow and style guide to assign to your product. If you needed to make changes, if you updated your style guide or changed workflows, it was a very manual process to go through and remap all of these things. So we-

Yeah. Just keeping it clean and maybe you have new triggers this year coming in with new categories and so on, it's just impossible to manage it. But I was really excited when we got that one out. Yeah.

And that makes sense to me because again, I think that context is important. You build something one way, and this is one thing I really admire about Creative Force in general, and you specifically Tejs is, you build something that's pretty amazing and works really well, but then it's never good enough. It's got to be better, it's got to be faster, it's got to be easier.

Yeah, that's funny. I was just reflecting on that before we jumped on this call that what's going to happen next year. I think last year I said that I really look forward to making those small updates or those small iterations because that's really where I feel like you often have to hold back on your first release of something and then revisit it later on when you've had enough feedback and you know what you need to do and so on. And that's really when you finish something and that is the best feeling from my product perspective. No ta-da with that or no one applauding you, but they are small, they're very important updates. I love that. Yeah. [inaudible 00:04:57]. Because I think we've been pushing too many of the refinements and define improvements and so on too long. And I would like to do much more of that and we can do that with a bigger team. [inaudible 00:05:12]. But they are small, very, very important updates. I love that. Yeah.

That's number three then. That's the number three spot is updates to how you manage the category triggers. That's a great one. That's a good one. Yeah.

Yeah. Then video, then video is number two.

Number two. Okay. I mean video is, I don't know how much we need to explain on that. We launched, did we launch both versions of video in 2022?

Yeah, we did.

Wow. So two rounds of video. We did the L1 video where we just supported bringing video into the platform, being able to track that you need video and that it exists and that was it. And then explain to the listeners what the next phase part of the video release was.

So the second part was to, first of all, support more video formats. We initially started out with MP4 support, which is basically the files you would use on your website, but we all know that people edit and work with different file types that has much higher quality, higher file size, higher resolution also typically. So we needed to support all that. And then there's the editing part. So we made support for external post production so we can set up a workflow where you do some clips. You upload these videos into the platform, it goes to external post-production step where someone combines these clips into a single video and upload it back into the platform again. So just like any other post-production step basically.

And then the third thing, which I think is extremely important when you have something like that is to get that collaboration review part into the platform where we launched a frame by frame review QC interface so that you could quality control these videos coming in from post.

So you can make markups frame by frame throughout an entire video with notes attached to them. It uses the same multicolor approach where you can have color coded comments that attach to the markup on the video itself, similar to some other tools out there, but it's integrated into your end-to-end workflow solution.

I think it's getting to a point where you need to have that. If you want a support video, it's not good enough to not have that feedback loop.

Yeah. It's worth saying, even though everybody listening to this podcast knows it, if passing retouching notes for still images along with hard enough, imagine passing those notes along, okay, at the 53 second mark on this video. There's a moment where her foot touches the ground, we need to... It's crazy.

Yeah, that's impossible. So it's needed and I also think that we are going to talk about that later on maybe when we talk about what's going to happen next year. I also have video on that list.

Yeah, definitely excited to hear from you on what's next for video, but right now I'm very curious to know what's taking the number one spot.

So it's property display and alerts that is my favorite from this year. I think it's unlocking so much in terms of using your data and having it displayed at the right time and alerting the users with the right information. This is my personal favorite. I can tell that you're not as excited as I am but it is. Yeah.

My face betrays me a little bit. It's not that I'm not excited, but the wheels were turning for me a little bit because I've said a lot through the course of my role as chief evangelist for Creative Force that it's how we use the data that makes Creative Force work. Creative Force is a hundred percent about leveraging data that you already have about your product to build smarter workflows and to make it easier to do the work of producing assets for them.

We make such a big difference with the way we handle data and our whole data system, both downstream when we integrate with DEM systems, but have the data at hand, the right information, it's even being highlighted to you for certain situations and you could set up, if there's something in this property or this data field at the point of capture, please tell the team on set. These situations are extremely hard to manage and it's typically something that you would use and get a lot of effort via Slack email and so on, and you would fail on 20% of it anyway. It's such a clean solution and I'm like, I also think the execution of it is really neat. It looks really good can can display, you can design pretty much your own view there. And again, it was one of the things that we've heard from the beginning, "Hey, could you have fix this?"

