Media Production Company Consolidating LucidLink and Google Drive

The company operates within the media production industry, managing large volumes of video content for editing and post-production. Their team handles substantial digital assets—tens of terabytes of footage—and requires both active high-speed access for editing and longer-term archival storage. The company’s operations include remote collaboration and sharing finalized content with external companies.

Currently, the company uses a hybrid storage system comprising local hard drives, specialized hardware (such as a Promax box), and cloud-based streaming storage via LucidLink. They maintain about 40 terabytes of footage split between active (high-speed) and archival (slower) storage tiers. Their workflow involves shipping physical hard drives, streaming data through LucidLink, and managing archives locally to balance performance and cost.

- High ongoing costs for cloud storage and streaming services, approximately $1,000 USD per month for 40 terabytes. - Dependence on aging hardware and legacy solutions (e.g., Promax box) that are unreliable or no longer supported. - Concerns about sustainability and future support, especially as their current service provider phases out legacy plans. - Limited AI capabilities with the current solution, restricting automated asset search and metadata generation. - Uncertainty about switching to a newer platform due to lack of extensive reviews and proven track record.

Shade would consolidate the company’s fragmented workflow into a single platform that integrates camera ingest, coloring, post, and delivery review. Shade uses the same underlying streaming technology as LucidLink but with enhancements such as smaller data chunking for improved performance. It offers both streaming access and traditional download options, enabling flexible workflows. Key innovations include AI-powered content recognition and natural language search, allowing the company to quickly locate specific clips by visual content or spoken dialogue, even with imperfect spelling. The platform also supports secure, shareable review links for company collaboration. Shade provides European data hosting options to comply with GDPR, addressing regional data sovereignty concerns.