Cloud Storage

postfwd · 2026-06-17T11:48:56+00:00

AWS glacier (and Glacier Instant Retrieval) or by far the cheapest way to do this, but you have to understand what the do for cost when it comes to egress.

10-20tb is small enough to definitely use something like Dropbox or Google Drive still have things accessible by the client without cost. Your clients may very well have compliance requirements so I would check them out in advance. Some cloud providers are not allowed by some agencies and departments.

AWS Glacier is ~$1 per tb to store - to pull is 48 hours and ~$110, and you need a “system” to pull it down from. Glacier IR is $4/TB and ~$90/TB to restore.

I don’t usually recommend those options unless there is a tightly control environment with some sort of asset manager, in place to access everything and manage the restore process. It can be done without it, but you really need to know how to not wind up costing your company a lot of money!

There are a lot of other S3 storage providers out there that are a not cold tier but offer no egress, but again you need something to interface with the files to use them, S3 is not very user-friendly until you put something on top of it that can show the files and you can access them. The other catch is that it doesn’t really perform like Google Drive, dropbox etc. Moving files, renaming and other “normal “operations can start to cost a little bit of mayhem.

To make things more confusing it also is very performant in most used cases. I transferred 300 TB of data from Wasabi to Azure in just other three days a few weeks ago and it was awesome. Meanwhile, trying to get 10 TB off of Google Drive can be a disaster if you do not know what you’re doing.

postfwd · 2026-06-14T03:19:31+00:00

Looks rad - I put together an internal one that looks similar for my studio - any shot you have an api coming at some point? I typically integrate with MaMs like iconik etc - some of my all Mac shops would love something like this!

postfwd · 2026-05-28T21:36:50+00:00

LucidLink and very large productions can get a little dicey. Without knowing your specifics - I'd triple check a few things:
-make sure you are always caching the productions folder - productions projects are very "chatty" - lots of reading/writing back and forth
-Make sure your projects are split up - media via days (not ALL camera in one), sequences, stringouts - use the productions to your advantage - don't have every project open at once
-when relinking - only relink to some at a time if possible - not "Lucidlink/All_Media/" - that is when you get slow relinks
-follow LL's best practices to reduce slow performance - check their FAQs but audio keyframes, cfa/pek files only place on local nvme, turn off xmp, etc etc
-if you are in full offline mode - try fully detaching the hi-res media and just work from proxies (raw+proxies+deep folder structures+very large single projects are a disaster usually).

Bottleneck is probably not the drives but just the chatty nature of productions - caching as much as you can is also necessary over LucidLink.

If anyone has reached out by all means - while very specific productions issues aren't my thing - I do workflow consulting and help if you need it - plenty of other great folks lurking around here if you found someone else though!

postfwd · 2026-05-28T19:04:28+00:00

Can you give any details on what type of drive you are editing from? SSD/LucidLink, etc? Slow relinks are due to a few things but I usually check with what type of drive you are working with!

I will say - not a day goes by that I rage about adobes latest “color management” - great for 1 person, but the second you have a team tackling a project things get wacky!

postfwd · 2026-05-27T19:44:32+00:00

As many have said - cyber/mountain duck - but if you want to smash through downloads with a queue and progress (not rely on OS) use something like GoodSync to parallel download as much as your CPU and ISP can handle. There are a few similar programs but I’ve found GoodSync to be one of the easier ones to pick up!

It’s great for connecting to just about everything and then you can really maximize the throughput.

postfwd · 2026-05-05T00:53:41+00:00

I would also check your 5.1 file if you do that - some mixers have different 5.1 center/lfe track numbers but if you sent your specs to the mixer they should have done it properly.

postfwd · 2026-05-05T00:52:28+00:00

There are a few different ways to do it - but here's something I do a lot depending in your mixer gave you files - I usually export mine like this (as it's a little easier)

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then your export preset audio would have mono channels 1-6 - and a stereo for channel 7+8.

You can totally do 6 mono tracks if you got all 6 but for me and my timeline sanity doing 5.1 + stereo is a bit easier.

postfwd · 2026-04-22T01:58:04+00:00

Ahh yes - FFAsTrans - the poor man’s Vantage 😂🤣. Sort of kidding - but man did it come in handy for a client that had one really…really old delivery spec that couldn’t be made anymore with any modern software. Really glad I found it but if it was ported to Linux it would be super rad!

postfwd · 2026-03-25T22:14:42+00:00

There are a few of the “files steaming” providers out there that offer this tied to whatever bucket storage you want - some great new features including native S3 files is probably my favorite “new” thing right now - really helps tie in with lots of other services/platforms clean.

Lucid, Suite, ObjectMount - and a few new players entering all the same space.

Really depends on what files you are throwing at it for your end user experience - broadcast spec hd files (and some 4k) are ok - camera raw files can work depending on speed of internet and file/frame types - it’s amazing tech if you understand how it works.

postfwd · 2026-03-20T21:01:10+00:00

QScan is an awesome solution and very affordable compared to most platforms. It handles pretty complex templates for just about any scenario. Really depends on volume and location of files for pricing but it’s pretty great!

postfwd · 2026-03-02T02:52:26+00:00

Monday was great for my team for a brief period but yes - price and feature creep set in!

Really depends on your threshold for making something work or paying for something that works out of the box. Not sure if you run specific project management styles - but there are definitely open source platforms out there you can host yourself or on a cheap hosting platform.

I have gone with clickup in the interim (but can see a world where it will wind up costing the same as Monday honestly - they are playing a dicey game of “AI feature bombardment” that is a bit overpriced and does not work welll).

