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Digital Media Production Company Consolidating LucidLink and NAS Storage
Company Situation
The company operates within digital media production, supporting a remote team of six members producing frequent social media content and event footage. Their projects involve ongoing shoots across different locations and times, requiring quick access to a variety of video assets accumulated over months or even years.
Existing Workflow
Currently, the team uses a cloud-based file mounting solution to access and edit footage remotely, with around 8 to 10 terabytes of “hot” storage for immediate editing needs. Their footage is stored on a large NAS system (around 70 terabytes), but they struggle with organizing and efficiently searching through this extensive archive. They often pull shots from disparate events and times for their monthly social media reels, managing multiple projects and companies with mixed asset locations.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
Searching for specific shots or moments consumes significant time due to lack of advanced metadata and AI-powered search.
The entire archive cannot be kept in expensive hot storage, limiting immediate accessibility to only a portion of assets.
Mounting drives for editing requires pre-selecting footage, complicating the retrieval process for scattered clips across projects and timelines.
Permission and project organization challenges arise when trying to segment storage by project or company.
Current costs for hot storage are high, with no streamlined solution to balance storage tiering and budget.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade’s platform offers a dual-storage system with AI-enhanced capabilities that directly address the company’s pain points:
- Unified Search Across Hot and Cold Storage: Both hot (mountable) and cold (non-mountable) storage are integrated into the Shade cloud with AI-driven search features including auto tagging, transcription search, and facial recognition that enable rapid retrieval of clips without manually browsing folders.
- Cold Storage for Archive Footage: The company can offload their entire 70TB archive to cold storage at a lower cost, keeping all footage searchable and accessible for review, commenting, and sharing, without the need to mount or download everything.
- Flexible Hot Storage Use: Once the desired footage is found in cold storage, it can be transferred to hot storage for direct editing via a mounted drive, streamlining the editorial workflow and reducing unnecessary storage costs.
- Project Organization Recommendations: Shade advises storage by company rather than by project, simplifying permission management and avoiding unwieldy large drives.
- Cost Efficiency and Scalability: Shade’s tiered pricing model for hot and cold storage provides predictable and lower annual costs, helping the company optimize their storage spend.
Benefits
- Accelerated search and retrieval of footage using AI-powered metadata and facial recognition
- Cost-effective management of large archives through cold storage with full search capabilities
- Seamless workflow between cold archive and hot editing storage
- Reduced manual effort in organizing and finding specific clips across projects and timelines
- Scalability for remote teams with multiple users and flexible storage needs
- Simplified permissions and project management by company-level drive organization
Technologies Used
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