Optimizing the Performance of a Film and TV Production Platform by 3x
A software provider for the film industry turned to Altoros to extend the functionality of a flagship product, optimize performance, and facilitate delivery.
Summary
Brief results of the collaboration:
- Under tight deadlines, the customer delivered business-critical components to its platform, raising additional investments and onboarding two film production companies as pilot users.
- The provider got flattering feedback along with official testimonials from industry professionals, as the developed features enabled them to cut clerical workload by 2x.
- The chosen architectural approach and code reuse favored ease of maintenance, facilitating the development of new functionality.
- Thanks to the optimizations introduced, the organization improved platform performance by 3x.
The customer
Founded in 2021, the company is an Israel-based startup operating in the film and TV industry. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the customer's flagship platform streamlines content production workflows and facilitates project budgeting.
The need
The platform was in active development with multiple core features still in alpha or beta stages. The in-house talent, representing mostly back-end and AI engineers, invested their efforts in fine-tuning the proprietary technology. Meanwhile, the company was preparing to raise additional funds and needed to showcase the product to investors and early bird users in just six months.
With no time to hire and onboard new talent, the organization relied on the front-end expertise at Altoros to speed up feature delivery and ensure ongoing maintenance.
The challenges
Under the project, the team at Altoros had to address the following issues:
- There were major performance issues even during a simple interaction with the system. For instance, typing a short phrase in a report form could take up to 30 seconds.
- Some of the business logic (e.g., shooting schedule, actor availability, etc.) was implemented on the front end, contradicting the fundamental principles of a 3-layer architecture.
- Due to active development under tight deadlines, it was crucial to choose a technology stack and architectural approaches that would help to both achieve business goals and maximize return on investment.
The solution
Stage 1. After analyzing the customer's requirements, front-end engineers at Altoros chose a technology stack based on React, as this lightweight library had all the necessary tooling for the project's objectives. Then, the team identified existing bottlenecks, defined an improvement plan, and worked out a feature delivery roadmap.
Stage 2. To promote ease of maintenance in the future, developers at Altoros improved the existing architecture, introducing loosely coupled components.
Stage 3. To speed up release cycles, the team at Altoros practiced code reuse, as well as leveraged linting tools to prevent errors and bugs.
Stage 4. In terms of functionality, developers at Altoros built the module responsible for automated scheduling and daily reporting from scratch. Then, the engineers updated an algorithm behind budget management and planning, improving the accuracy of cost calculations.
Altoros also improved a screenplay editor that automatically broke down film scripts into individual scenes in less than 60 seconds. This helped people on set to easily collaborate over the same stages of video content production.
Stage 5. To optimize performance, the developers applied a bunch of best practices. Those included memoization to retrieve heavy-weight requests from the cache along with lazy loading to invoke noncritical resources on demand.
The engineers also disabled unnecessary JavaScript functions that could cause performance bottlenecks in the future.
3x
performance boost
60 sec
screenplay breakdown
2x
reduction in clerical routine
The outcome
Partnering with Altoros, the customer was able to deliver business-critical components of its platform in time for the planned investment round. Thanks to this, the company raised additional funds and onboarded two film production companies as pilot users. The provider received positive feedback as the features developed allowed early bird users to reduce operational workload by 2x.
The optimization measures in place contributed to enhancing platform performance by 3x. The chosen technology stack and an architectural approach, as well as the implemented best practices promoted ease of maintenance, facilitating the development of new functionality.