So do you have any honorable mentions for releases for this year?

Delivery matrix, maybe, I don't know. You too, love that.

Yeah. Delivery matrix for sure is on my list of maybe my top three. But yeah, the delivery matrix for our listeners is, how do you describe it? It's a matrix.

Yeah, it's a matrix of variants and you can decide what's going where.

If you have three delivery locations and you have three style guide positions, meaning three images, but one of those images gets split into two images, so you have four total, you can check boxes. This is impossible for the people listening to try to follow there. They're totally lost. But it's check boxes. It's check boxes that say send this image and this image here and send these other images there. And it's like super intuitive. What I said at the beginning is that anybody could be trained on how it works and how to use it in about three minutes if that. It's an incredible tool in our system that, I don't know. I love it. I just go in and I look at it sometimes.

It's a satisfying interface. I think that's [inaudible 00:10:52].

That's a great way of putting it.

I think Daniel, that we should also mention that we edited or we updated the markup component throughout the system.

That's a big one. That was on my list. That was a big one, for sure. Also on my list of, I don't know if this made by top three, but definitely an honorable mention was getting the Hue integration with Photoshop sorted out for the new M1 Max.

That's right.

That was something that was a little bit problematic and it took a while to get that fixed. This is the problem of being in the software game. When you're dependent on the computers and they make changes. We have no control over that.

No, and it's a little bit of a hard one because was forced on us by Adobe like okay, there's no more support for this panel that you already have for the new Max. But then it wasn't super ready, the framework they said we had to work on and yeah, we've been having some issues with it. It's getting more mature, but I would love to see the rest of that Adobe Suite also switch over to this new framework and so on because we are stuck in two worlds with this.

Well, first of all, any other honorable mentions or anything else we want to talk about in 2022? I mean it was a big year for Creative Force. We've grown a lot as a company. The product has grown a lot. A lot of refinements were made. Our development staff. When we talked this time last year, one of the hurdles was finding the right dev team and we really broke through that. That's huge.

We did. This year has been incredible on that. So I think we doubled the team or maybe tripled, I don't know, something like that.

Who knows? Who can say?

Yeah, the dev team at least, but there are some other things of course also, which I think are interesting. And we did do some good for the retouchers that are sitting with the Hue app with filters and save viewers and so on. That came out. That was pretty big.

Sprint 111 that was. Just for in case anyone's keeping score.

Remember that?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm chief evangelist of Creative Force man.

Yeah, you have to know you.

I got to be the library at least.

Yeah. But the EIP support is pretty cool. I think that's-

EIP, that's a great one. A very typical studio process. A very typical studio process to want to preserve that information. Because many studios make adjustments and Capture One on set and you just lose them once you process out a JPEG and send it through.

That was not an easy one. I can tell you it's like a proprietary format of Capture One, which is close. There's some sip thing but then it's not really like that and if you do things with it breaks and so on. So it was hard to figure out how to work with this.

Can I ask a geeky question about it though?

Yeah.

It's technically interesting to me. So is it the image file plus a sidecar file with just information that's packaged in EIP or is it more technical than that? I always assumed it was just a metadata that rides in an XML file that it was that thing and they were connected in that EIP package. But it sounds like it might be more than that.

It's close to being that, but there is more to it. There's like, because if it was just that and sipped, you would just open it up, edit it and just zip it again. But it's not how it is. So there's some more stuff to it, but basically that's it. So in the information about the conversion and the raw file sipped into a file called EIP, but there's more to it.

Interesting.

Yeah, so that was a good one. Containers as well came out I think.

Oh man, the list is getting longer as we go. We spend the whole time talking about it. But yeah, Containers is a big one. Again, for listeners that may not be familiar, it was another layer of our sample management. If you think of sample management and Creative Force being an organizational tool of where your products are in your studio, Containers created another layer of that. So you could add several products to a Container and that entire Container could virtually move to different locations in the studio. We've been talking for a while, I think early next year we're going to do a public demo specifically on sample management. It's an extraordinarily powerful part of Creative Force. Let's pivot the conversation. We've acknowledged that it's been a big year for Creative Force, both the company, the growth and the product itself. Just so many exciting features and things. What is left for us in 2023?

