NAB: GridIron demos Flow, public beta due in Spring

GridIron Software on Monday announced that GridIron Flow software is now undergoing beta testing with a select group of creative professionals and is being demonstrated this week on both Mac OS X and Windows at the NAB (booth SL6220). According to the company, Flow is billed as "a revolutionary new approach to workflow management for creative pros that dramatically simplifies the design process for print, web, film, and video projects." The software transparently tracks work from idea to end result and manages all assets and applications with any modifications to existing workflows. Expected to ship later this summer starting at $350, Flow automatically tracks projects allowing users to instantly see the relationships between all assets without changing the way you work.

Flow uses sophisticated Real-Time Asset Tracking technology to record all Import/Export, Save/Save As, and Copy/Paste actions in a project. The softwawre recognizes the file formats for virtually all creative professional applications, including those from Apple and Adobe, and maintains the relationships between stills, movies, sound clips, fonts, plug-ins, and color swatches on all local, network, and removable storage devices.

The software provides an intuitive user interface to display this information along with several key features, including workflow maps, visual search, project time tracking, visual versions, tags/annotations, and a Flow SDK for integration into existing workflows.

• Workflow Maps -- show the files used in a project and how they are connected to one another as they move from application to application including all related assets, fonts, color swatches, plug-ins and even internal file structure like comps and layers. They are updated in real-time as you work.
  
  
• Visual Search -- searches for internal file details such as layer names, plug-ins, fonts, or colors, and Flow will instantly highlight how and where those elements are used in your workflow.
  
  
• Project Time Tracking -- automatically records how much time was spent creating one file, a series of files or an entire project.
  
  
• Project Packages —- provide a point in time snapshot of any project and capture everything that went into its creation, including media files, fonts, color swatches, applications and plug-ins. Project Packages include a Workflow Map showing how everything fits together so that everything needed to hand it off and reconstruct it later will be there.
  
  
• Visual Versions -- automatically tracks versions of files, including thumbnails and metadata, as a project evolves allowing users to easily revert to a previous version of a file anywhere in their workflow.
  
  
• Tags and Annotations -- add customized tags and annotations to assets or projects to support your own business processes. View existing file metadata with support for metadata standards like DICOM, EXIF, IPTC and XMP.
  
  
• Flow SDK -- offered to tool vendors to easily create custom extensions to support their file formats and add new functionality to the Flow environment.

Flow will be available this summer for Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard and for Windows XP/Vista for $350 per seat. Volume pricing will also be available, but was not disclosed. The Flow Beta is currently available to a select group of professionals and will be made broadly available from the company website later this Spring.

Filed under: software, Graphics/Web Design
Other story tags: NAB, workflow