How the Cloud is Transforming Post-Production Media Workflows

To the lay-editor, the idea of completing post-production on a project in the cloud might seem ludicrous. Media professionals need quick access to the highest-quality video footage. Surely this is something only a high-performance desktop computer with locally attached storage can achieve. In actuality, a cloud-based workflow for media production presents an efficient, streamlined approach to editing that does not sacrifice ease-of-use.

Ryan Media, a media production house out of Connecticut, recently learned this firsthand. The company was tasked with creating a thirty-minute themed video. Normally this would be no trouble for Ryan Media, which has twenty years’ experience in the business. But this project came with an unusually tight deadline: just twenty-one days from conception to final cut.

Production during the COVID pandemic

Ryan Media filmed interviews for the project in both the central United States and on the West Coast. The subjects, elite athletes from around the world, spoke English, Spanish, and Korean. Ordinarily, Ryan Media would send a single DP and crew to each site, but the time crunch and COVID protocols made this next to impossible. To combat this, Ryan Media employed a production crew that was spread across the United States and Alicante, Spain to conduct more than 17 interviews with top league athletes, coaches, executives, and mascots.

Post Production in the Cloud

When shooting was complete, the raw interview clips were ingested into LucidLink Filespaces and uploaded to Wasabi hot cloud storage where the assets were available for global access within the Adobe Premiere Pro edit environment. This consolidation of media is a key differentiator of the cloud's media workflow, giving distanced team members access to the same pool of footage. LucidLink also segments data into tiny blocks in the cloud Filespace, similar to the way data is stored on a local drive, so Ryan Media staff using Premiere were able to edit directly in the cloud instead of first downloading the files in their entirety prior to editing. This is a significant efficiency improvement that allowed Ryan Media to drastically reduce their post-production timeline.

The cloud-based workflow eliminated the considerable duplication and manual transfer of files that traditionally would take place between distanced workers, all of which is time consuming, difficult to track, and prone to loss by human error. The cloud-based system simplifies this process by forgoing file transfer in favor of file accessibility. Rather than sending files directly to contributors when needed, the contributors instead source data themselves from a centralized repository in the cloud. This has been a known advantage of the cloud for some time, but it is only now that applications and compute resources have been able to connect storage to where it is needed. This joint solution has created a near-local user experience backed by the scale of cloud: Wasabi as the storage home, Adobe Premiere Pro as the user-facing application, and LucidLink as the underpinning file system. Together, media professionals can supercharge their production workflows and eliminate many pain points associated with data management.

Lay-editors may still have their doubts, but they don’t have to take my word for it, they can take Tom Stanwicks’, Principal Owner of Ryan Media. “The combination of Adobe Premiere Pro, LucidLink and Wasabi has enabled Ryan Media’s creatives and storytellers to deliver our best work in the absolute shortest time frame and at the lowest possible price for our clients,” said Stanwick.

For the complete case study, check out Ryan Media Delivers in Record Time Using Adobe®, LucidLink, and Wasabi.

If you’re planning on attending the HPA Tech Retreat 2022, Feb 21-24, make sure to stop by the Wasabi booth #606 to learn more about our media solutions.