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Media Production Company Consolidating LucidLink and AWS S3
Company Situation
The company operates within the media production industry, managing a range of active and archived video projects. Their team is distributed, requiring remote access to large volumes of video footage and project files. They work with multiple cloud-based and on-premise storage solutions, alongside proprietary in-house tools, to handle their workflows at scale.
Existing Workflow
Currently, the company relies heavily on LucidLink for cloud storage and remote access, combined with AWS for archiving. They also use a mixture of platforms such as Frame.io, Vimeo, Google Drive, Dropbox, and local NAS systems to manage different aspects of their media workflow. This creates a fragmented system where multiple tools are necessary to cover ingest, storage, collaboration, review, and delivery.
Issues with the Existing Workflow
While LucidLink serves adequately for active projects, the company finds archival and restore processes on AWS challenging and suboptimal. Managing multiple platforms results in inefficiencies and added complexity, especially when integrating proprietary tools. Cost concerns are also present, given the overhead associated with using several services and the complexity of data management across them.
How Shade Would Change Their Workflow
Shade offers a unified cloud-based platform designed to consolidate multiple aspects of the media workflow into a single system. It provides cloud storage with two flexible options: using Shade’s own Wasabi S3-backed storage or integrating a “bring your own S3” bucket, which must be reformatted to Shade’s optimized file structure. Shade replicates LucidLink’s core functionality by enabling remote, synchronized access to footage through a desktop-mounted file space with configurable local caching. This allows seamless collaboration across distributed teams on the same projects and files without juggling multiple platforms. Additionally, Shade’s pricing model simplifies costs by charging only for seats and storage with no additional ingress or egress fees.
Benefits
- Consolidation of multiple tools into one integrated platform
- Cloud-first storage with flexible backend options (Shade’s Wasabi S3 or user-provided S3 buckets)
- Remote streaming and synchronized access to footage similar to LucidLink, with configurable cache settings
- Simplified archival and restore processes built into the platform
- Transparent and straightforward pricing based on storage and user seats only, with no hidden transfer fees
- Global infrastructure with servers deployed across multiple continents to support global teams
- Support for migrating existing large-scale S3 buckets into Shade’s optimized format for streaming
Want to see how Shade can improve your workflow?
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