Managing Shared Media With Multiple Editors

How Do You Manage Shared Media with Multiple Editors?

The challenge of managing media when multiple editors need access comes down to two things: simultaneous work and distributed location. Editors and colorists need to be cutting, coloring, and finishing at the same time, often from different places. That means modern shared media workflows rely on a hybrid approach of local and remote storage solutions.

In House

Sawtooth Post's hybrid approach to media storage leans on local 10-gigabit network infrastructure tied to 250TB of high-performance storage. Through proprietary sync mechanisms, we selectively add projects and proxy media to Lucidlink for remote editorial, with locked-down lists of who can access what. Source media never leaves local storage and backups unless select portions are needed for finishing or visual effects.

Source of Truth

When working with Adobe Premiere, project files, typically Premiere Productions, live on Lucidlink and are the single source of truth for creative offline editorial, but are backed up in duplicate across local storage. A similar process occurs when we cut in DaVinci Resolve, but in that case, projects are managed through Blackmagic Cloud.

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Where Do Shared Media Workflows Start to Strain?

Strain begins when a project outgrows a single workstation, which tends to come faster than you may even realize. The failure is rarely dramatic, but can be painful to work through without upfront planning. Access is the bottleneck and, from a local facility standpoint, it's easy to address so long as physical space, workstations, and storage speed allow.

Once hybrid or remote solutions come into play, the access strain becomes both easier and trickier as adding users is simple, but now there are two sets of project files and media to contend with. It's imperative to have a clearly defined workflow for how those storage solutions interact, stay in sync, and are accessed by multiple users, and that users are educated on how the workflow operates.

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What Type of Shared Storage Do Editors Need?

Shared editorial storage has to satisfy three ideas at once:

• Sustained reads for multiple concurrent video streams
• Redundancy that helps producers and post-supervisors sleep at night
• Storage capacity beyond the OCF media, because proxies, renders, graded exports, and audio stems (among others) all need a place to live.

Performance under concurrent access is often an overlooked trip hazard. A server that plays back 4K cleanly for one editor may struggle with five editors, which is why fast connections, like 10GbE, and a NAS sized for multi-client load matter more than raw capacity numbers.

RAID 5, 6, 10, 50, or 60 configurations are the most common RAID solutions at multi-terabyte editorial scale, delivering speed and redundancy together rather than trading one for the other. Which RAID setting depends on the amount of storage and the number of drives. Proper systems go further than basic RAID drive parity though with dedicated backup storage that's local, in the cloud, or ideally both.

Network topology matters as much as the storage itself. Thunderbolt connections or 10Gb ethernet is a must for multiple workstations pulling 4K media (or above) from the same volume. Standard gigabit ethernet connections simply do not have the necessary bandwidth, even for a single editor. Working with remote cloud services locally, like Lucidlink, requires fast SSD hard drives, internally or externally. Speedy internet also helps drastically.

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How Do Remote Editors Access Media?

There's a host of options for accessing media remotely, but our preference relies primarily on Lucidlink and remote desktop services like Jump Desktop or Parsec.

LucidLink, a cloud-hosted approach, presents a cloud-backed filespace that mounts on a remote editor's machine like a local volume, streaming and caching on demand. Media lives in the cloud, editors work against proxies, and the original camera files remain on the facility storage. The tradeoff is internet bandwidth dependency and expensive storage fees.

Remote desktop services like Jump Desktop are great, especially for editors working from home that also have dedicated workstations at the office. Media stays in one location and the remote connection can be secured and monitored, but there are downsides are worth considering. The biggest is that using a remote desktop service still ties up a local workstation, eliminating any relief via scaling. The other is that editing over a remote connection can sometimes not feel as fluid as sitting at the machine directly.

One solution worth paying close attention to is Strada. They take a local-first approach that inverts the cloud model. Rather than uploading media to a filespace in the cloud, Strada connects local and network drives using peer-to-peer connections (like bittorrenting, but legal). This allows remote collaborators to browse and open media as though it were mounted locally, with no cloud copy in between. It works well once the network topology supports it, but in our experience still has a few workflow caveats worth investigating before full implementation.

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What Keeps Media and Projects in Sync?

When using a hybrid solution like local storage paired with a cloud provider like Lucidlink, media and other project assets must be kept in sync using external mechanisms. At Sawtooth Post we use a dedicated workstation running Chronosync with explicitly defined rules for what

gets sync'd, where, and when. This means that folder structures across local storage and Lucidlink must mirror one another.

The project policy that prevents version conflicts is simple to state, but only works if everyone on the editorial team knows it. In this hybrid approach, project files on cloud storage are the source of truth so that all editors, local or remote, have access to the current project. Those project files are then redundantly backed up to local storage, but accessed from that storage if there's an issue.

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How Does Bin and Project Locking Work?

Resolve handles bin and timeline locking natively through Blackmagic Cloud. The moment an editor opens one, it becomes read only to everyone else until released. Resolve even allows clip-level locking on the Color page, so a colorist can grade a shot while an editor keeps trimming elsewhere in the same timeline. The one quirk worth knowing: locks apply at the bin level, so timelines stacked together in a shared bin can end up locking each other out. Keeping active timelines in their own dedicated bins avoids that headache entirely.

Premiere manages locking differently, at the project and Finder level, but the same concept applies. Once a project is open, it becomes read only to other editors. A best practice approach for large Premiere projects is to utilize a Premiere Production, which breaks a large project into smaller individual projects that can all reference each other and allows editors to access and work in the individual projects independently.

Locking bins and timelines with Avid is a special case, though it's been doing it the longest. Avid's bin locking has always depended on storage built to support it, which a cloud filespace like LucidLink doesn't do natively on its own, so third-party integrations like Mimiq or PostLab are needed on top of non-Avid storage so a distributed team gets the same granular protection they'd have locally.

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