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Creative Media Production Company Consolidating Lucid and TrueNAS Scale
Company Situation
The company is a full-service creative agency specializing in audiovisual (AV) production, branding, marketing, and retail strategy. Their operations span multiple regions, supporting high-profile entertainment companies with extensive content delivery needs. The team includes a core group of creatives and AV specialists distributed across different offices, including a growing presence in a secondary location with remote editors. Their workflows involve managing large volumes of media assets with strict access controls and high security requirements.
Existing Workflow
Currently, the company uses a hybrid environment combining on-premises servers with cloud-based tools. They rely heavily on Lucid as their cloud collaboration platform, which provides encrypted, accessible storage for remote editing and sharing. Their on-premises infrastructure consists of Linux-based storage solutions running TrueNAS Scale, hosting hundreds of terabytes of company assets across segmented, encrypted shares for each company. The team manages asset ingest, live workflows, and archival processes through a combination of these systems, with ACLs and air-gapped setups to maintain security and segmentation.
Because of the dispersed nature of the team and the high-security environment, workflows involve transferring media between offices and platforms manually or semi-manually, with live servers and cloud storage mirroring company asset shares. This approach supports project collaboration across locations but requires physical intervention and can be clunky for large projects needing cross-office contributions.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
Lack of seamless synchronization between cloud collaboration tools and on-premises storage, resulting in manual handling of files between locations.
Cloud storage costs are significant, especially compared to more cost-efficient on-premises storage.
Current tools do not support bidirectional sync between cloud and on-premises environments, complicating workflows when projects span multiple offices.
Access control and segmentation are complex and require air-gapped networks and ACLs, increasing operational overhead.
Existing collaboration platforms do not offer native integration with the company’s on-premises Linux-based storage (TrueNAS Scale), limiting workflow efficiency.
Remote editors have limited integration with the physical servers, requiring workarounds to access and manage assets.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade’s platform is designed to unify search, access, and sharing of media assets across hybrid environments, effectively bridging cloud capabilities with on-premises storage. By enabling seamless integration with S3-compatible on-premises storage such as TrueNAS Scale, Shade would allow the company to synchronize assets bi-directionally between local servers and cloud workspaces. This would reduce or eliminate the need for manual file transfers between locations and improve real-time collaboration between distributed teams.
Shade’s approach treats cloud storage like a production system rather than just passive storage, enabling enhanced media management workflows while maintaining security and segmentation through ACLs. This integration would support a more efficient hybrid workflow where remote editors and on-site teams can work on the same projects concurrently, with changes syncing transparently. Additionally, Shade’s ability to abstract on-premises storage as part of its ecosystem offers a cost-effective alternative to purely cloud-based storage, reducing ongoing expenses.
Benefits
- Seamless bi-directional synchronization between cloud and on-premises storage.
- Improved collaboration between distributed teams with transparent file access and updates.
- Reduced cloud storage costs by leveraging existing on-premises infrastructure.
- Enhanced security and asset segmentation without complicating workflows.
- Simplified media asset management with integrated search, access, and sharing tools.
- Support for S3-compatible storage, enabling compatibility with Linux-based TrueNAS Scale servers.
- Streamlined workflows for complex projects requiring multi-location contributions.