Mike Reigle, Systems Engineer at Deutsch and Steelhead, chatted to us about switching to Louper for their remote editorial sessions.

Hi Mike, can you tell us a bit about the relationship between Deutsch and Steelhead?

Steelhead started inside of Deutsch, and it was a pretty obvious case of vertical integration. Deutsch makes a lot of ads, and it made sense to do more of the process in-house. But they did something that other agencies with the same idea did not do. They built out a really large state-of-the-art soundstage. You can drive a car onto it, it’s got sound-dampened air conditioning. And we have two audio mixing rooms, with a sound-isolated recording booth. And five edit bays. 

Shooting a spot for NerdWallet on the Steelhead Soundstage.

What led you to switch to Louper as your live-streaming platform?

We’d had some reliability issues with our previous streaming service, and I was looking for something that didn't require any specialized hardware, because we have headless workstations in our computer room. 

In larger companies, or in agencies, replacing tooling can be a pretty heavy lift. But with Louper, it only took about a month. It was the right tool for the job and it just worked really well with rock solid reliability: it gets our media and our message across to our reviewers.

We cut on Premiere Pro and we're using the LDE app, with the NDI plug-in. Louper is really in our everyday work now. Around Deutsch people know about the live streaming aspect and they'll ask for it. Agency producers will ask, "can we get a Louper room for this project?"

Part set-build, part VFX for 'Pet Smart'.

Has Louper changed your workflow in any way?

Some of our stakeholders just really don't like asynchronous. And they want to get together in the edit bay. But often their team will include someone who cannot come to the edit bay. So we can now have a hybrid session where whomever wants to be in that central location in the edit bay can go there. And anyone who can't be there, can join on Louper.

It used to be the case that all of our talent had to be in Los Angeles and now it's not. So Louper is one of the tools that helps the company open up that talent pool in terms of the stakeholders who can work with us: creative directors and agency producers. We have editors dialing in from around Los Angeles working from home but also from other cities. There's a couple of editors that we work with in the New York area and there's even been some internationally too.

Creatives connected remotely for reviews of 'Taco Twosday'

What makes Louper a good fit for your clients and projects?

Clients don't need to download anything. That's actually one of the key features because in a lot of big corporate environments, people can't install apps on their own computer. 

People just adapt to Louper so easily that the meetings seem to proceed naturally. With other platforms we've tried, the meeting always becomes kind of clunky, whether that's just streaming your edit into some other meeting system like Zoom or, whether it's something like Evercast. There's always an element where everybody involved feels like they're doing something extra. And with Louper, it's just so available that everybody feels natural about it. They seem to forget that they're doing anything unusual or extra.

That's the best Louper feature. It's transparent.

Pete Zahut delivers the goods

How to Review a Talking Whale

Read our interview with Deutsch creatives X and Y on their collaboration for this awesome NerdWallet spot.

Deutsch is an advertising agency and creative studio based in LA.

Visit Steelhead.tv to view the spots mentioned in this article, as well as other work produced for Deutsch.

The Steelhead editorial team run their Premiere Pro review sessions on Louper.

Click here to access detailed setup guides for Premiere Pro.