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Marketing Services Company Consolidating Adobe Suite and Promax Media Server
Company Situation
The company is a smaller marketing agency with a fully remote post-production team. Their post-production operations are integrated within a broader marketing company structure. The team primarily works with Adobe Suite tools and supports a mix of remote editors connecting to centralized PCs and media servers housed in their main office. Their workflow involves managing large volumes of media assets retained for future projects, requiring robust storage and asset management solutions.
Existing Workflow
The agency’s editors remotely access PCs located in their main office via high-speed 10-gigabit connections. Their primary media server platform is an on-premise solution from Promax, supplemented by a large NAS server and Google Drive for user file sharing. Backup is currently managed via LTO tape, though backups have been infrequent due to available storage space. For file sharing and large media transfers, they use Media Shuttle. Review and approval workflows utilize a standalone platform called Simeon for commenting and project management.
Asset searching relies on a FileMaker database, requiring users to know specific project names and metadata to locate media. The team has experienced challenges with file access permissions on Google Drive, particularly when users leave the company and assets become siloed in individual accounts.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
Performance and Support: The Promax media server has exhibited poor performance and limited vendor support, negatively impacting remote workflows.
Platform Transition: The agency is trying to migrate from PCs back to Macs, complicating existing infrastructure compatibility.
Fragmented Storage: Media assets are scattered across multiple platforms (on-prem servers, Google Drive, NAS), leading to data sprawl and difficulty centralizing content.
Search Limitations: The FileMaker-based search requires prior knowledge of project details, slowing down asset retrieval and increasing dependency on tribal knowledge.
Backup Constraints: LTO tape backups are costly, cumbersome, and have not been consistently utilized, risking data loss as storage fills up.
Access and Permissions Issues: Google Drive’s user-based permissions create challenges in sharing access across teams and with external collaborators, especially as users leave the company.
Review and Approval Silos: The standalone review tool, while functional, is disconnected from the primary asset management and storage systems, adding complexity.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade offers a unified platform that integrates storage, asset search, and review/approval workflows into a single environment. Replacing the Promax server with Shade would provide faster, more reliable remote access to media assets, optimized for both PC and Mac workflows. Shade’s advanced metadata-driven search eliminates the need for users to know detailed project names to find assets, accelerating retrieval. By centralizing all media assets on Shade, the agency would eradicate data sprawl and simplify permissions management, ensuring consistent, role-based access. Importantly, Shade’s review and approval tools are built-in, streamlining collaboration without requiring third-party apps or fragmenting workflows. Shade’s pricing model leverages existing on-prem infrastructure, helping the agency avoid costly cloud storage fees while enabling scalable growth.
Benefits
- Significantly improved media server performance and reliability for remote editors
- Seamless support for both PC and Mac editing environments
- Centralized storage eliminating data sprawl across multiple platforms
- Advanced, user-friendly metadata search for fast asset discovery
- Simplified, secure permission management preventing orphaned files
- Integrated review and approval workflows reducing collaboration friction
- Cost-effective solution leveraging existing on-prem infrastructure without expensive cloud fees
- Scalable platform that supports growing media volumes and project complexity
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