Legal Firm Streamlining Video Collaboration with NAS and Frame.io

The company operates within the legal services sector, managing a growing in-house media team responsible for producing a range of video content including documentaries and interviews. Their team includes editors, graphic artists, and content creators, all collaborating on large media files that require seamless access and efficient workflows.

Currently, the company relies on an on-premises NAS (Network Attached Storage) system with large storage capacity (approximately 160+ terabytes) for backing up and storing raw footage and other media assets. Editors and collaborators must download large files—often raw, high-resolution formats such as REDCODE and log files—from the NAS to their local drives before working on them. The company has also used cloud-based collaboration tools like Frame.io but found limitations in storage capacity and cost.

- **Manual File Transfers:** Large raw media files require overnight uploads and downloads, causing delays and inefficient use of time. - **Limited Remote Access:** Existing solutions either require full downloads or have limited cloud storage, restricting remote collaboration flexibility. - **Scalability and Cost:** Storing and sharing multi-terabyte files on platforms like Frame.io quickly becomes expensive, and the NAS solution does not provide cloud-based editing capabilities. - **Integration Challenges:** The company’s current NAS hardware is not fully compatible or easily integrated with cloud-native solutions, complicating workflow automation.

Shade enables direct cloud-based access to large media files without the need for full local downloads, functioning like a virtual SSD drive. This allows editors and graphic artists to work on files remotely with the speed and responsiveness of local storage. Shade’s platform supports seamless collaboration, versioning, and note-sharing within the cloud environment. Although the company’s NAS system is on-premises and not natively S3-compatible (Amazon’s cloud storage standard), Shade’s team can explore manual or custom integration options to bridge the gap between the NAS and Shade’s cloud services.