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Review: GridIron Software Flow

By Jan Ozer
July 6, 2009

Workflow program maps project file relationships across multiple computers and professional software apps.

GridIron Software Flow maps your projects including the files input into the project (shown on the left in the program's diagram) and those rendered from the project (shown on the right).

GridIron Software Flow went from "What the heck does this program do?" to "I can't live without this software" faster than any other program I've looked at in my 15 years of reviewing software. For a while, however, it looked like all of us were going to have to live without the product, given a delivery time that slipped like Brett Favre's retirement plans. Though Favre's golfing days might have to wait, it looks like Flow, which was first announced at NAB Show 2008, is finally here.

What is Flow? At a high level, it tracks your project workflow through a number of content-creation programs such as Adobe Creative Suite 3 and 4; Apple Final Cut Pro, Shake, Keynote, Numbers, and Pages; and Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. At any given point, you can package up your projects and associated files and move them to another machine. Flow will warn you if you try to delete a file that's included in any tracked project, and it will tell you how long it took to create every file produced in any supported application included in a project (as well as the creation time for the project as whole). You can even export a .csv file with this time information to pretty up in Excel. Flow also saves separate versions of your projects, totally independent of any program's autosave function, so you can recover content that you deleted multiple versions ago.

True, many content-creation programs perform a subset of these activities. Adobe InDesign's Packaging function comes quickly to mind, as does Word's Properties window that tracks total editing time. But InDesign won't tell you how long it took to edit the Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files you included in the project, and it won't prevent you from deleting them six months down the road. Basically, Flow will help you work more efficiently and, if you charge for your work, track how much time you invested in each component of the job, as well as the total job itself. Best of all, Flow does this without any action on your part after you install the program.

But I'm gushing prematurely. Let's take a quick look at some basics, and I'll tell you what Flow did for me in the three weeks that I've been testing it.

Speeds and feeds

Flow costs $299 for one license (i.e. one computer), with a three-pack available for $399. Using the workflow feature described below, multiple users will be able to contribute to and view the same workflow map over a network. The program will be available for 32-bit and 64-bit Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on Intel and PowerPC machines.

At its most basic level, Flow creates maps of your projects that include all the files in the project and all files rendered from the project (see Figure 1 on p. 22). Flow has two potential sources for this data. When you load a supported project file into Flow — which is how you create a map — Flow parses the file and, to the extent that the information is provided within the project file, displays source and output file-related information in the map. This is called "backtrack scanning."

Flow prevents deletion of a file that's included in an Apple Final Cut Pro project.

Results here will vary based on the amount of information preserved in the project file. For example, I had hopes that Flow would tell me the location of all the files that I had input into a PowerPoint file so that I could more easily convert the presentation into a web page. No joy. I'd have to guess it's because PowerPoint doesn't track that information. On the other hand, Flow easily found all the image files that helped compose multiple InDesign documents that I tested, as well as the source files for Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro projects that I tested.

Flow performs backtrack scanning when you first load the file into Flow, which can take several minutes with complex files. Because the program presented no status message along the lines of "Scanning file, please wait," I thought the program had frozen, though inevitably it returned to life. Note that you can avoid this problem by having Flow search your hard drives for compatible files and perform backtrack scanning in one fell swoop, though this will take a while if you have a lot of projects. What Flow can't do during backtrack scanning is tell you how much time you spent creating the project unless it can find this information in the project file, which, even for Microsoft Word, it couldn't.

Beyond backtrack scanning, once you install Flow, a small (30KB for Windows) process remains in the background, tracking activity for all supported project files and saving it to a Flow-specific database. This is how Flow tracks how long you worked on a particular project. Note that Flow still appears to depend upon the project file for source-file information; specifically, even after installing Flow, it still didn't track the identification or location of source graphics files for a new PowerPoint file. I'll just have to get better organized.

Of course, if you're reading this magazine, chances are you don't make your money creating PowerPoint files. When it comes to video content creation with professional programs, Flow really shines. More on this after I detail a few configuration options.

