Answers
Straight answers to what post teams ask
Every question here gets a complete answer on this page. No form in the way, and no answer that turns out to be a link to a sales call.
What software do TV shows use to track post-production?
Most episodic television shows track post-production in spreadsheets - usually several, one per department. Purpose-built options fall into three groups: media asset managers that catalogue files, review tools that collect notes on cuts, and coordination tools that track where each episode is and who has it. Baton is the third kind, built for high-volume unscripted shows.
Read the full answer →What tools manage post-production workflows, like who is working on what?
It depends on which question you mean. Booking tools like farmerswife schedule people and rooms. Pipeline trackers like Autodesk Flow Production Tracking and ftrack assign VFX and animation tasks shot by shot. General boards like monday.com and Airtable can be shaped into any tracker. Frame.io tracks review status on media. Baton answers where each episode is and who has it on episodic unscripted shows, and works that out from what people do rather than from a status somebody types.
Read the full answer →How do you track post-production deliverables without spreadsheets?
Replace the spreadsheet with a system that works out status from what people actually do, rather than asking them to report it. In Baton, a card moves when someone opens the cut, every delivery destination is its own line with its own due date, and blocked is shown separately from late - so the list stays true without anybody maintaining it.
Read the full answer →Do we need Avid Production Management for verified handoffs?
No. Handoff verification is not an Avid feature. Whatever system knows which cuts exist pushes that in, and Baton takes the same shape from all of them - Avid MediaCentral, a PilotWare export, a nightly export, or a person pasting the list. All four produce verified handoffs, so this is not gated on owning an enterprise system.
Read the full answer →Does it integrate with Frame.io, Sony Ci, MediaSilo or Box?
Those four are built on request rather than shipped today. Baton stores a review link per episode and does not care which platform issued it, so connecting one fills a seam that already exists instead of changing how the board works. Working today: your own storage, Slack, email, handoff version checking, and our own cloud transcode and delivery.
Read the full answer →Does our media have to move to the cloud?
No. Your footage never leaves your building. Baton has two pieces: a board that runs in the cloud so anyone can open it from anywhere, and a small program that runs inside your facility and reports what it sees. The cloud side never touches your storage, the program in your building does not open anything to the internet, and your logins stay with you.
Read the full answer →Can I search what was actually said on an episode?
Caption and transcript search works today - you can find a line across the season and see which episode it is on. Being built now: asking in plain English and getting the timecode back, plus the same questions about deadlines and who has what. That part is in development and is not available yet.
Read the full answer →What happens if the connection to our storage goes down?
The board keeps working and tells you what it no longer knows. Baton falls back to estimated dates and marks affected cards as unchecked rather than guessing. It never turns 'nobody could check' into 'missing', because a drive that is temporarily unreachable and a file that genuinely is not there are different facts.
Read the full answer →How long does it take to set up for a new show?
Adding a show is settings, not new software. You supply your stage names and how many days before air each one starts, your target runtime and frame rate, who holds which role, your asset libraries, your delivery destinations and your handoff order. It is checked as a whole before the board will load, so a schedule that skips a stage is caught at setup rather than three weeks in.
Read the full answer →Does it work for a daily show?
Yes, and daily shows are the strongest fit. Baton handles taping on one day and airing across several broadcast weeks, packages reused across a 190-episode season with a flag on every episode still on an old version, and a delivery list that fans out per destination. That volume is exactly what breaks a spreadsheet.
Read the full answer →How is this different from a review tool, a media asset manager, a project tracker, or a spreadsheet?
They answer different questions. Review tools collect notes on a cut. Media asset managers catalogue and store files. Monday, Asana and Airtable are general trackers that need somebody to keep them current. Baton tracks where each episode is and who has it, and works that out from what people do rather than asking them to report it.
Read the full answer →How do you know the board is telling the truth?
Three rules, kept deliberately. It never turns 'nobody checked' into 'missing', it never presents an estimated date as a confirmed one, and it never relies on a status a person has to keep up to date. Every card says whether what it shows was confirmed by a system or worked out from the air date.
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See it on a real board
The demo is the actual software, running on a made-up show. Nothing to install, no sign-up.
Walkthroughs are with someone who spent 15 years as an assistant editor, not a sales rep. Who builds it.