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Digital News Media Company Streamlining Cloud Collaboration Workflows
Company Situation
The company operates within the fast-paced digital news media industry, managing a sizable team of video editors and content producers who collaborate across multiple shifts. Their workflow involves handling a high volume of media assets sourced both internally from photojournalists and externally from licensing agencies. The team requires efficient sharing and management of these assets to produce timely news content.
Existing Workflow
Currently, the company relies heavily on LucidLink integrated with AWS cloud storage for active project files, alongside Dropbox as a temporary archive solution. Their review and approval processes utilize Adobe Frame. Media assets are often shared manually, with editors maintaining individual “buckets” of frequently reused footage on LucidLink. Metadata management is limited, and many files—particularly raw footage sent via email—lack embedded metadata, forcing manual tracking of credits and usage rights.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
Lack of a centralized Media Asset Management (MAM) system creates disorganization, especially around asset reuse and metadata.
Archival storage is inaccessible for active workflows due to no MAM integration, leading to excessive reliance on costly active storage and inefficient manual cleanup.
Searching for specific clips or metadata is cumbersome, often requiring manual cross-referencing with emails or external documents.
Licensing restrictions and crediting requirements are difficult to manage without embedded metadata or automated tagging.
The current setup inflates storage costs and complicates collaboration across multiple editorial shifts.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade offers a unified MAM platform designed to integrate seamlessly with existing cloud storage solutions, providing both a desktop and web user interface familiar to users of Frame.io and Dropbox. It enables:
- Flexible, customizable metadata fields that capture licensing, credits, embargoes, and other vital information.
- AI-powered search capabilities that identify content within clips without manual tagging, including facial recognition and contextual searches (e.g., identifying notable people or specific activities).
- Timestamped comments and review/approval workflows embedded directly within the platform, replacing reliance on separate tools.
- Efficient archive management through the upcoming Shade Vault cold storage tier, reducing active storage costs by enabling larger volumes of footage to be stored cost-effectively while remaining accessible.
- Streamlined collaboration between editors across shifts with real-time asset sharing and access controls.
Benefits
- Significant reduction in active storage costs by enabling cold storage archival with easy retrieval.
- Improved searchability and discoverability of assets through AI-driven metadata extraction and flexible tagging.
- Enhanced compliance with licensing and crediting requirements via embedded metadata management.
- Simplified and integrated review and approval workflows within a single platform.
- Increased editorial efficiency and collaboration across distributed teams and shifts.
- Elimination of manual, error-prone processes for asset management and metadata tracking.
Want to see how Shade can improve your workflow?
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