There's a lot. With a bigger team, of course we're going to have more capacity, but I also think the complexity has gone up. When you start out, you start out with one component, you can just build it however you want. Now everything is integrated, everything is connected with logic and so on. So it's just more complex expanding a platform like that. So there is a slowdown. We'll probably see a similar release amount next year.

Obviously we do sprint releases every two weeks, but there is, for anyone paying attention, there's a cadence to them. There's really big releases probably every quarter and then handful of the releases are just housekeeping and small things.

So I think if we just talk about big things that I'm really excited about, then I would say we've been talking about planning for years. It's been in discovery for years, but now it's actually software. So we have a working prototype or early version of planning.

We've seen the mockups of this for a couple of years now and it looks fantastic. It's-

Slideware for a while.

I like that. Slideware, I've never heard of that.

It's a thing.

That's an industry term?

For when something never really gets to become software, but it is actually software now. We have a calendar, you can schedule sessions, you can add production, you can add team and we need to connect that into Kelvin so that you can run these sessions in there. We need to do more on the booking of resources and so on. But it is a really, really interesting thing that we are going to come up with here next year. So that's pretty big planning. We will be releasing to a very small group of customers January and then a little bit of bigger audience during Q1.

And this is like many project management tools. I'll put it this way. I think when a lot of people who don't know what Creative Force is, they think it's this. They think it's the managing a, okay, what models are we going to have in on what day and what set are they going to go to? I guess really it's because the idea of having something that manages the actual production of the assets itself is such a foreign concept for a lot of people who always thought it was impossible.

We've talked about this internally at Creative Force. I think we've addressed the harder thing coming back to planning now is like with all the things that we've learned about how production actually happens in Creative Force, we can build a smarter planning tool that supports that and now are adding in that functionality that people think Creative Force is.

Correct. And I think the workflow automation, which is that component that people don't really like, "Do we need that? What is that?" It's huge. It's the biggest component we have in our platform. It's where we spend half of our efforts and so on because it's so hard to manage all the files moving around, the task management, the people, the tracking of everything and so on. That is a huge part that if you just think you need a calendar or scheduling, then you have to think again because there's a huge productivity gain, cost savings, all that coming from automation. And I think people are starting to look much more into that now where the budgets are a little bit more tight.

I'm very excited for the planning thing for a lot of... I know one of the things that we've talked about, and I don't know if this is made it in or if it's on a future state somewhere. But one of the things that I always wanted to be able to do was just automate my call sheets when I was booking my studios, I just wanted to be able to push like, "Okay. Here's my team, put them in place, press a button and everybody gets their call sheet," because that was so tedious, so manual and there was no other way to do it.

But that's in there. That's definitely part of it in multiple ways both sending out things but also just having calendar feeds that you can share with people. If you have on staff people, why can't they see when they have to work and why is that not fully updated all the time when you move around production and so on. So there's a lot of things around that area.

A lot of the producers that listen to this podcast, their ears are perking up a little bit because they're starting to hear like, "Wait, am I going to have a way for people to easily update their availability or to confirm holds without it being six days of emails back and forth?"

Exactly. It's all that and that is a big thing. Of course, it's going to take some time to dial in, but that's what we are headed out to start on.

What does the future of the editorial module look like? We released editorial, it's been used, it's got some refinements that need to happen. Is there any big changes coming to editorial in 2023?

And I think it's on my list of really, really interesting things, but it's actually also going across to e-comm production, but it is a lot more collaboration. I think we see it with Adobe. We see all these tools during COVID and so on where collaboration was really the thing that made the difference and we need to get much more collaboration into our platform, especially for editorial where it's a bigger need. But I still think that things like rounds of review is super important for commercial photography. Shot all the product, let's get some feedback from the client and we've agreed to do a certain amount of rounds and having a controlled approach on that first round is internal. Second one goes to the customer. That could be a simple one.

