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Creative Agency Streamlining Video Editing and Archival Storage
Company Situation
The company is a creative agency operating as a full-service firm specializing in web design, branding, video production, and photography. Their team consists of approximately a dozen full-time employees plus some part-time contractors. Most of the team works onsite with a few remote members. They manage large volumes of media assets, including 4K and occasionally 6K video files, alongside extensive photography libraries.
Existing Workflow
The agency currently relies on their parent company’s IT-managed server infrastructure for media storage. They have access to fast attached storage volumes suitable for editing high-resolution video files directly, and a separate archival storage volume for older or less frequently accessed files. Editing is performed primarily using Adobe Creative Cloud applications such as Premiere Pro. Media review and approval tools like Frame.io are not part of their current workflow.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
The agency faces significant challenges stemming from storage management and IT constraints. Their IT department frequently pressures them to delete files to free up space, but the creative team cannot remove company-owned assets. This friction causes ongoing tension and inefficiencies. Additionally, archival storage is not optimized for media management, making it difficult to organize and locate assets quickly, which slows down workflows—especially when revisiting past projects for re-edits. While editing performance on active storage remains strong, the growing volume of data (upwards of 24 terabytes in archival storage) is becoming increasingly difficult to manage and sustain under current constraints.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade would streamline the agency’s media storage by providing a dedicated media management platform that integrates asset organization and archival storage in a way tailored for creative teams. The solution would alleviate IT pushback by reducing the demand on traditional server storage and providing a more efficient, media-centric storage system. Shade’s platform would enable easier file retrieval, better collaboration, and a more transparent storage process that respects company asset ownership without risking data deletion. This would empower the creative team to focus on production and editing without constant storage concerns.
Benefits
- Reduces friction between creative and IT teams by offering scalable, media-optimized storage
- Improves asset organization and retrieval, saving time during project revisions
- Supports high-resolution video workflows without lag or performance issues
- Maintains compliance with company data ownership by preventing unauthorized deletions
- Enhances overall workflow efficiency for a small but data-heavy creative team
Technologies Used
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