The boundaries of the traditional edit room continue to crumble. The hybrid world we all work and play in now has become more of a permanent reality. Gone are the days of having 10 edit rooms and three audio rooms, all humming on a 160TB Facilis TerraBlock – at least here at Definition 6. We’ll have an editor or two in the office, while the rest are cutting from home.
Supporting this new workflow and making it efficient is a topic on my mind often these days, and technology is improving the experience, day in and day out.
Rewind the clip back to March 2020. We shut down our offices and managed our workflows by moving data in and out of our facility to local RAIDs at our editors’ homes. Luckily, just a few months earlier, we implemented Signiant’s Media Shuttle into our workflow. At the time, we were looking for a way to send data quickly and securely. Media Shuttle fit that bill. Working from home, our usage of the service skyrocketed. We were using Media Shuttle to move data from our homes to the office multiple times a day – but we wanted more. I kept wanting to have the same experience I have in the office with our TerraBlock shared storage server, where multiple editors, junior editors and assistants can all be in the same project sharing media.
Cut to LucidLink. LucidLink is a cloud-based NAS solution that streams data straight from the cloud. Think Dropbox for editors. The beauty of LucidLink is that it does away with the synchronization of folders and streams the data you need when you need it.
I remember the first time I saw a demo of LucidLink and noticed that it mounts on the desktop like any other local drive would, or even our TerraBlock would mount on workspaces, and a light bulb went off. It’s like our TerraBlock in the sky!
I have always been a skeptic of being able to edit from the cloud. I’m the type of person who needs to touch it to believe it, but after a demo period of using it on real work, I was hooked. Most of our projects are fast-paced with tight deadlines, and a shared cloud storage solution like LucidLink allows us to be nimble about how we approach them.
From the use of assistants to load or help deliver while you are cutting the next spot, or multiple editors needing to share a lot of data, LucidLink has proven to be one of the strongest tools in our collection.
We recently worked on a behind-the-scenes style show for a major network and needed to have multiple editors and producers working on different segments in order to achieve the tight delivery date. Not only did the service live up to our editing expectations, but we also performed color correction and the final audio mix right off the storage as well.
At Definition 6, our partners in the technology space are allowing creativity and collaboration to flow more freely than ever before. As I opened with, gone are the days of working from the same place, day in and day out, and cloud-based services are making it possible to do our jobs in post wherever we are. I don’t see this trend slowing down in the near future, and we are already starting to think about how much we will spend on physical storage. Are we disconnecting our internal shared storage tomorrow? No, but I'm starting to see a reality where that could happen in the coming years.
Chris Reinhart is the SVP of Post Production at Definition 6 (https://definition6.com), which has offices in Atlanta and New York City. The company offers in-house production services that span concept to completion and include writing, editing and mixing.