Having all that fully controlled within the platform and sharing out for feedback in maybe a white labeled interface where you don't let people go into Creative Force but they see some simplified, maybe more sleek version, less tools and so on, but they have this available, they can give this feedback really easy and so on. That is something that we are looking into and working on right now.

What else can we look forward to 2023, Tejs?

We mentioned video. I think that is of course, again a thing. Tighter integration with Adobe Premier. Getting that so we can do what is similar to internal post-production for images, having an internal post-production step for video where instead of Photoshop it's and maybe also smarter tools that are being used.

I was going to ask about that. I know DaVinci is really popular for a lot of color graders and I feel like it's expanded to other types of video post production aside from... I mean it's known for color grading, but it does a lot of other things now.

Exactly. I think that's a very cool tool and we're definitely looking at integration with that.

Is there anything else coming up in 2023 Tejs, that we should be paying attention to?

So copywriting is a new module coming out in '23, which I think it's a strategy. We want to cover the entire spectrum. So everything you need to launch product, we want to help you create that content.

It's not actually not uncommon at all for copywriters to sit in the studio, there are plenty of places where the only place that those types of employees get the opportunity to interact with the product is in the studio. So when I was the studio at Nordstrom, we had copywriters that sat in the studio. I know many, many studios for some of the biggest... The world's biggest retailers have copywriters who sit in the studio who can sit with the product, take the measurements they need, gather the data they need, and then write their copy for the website PDP pages.

Yeah, that's right. First time you hear about it. It's pretty crazy. But I think it works. It makes the process much shorter and yeah.

Yeah. Very cool. Copywriting video, I imagine just further refinements to those user experiences, more delivery matrixes, more clicky boxes that are easy to understand.

Exactly.

Actually, here's the one thing that I would like to request and I don't know. I don't have anymore-

The Dropbox delivered.

No, I gave up asking up for Dropbox because you just you start ignoring my messages on Slack when I start talking about Dropbox.

Yeah, I do.

I was talking with somebody from Mural a while ago at, it was actually the New York Henry Stewart conference and I was sharing with them that I love to use these flowchart tools to map out, when I build a workflow in Creative Force and it has a lot of conditions on it, I like to build it in a tool like mural or mural first so that I can visualize where things are going. It occurred to the two of us in that conversation that that might be something that we could integrate and automate. That when you have a workflow that it could generate that workflow map for you so that you can really understand where things are going.

Pretty cool idea.

Something to think about.

Roll through all the logic and then draw all these flow charts up automatically.

Very cool. Well I'm excited, Tejs, to see what 2023 holds. Obviously there's this hanging low cloud that's hovering right over your house right now I think, getting a little bit of rain.

There's like a hailstorm going on.

Yeah, I was going to say-

I don't know if you can hear it.

I can't hear it. And I was like, "I know it's not raining at my house, but it was pretty loud."

Yeah, it's pretty loud.

But there's a low dark cloud hanging over the industry right now in the form of what is the economy going to do? And every day I see one Wall Street guy says this thing and one CEO says this thing and nobody really knows what's going to happen. But I'll say this, now's the time to invest in the tools that can get you through this. And I know that's going to sound incredibly biased coming from a couple of Creative Force employees, but I think I genuinely believe this. I think that if you are looking for ways to save time and money in 2023, Creative Force is one of those ways.

Yeah, I totally agree. And thank you for not asking me about my opinion on where things are going, but I definitely agree on that one because it doesn't hurt to become more productive or get things more under control, and just get more out of your team because I don't think they're going to stop requesting more complex stuff like you mentioned earlier on.

Absolutely. Well, Tejs, thank you so much for your time. It's getting on the late side for you there in Denmark, but I really appreciate it. It's always a pleasure when we get to catch up and especially to have you on the podcast, and thanks for letting me to continue to do this podcast. It's been a joy for me the last couple of years.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

That's it for this episode. Many thanks to our guest, Tejs Rasmussen, and thanks to you for listening. The show is produced by Creative Force, edited by Calvin Lanz. Special thanks to Sean O'Meara. I'm your host, Daniel Jester. Until next time, my friends.