Configuring Flow

I hear you thinking, "This time-keeping stuff sounds great, but what happens when I'm off checking email, or leave for lunch and leave the project file open?" Well, you can tell Flow to stop the recording time after a configurable idle time; I used the default of 5 minutes. What about rendering time, which can be quite lengthy for many projects? It's currently included with all other project-related activities, but a future version of Flow should give you the option to either include or exclude rendering time from the total project-creation time.

What about projects for which multiple users contribute to the end result from different workstations? You can create shared maps that multiple users of Flow can access, and the content-creation time invested by each participant is added to the global project.

Here's how it works. Imagine you (or someone else on the team) creates a script for a video project in Word on computer 1. Then you shoot the project and capture and edit on computer 2 using Premiere Pro, which integrates project components from Photoshop and After Effects that were produced on the same computer. Then you edit the audio using Adobe Soundbooth on computer 3 (I know, you'd rather use Adobe Audition. Me too. Maybe a later version of Flow will incorporate Audition). All three computers have Flow installed.

An Adobe Premiere Pro project was created on one computer, the script on a second, and the two bottom audio files on a third. All the computers can see the Share Map.

Computer 2 owns the Premiere Pro project and would set up a Share Map on a fourth computer that's accessible to all three creation stations. The only requirement is that this machine doesn't have Flow installed. The scriptwriter on Computer 1 drags the Word document into the shared Premiere Pro Map, which associates the time spent on that project with the Map. The audio editor on computer 3 saves the final audio file, then copies it to computer 2 for inclusion in the project. The time spent editing the audio is added to the project automatically. And if you try to delete the Word file on computer 1 or the audio file on computer 3, Flow will warn you that both are included in a project, and it will give you the option to recover the file.

Note that this workgroup feature wasn't in the public beta but only in the early release candidates of the software, which is why you might not have heard about it in other reviews. But it's a totally killer feature that reflects how some individuals produce different types of content on different workstations and how workgroups function. The $399 pricing for the three-pack really seals the deal.

Going with the flow

Flow proved very useful in just a short time. For example, during my trial, I was writing an article with Word and edited out some sections that I later decided to add back in. I had saved the file in the interim, so the deleted work would have been lost. Flow saved every version of every article file, so I was able to recover the work.

When working with InDesign, finding source files after archiving projects is a constant problem. I'm sure there's a best practice that would prevent this, but Flow warns me when I delete or move a source file. This is easier and highlights the point that you really don't have to change the way you work to reap Flow's benefits.

It's also hard to overstate the value of knowing how much time you actually spend on a project. For one recent mixed video/screencam project, I suspected that I had underbid the project. Flow confirmed this by telling me that I spent 8.5 hours solely on narration and editing. It was also interesting to learn that I had invested more than 5 hours of editing to produce two screencam videos for my website that I was supposedly producing in my spare time.

My major frustrations with the software relate to programs that Flow doesn't yet support, such as Audition and TechSmith Camtasia. GridIron plans to incorporate at least the former in future versions of Flow. Also notable among the missing is Apple DVD Studio Pro. However, if you drink the Adobe CS3 or CS4 Kool-Aid, you're totally covered, as you would be if you were using most key apps in the Microsoft Office suite.

What are the caveats? Flow is a very ambitious project that operates on a very low level. If you scan the user boards of the long and extensive beta, you'll see some complaints about CPU use and disk space requirements. In these regards, note that Flow lets you decide how much CPU and disk space to allocate to Flow-specific activities.

In my cross-platform tests, however, CPU drag never got ominous and program operation was generally stable. As with all new programs, I would recommend that you check out the 30-day trial before you buy. But I'm predicting that once you install Flow on your computer, you'll be very glad that you did.

Bottom Line

Company: GridIron Software www.gridironsoftware.com
Product: Flow
Assets: Monitors total time spent on a project across multiple programs and computers; maintains copies of previous versions of files; warns user when moving or deleting a source file.
Caveats: Lacks support for some programs (Adobe Audition and TechSmith Camtasia among others).
Price: $299 (single license), $399 (three licenses)

From http://digitalcontentproducer.com/dcc/revfeat/review_gridiron_flow/index.html