Media Production Company Consolidating NAS and Frame.io

The company operates within the media production industry, managing video content creation with a small team of three editors. Their workflow is entirely in-person, with all team members working from the same physical location. The company handles frequent, high-resolution 4K video shoots (weekly production), requiring substantial storage capacity and fast access to archived and current footage.

Currently, the company uses a local NAS (Network Attached Storage) device to store and archive all footage. Editors access the NAS via the network for editing and collaboration. They also rely on physical hard drives circulated among team members for sharing footage. For remote review and feedback, the team occasionally uses Frame.io on a project basis, deleting projects once approved to manage storage costs. Proxy workflows are minimally used due to process adoption challenges.

- **Storage Limitations:** The current NAS is insufficient in capacity and speed, causing slow editing experiences, especially with large 4K files. - **Inefficient Sharing:** Passing around physical hard drives is cumbersome and impacts team efficiency. - **Archive Searchability:** Difficulty in indexing and searching through archived content stored on multiple drives and NAS units. - **Workflow Fragmentation:** Lack of a streamlined solution combining ingest, editing, archiving, and delivery increases manual handling and delays. - **Cost Concerns:** Exploring cost-effective storage solutions, with concerns about long-term scalability and budget. - **Proxy Workflow Adoption:** Resistance or difficulty in integrating proxy editing into existing processes, affecting editing speed and collaboration.

Shade offers a unified cloud-based platform that integrates storage, indexing, and collaboration capabilities. By consolidating archived and active media into Shade, the company can index all their stored content, making it fully searchable and accessible without cumbersome physical handling. Shade’s platform supports proxy workflows to improve live editing speeds and collaboration. Cloud accessibility complements their on-prem NAS, bridging gaps in sharing and remote review without compromising local storage strategies. This hybrid approach enables faster access to archives and smoother team collaboration, while maintaining the option to pull archived content back for in-house storage. Shade’s per-terabyte pricing model offers predictable and scalable costs compared to fragmented NAS investments and costly project-based cloud storage.