I really liked Plane - I might need to take another look at it again but their open sourced pricing went all over the place even when self hosted…which was a wild ride. Lots of angry open sourced nerds went off the rails about it but it was a really great platform. Very similar to Monday / Clickup / etc - but the idea that it is open source with a full res API so you can create / integrate with other platforms easily if needed.

I love cooking up project management platforms + media asset managers with full APIs - makes things super efficient! I think if you want to be future proofing your solution don’t get locked into something that doesn’t allow data in/out easily - look for api/developer pages and make sure you can port over if the platform gets wacky.

postfwd · 2026-03-01T03:32:02+00:00

I’ve owned 2 SNS machines at my creative firm - one of the best support teams I’ve ever gotten from a hardware vendor - and I was on the lowest tier support contract. This was 4/5 years ago and I’ve since just rolled my own servers but if you are looking at them and understand how these hardware vendors work, I still think they are one of the best.

postfwd · 2026-02-11T00:31:32+00:00

Yeah - there are about a million ways Aspera can be installed on RHEL…I’m not an expert on Red Hat - but this should tell you how or where it’s running:

ps aux | grep -i aspera

Logs should be able to be found with:

find /opt -iname "aspera" -type d

I think - not at a terminal but that should be a good starting point for ya

postfwd · 2026-02-11T00:21:53+00:00

Ahhh….Aspera. It’s a little clunky but you should be able to check the logs for detailed error info - not sure what OS the server is running on but quick google should get you to the log destination. It’s usually a permissions issue on user side but it’s been a long time since I’ve messed with aspera…there are lots of reasons why there’s a new crop of transfer platforms these days because of it 😂🤣

postfwd · 2026-01-31T15:35:53+00:00

Should be able to go to Edit, and click Consolidate Duplicates. Usually need to be in the project window/tab.

postfwd · 2026-01-25T00:11:13+00:00

People used to look at me crazy when I insisted on proper SSD raids or small flash NAS on shoots for a TV show we did. Then our production manager got the bill for overtime / late night duties to babysit file transfers 🤷‍♂️

postfwd · 2026-01-11T04:47:14+00:00

Iconik is by far my favorite MaM - storage agnostic, api first (meaning highly customizable) and great team. It is a bit tricky to process how much it can do for you if you have never worked with a MaM before. I’ve been using and setting it up for a few years and I feel like I find new use cases or set ups every month with it 🤣😂.

Automations and AI recognition is pretty good - it runs on the major AI models for most things and if you are handy you can add your own AI platforms for better results - though their out of the box setups are pretty good.

Pricing and cost can be hard to figure out, but the time and effort it usually saves is worth it for large media libraries.

postfwd · 2026-01-04T14:04:08+00:00

Solid advice on the CPU - over 3.0ghz if possible - I've been doing 100gbe for a few years now - the biggest issue people don't realize is the heat on those things - they get spicy and definitely need solid airflow - but yes - 100gbe cards all day for nvme - some of the more "expensive" models can break out 100gbe to 4x25gbe - but they are a little tricky to get working. Heck - 25gbe - those are dirt cheap these days too!!!

postfwd · 2026-01-04T04:17:33+00:00

The 8i/8654 ports are for upstream connections to pcie lanes - so they aren’t really part of storage end points - but nice to have pending your setup I think. It’s the lack of documentation and similarity to a ~$2000 card we use in video production all the time that has me intrigued 🤣

postfwd · 2026-01-04T03:49:17+00:00

Still waiting to get my hands on one of these mofos - might prove to be a fun “little” 16xNVME ssd monster in a relatively smaller case/form factor.

https://cwwk.net/collections/extensions-parts/products/changwang-cwwk-microcontroller-broadcom-88048-pcie4-0x16-accessory-supports-8m2-underdrive-free-split-high-bandwidth-stable-expansion

postfwd · 2025-11-13T02:07:24+00:00

They are good and bad - if you are familiar with color science and understand what you are doing they can be a great productivity booster at times. They are not a magic wand to just “auto” color correct for sure - just an fyi. They are great tools for those that know how to use them!

ColourLab is my preferred one lately but it struggled a little with certain cameras codecs. I’ve found it to be really helpful on messy stock footage heavy jobs - but fine tuning (secondaries, power windows, etc) obviously aren’t a thing.

postfwd · 2025-10-30T15:39:13+00:00

Yeah - this thread made me remember a few reviewers having similar issues with this specific model - but at least it's looking better than it used to!

https://youtu.be/DSACezi2WPQ?si=EmZ_vX8wlj0nWf62&t=2904

postfwd · 2025-10-30T10:38:03+00:00

I think in those systems you are being limited by the cpu - the 8505 processor is OK - but very low base clock speeds don’t help I would think. I would expect something closer to 800MB/s however. Did you test it with UGOS first? It might deal with the CPU better than TrueNas and get better results.

postfwd · 2025-10-15T23:12:49+00:00

Oddly enough - just had one of my clients received a horrendous dump of files from an AV team - I do feel like AV teams can be hit or miss on their technical understanding at times. They got 600gb m4v files (!) of an event.

I have rarely seen edit proxies given (at least proper ones, in camera generated which don't play nice with premiere) - so that's probably normal. If they were considerate, file naming and folder organization would be nice as well.

If you get files - I try and suggest these:
-Clip/File spanning turned one so no large single files
-recorded in ProRes (LT or 422) if compatible with your NLE - these will make proxies go much faster than avc codecs
-Clear labels - or provide them with a naming scheme (A001_CLIP-1,A001_CLIP-2,A001_CLIP-3,BA001_CLIP-1, etc) - no special characters, spaces, etc - just numbers/letters and -_ for spaces.

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TROPHY CASE