Lasher Post Keeps Work Flowing in Utah and Beyond

Based in Salt Lake City, Utah, Lasher is a boutique post production house that edits, grades and mixes commercials and content for brands including Intel, Mercedes, Merrell, Oracle, Texas Pete and Verizon to name a few.

Located minutes away from the Wasatch Mountains, everyone at Lasher loves the outdoors as much as they love being in the cutting room. The company encourages a healthy work-life balance, with employees often heading to the ski slopes at the break of dawn, before heading into the office.

It was this love of the outdoors that attracted Duvan Durand, lead editor at Lasher Post, to Utah. “I’ve always wanted to be able to explore epic mountain ranges and breathtaking nature without needing to drive for hours and hours. I sort of moved to Salt Lake City by mistake, met John Murphy (owner and executive producer at Lasher) and we just clicked. It’s awesome being able to live in a place with such easy and quick access to amazing scenery, whilst still being able to edit films for big clients.”

Not having to live in traditional ‘film hub’ cities whilst still maintaining relationships with big brands and clients is being made easier and easier through the rise of remote collaboration tools. “We’ve used Frame.io for a long time, and we still do, but we were really looking for a synchronous, real-time platform where we could work on live edit sessions with directors and clients who either aren’t in Salt Lake City, or who prefer to work remotely.”

That’s where Lasher’s journey with Louper started. Duvan was Louper’s very first beta user, in July 2021. Despite being warned that this was a very early version of the platform, he wasted no time in putting Louper to the test on a real job. Almost immediately after setting up his account, he invited 6 clients to join his room and work on an edit.

Three hours later, he phoned us. “That was magic, dude! I get it, the clients get it... the tech disappears into the background after a while and it just feels like we’re in the same edit suite together.”

Duvan soon introduced Louper to others at Lasher, including editor Daniel Martin. “It has become an integral part of our workflow”, says Daniel. “Not all jobs demand synchronous remote collaboration - but for those that do, Louper is an invaluable tool. We tried Zoom, but the quality just doesn’t cut it. I’ve even introduced Louper to some freelance colorists on our roster, who make good use of the high-bitrate streaming capability.”

The personal freedom afforded by remote collaboration tools is of great value to the team at Lasher, who often choose to work from home. They make use of Basecamp for project management and tracking, Frame.io for asynchronous presentations and feedback, and Louper for realtime collaboration. “Much like we use various post production software to get specific tasks done, we use multiple collaboration tools too - each with a specific purpose.”

With home internet connections getting faster and faster, Duvan appreciates the flexibility in bitrate control that Louper gives its users “even the base stream setting of 2.5 mbps offers very impressive quality and works on 4G connections, but for certain jobs I can whack it up 15mbps and stream in 4K without a hitch. Directors love that.”

So, will Lasher ever transition into a remote-only post production company? “I doubt it” says Duvan. “We still like to head into the office a couple times a week to see and work with each other in person. Local clients like to come round and hang out from time to time. We definitely don’t go to the office full time though - having simple and effective remote collaboration tools means that we don’t have to. And if I want to leave Utah and go snowboarding in Steamboat for a week, I can do that and still livestream my edit session to my clients. How cool is that?”