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Drone Manufacturer Streamlining Media Production with NAS and Frame.io
Company Situation
This company operates in the exterior cleaning technology sector, manufacturing and selling an innovative drone designed specifically for exterior cleaning tasks. Their team includes a content producer who oversees all photo and video content creation, including ads, YouTube videos, podcasts, and extensive customer training videos. The company supports a growing user base of approximately 500 drones deployed across various venues such as stadiums, college campuses, and museums. Their marketing team consists of several members, including contract editors and upcoming freelancers, all of whom require access to a large and continually expanding digital asset library.
Existing Workflow
The company currently manages a vast library of media assets stored on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) system located in their office. They have a 10-gigabit internet connection, enabling relatively fast in-house access. Editing is primarily done on local SSD drives, with footage pulled from the NAS when necessary. For collaboration and review, the team uses Frame.io, but this requires downloading footage for offline access. Backup and cloud integration are absent, and maintaining the NAS—including upgrades and repairs—is an ongoing concern.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
The NAS requires regular maintenance, upgrades, and is not backed up to the cloud, creating risks of data loss and downtime.
Collaboration is limited because remote team members and freelancers cannot directly access footage without downloading large files, which is inefficient.
Editing is largely tied to the office environment due to large file sizes and slow upload speeds from home or on the road.
The current workflow does not support flexible, remote editing or easy asset searching and tagging, limiting productivity and responsiveness.
The company anticipates these issues to worsen as their asset library grows and as they onboard more external collaborators.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade offers a cloud-based media management platform with advanced tagging, searching, and collaborative capabilities designed to replace or augment their existing NAS. By moving assets to Shade, the company’s team can:
- Access and edit footage remotely without the need to download massive files, enabling flexible work from home or on the road.
- Easily tag and search assets to quickly locate needed content, streamlining workflows.
- Collaborate seamlessly across internal teams and external freelancers with direct cloud access, reducing bottlenecks.
- Eliminate the risks and overhead associated with maintaining physical NAS infrastructure, with integrated cloud backups ensuring data security.
- Scale their asset management effortlessly as their drone deployment and content production continue to grow.
Benefits
- Enhanced remote collaboration and editing capabilities
- Reduced reliance on physical hardware and associated maintenance
- Improved asset organization through tagging and search functions
- Increased workflow efficiency for marketing and content teams
- Secure, cloud-based backups preventing data loss
- Scalability to support a growing and geographically distributed team