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Sports Media Team Streamlining Post-Production with BYOS and AWS
Company Situation
The company operates within the sports media and content production industry, managing post-production workflows for a large volume of editorial and audience-led video content. Their team handles original footage from numerous shoots and creates fan-based and commercial videos primarily for digital platforms such as YouTube. The setup includes a regional post-production team working collaboratively on shared storage drives to manage raw and edited video assets.
Existing Workflow
Currently, the company stores raw footage and project files on a cloud-connected server drive (a "bring your own server" mounted on Shade). Editors work directly from this shared drive, which holds approximately 33 terabytes of content with a capacity of about 200 terabytes. Previously, their workflow involved uploading completed projects and rushes to Dropbox, which consumed significant cloud storage space. Now, with raw footage residing permanently on the Shade drive, they maintain an active project drive alongside an archive vault drive for long-term storage.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
The primary challenge is managing the volume of raw content efficiently without overwhelming storage resources. Because raw footage is continuously uploaded and kept on the active drive, the company needs a streamlined, reliable process for moving older content to archival storage. The manual handling of these transfers and lack of automated workflows can lead to storage bloat and disorganization. Additionally, uncertainty around the technical setup for automated archiving and the nature of the archive storage (whether truly cold storage or more accessible tiers) complicates management.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade provides the company with a solution to automate and simplify content transfer between active and archive drives using a dedicated machine running scheduled Chrome jobs and a specialized script called "archclone." This approach allows the team to programmatically back up specified folders from the active content drive to the archive vault, ensuring data integrity before manual deletion from the source. Shade’s flexible BYOS (Bring Your Own Server) architecture supports both mounted active drives and vault-style archival buckets, which can be configured based on desired storage tiers including cold storage options. Shade also offers expert guidance and documentation to assist with technical setup, enabling the company to maintain an efficient digital asset lifecycle with minimal manual intervention.
Benefits
- Automated, reliable transfer of raw footage from active to archive storage
- Reduced risk of storage overuse and improved capacity management
- Clear separation of active and archived content for workflow clarity
- Flexibility to schedule transfers on demand or on a recurring basis
- Expert support and documentation to ease technical adoption
- Cost-effective management of storage tiers including cold storage vaults
- Streamlined editorial workflows with centralized access to raw and archived content
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