“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. Our team is looking forward to a cloud-based future and have plans to expand its usage across our business.”

A High-Profile, High-Visibility Project with an Impossible Schedule

A US-based major sports league and its partner, one of the world’s largest retailers, approached Ryan Media about creating a thirty-minute themed video for an annual employee meeting with an audience of 26,000 global employees. While this seemed a compelling project at first, a significant challenge was the extremely tight schedule.

The challenge was to complete a 30-minute video inclusive of creative development, client pitch, interview shoots, and post-production from load to final mix in just 21 days. Further complicating the timeline, interviews would need to be shot in different locations, central US and the west coast, in the athletes’ native languages, English, Spanish, and Korean.

To pull off the project, Ryan Media had to use a production crew that was spread across the United States along with staff in Alicante, Spain. Production, using different DP’s on different equipment in the various locations, presented immense challenges in creating a cohesive look and feel. There was also the issue of getting camera raw files back to Connecticut as soon as possible. When shooting was complete, there were only 12 days left to script, edit, finish, and approve the final 30-minute piece. To wrangle this impossible project, Ryan Media turned to the cloud.

A New Cloud Workflow Accelerates Production

Ryan Media began by creating an Adobe® Premiere® Pro Team Project. This allowed multiple editors to sync and share project structure, metadata, and timeline changes instantly with the click of a mouse. More importantly, the project file itself was safe from any catastrophic file corruption since it was stored in Adobe’s cloud, not locally. Furthermore, Adobe Team Projects are instantly saved with every keystroke and include a complete version history. This capability provided zero risk of losing the project entirely or having to “re-do” any work due to a sudden crash – all of which provided tremendous peace of mind on a production schedule that allowed no room for error or wasted time.

All of 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. A key feature of LucidLink is the synchronization of content metadata across all clients so multiple Ryan Media creative staff were able to work simultaneously on the assets stored in Wasabi without conflict.

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 was a significant time saver that allowed Ryan Media to drastically reduce the post-production timeline.

A Project Delivery Speed Record

With the Adobe/LucidLink/Wasabi workflow, Ryan Media was able to deliver the finished product in 21 days, from concept to completion – a speed record for a project of this magnitude. Ryan Media’s editors and artists enjoyed consistent and reliable access to the central content library stored in the LucidLink Filespace and were able to perform their work as if they were in the same building with the content local to their workstations. And 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.

Beyond the workflow efficiencies gained, Ryan Media also enjoyed considerable cost savings by not deploying local storage devices, incurring shipping expenses, and transferring files back and forth. Selecting Wasabi as their cloud storage repository had an immense impact on controlling the budget as Wasabi’s price is 80% less than the top tier services of AWS and Microsoft Azure. And since Wasabi does not charge for data egress or API calls (unlike other cloud providers), Ryan Media’s team never had to worry about incurring any fees when accessing content in the cloud.

The transition to a cloud-based workflow was easier and more successful than Ryan Media imagined. The company now has a highly agile production system that allows for synchronous work among team members across a variety of locations.

About Ryan Media

Ryan Media is a full-service video production company based in Connecticut. With over twenty years of experience, Ryan Media provides production, editing, color, compositing, and sound design for some of the largest domestic and international media organizations and brands. In addition to its Connecticut-based team, Ryan Media has creative staff located across North America and EMEA to service its domestic and international work and clientele.

The company uses Adobe® Creative Cloud® extensively – leveraging Adobe’s streamlined project collaboration tools, inter-program asset sharing, and third-party panel integrations to expedite its media workflows and keep its teams working together no matter where they are located.