What was going wrong
The team was running on Dropbox plus local copies on each editor's machine. Local disks filled up with duplicate media, and event production lost hours to uploads and downloads.
An edit often meant going back to the original PC, because that is where the live project sat. Handing work over remotely during an event was a coordination nightmare.
What I did
There were three real options: a NAS in both Pakistan and the UAE (a high upfront cost, replacements over time, and a second copy of storage the agency already had in the cloud), staying on Dropbox (simple, but slow for active production), or LucidLink backed by Wasabi for the archive. LucidLink behaves like a local drive but streams only what you open, which is exactly what an editor needs to jump between projects and machines.
A one-month pilot came first, then the Frankfurt region after latency tests, then workshops, then one team at a time. The rule was set early: keep the live set lean, and archive everything finished.
What changed
More than 80% of event delivery now runs through LucidLink, with about 1.2 TB of live projects across 3 seats and only what is in use kept on each machine. Wasabi holds the archive at a much lower cost per gigabyte than Dropbox.
Adoption clicked at the first event after rollout, when handoffs between machines happened instantly. It is growing from 3 seats to 5 as live work grows past 1.2 TB.
Cost and storage
Costs split two ways, live work and archive:
- Live (LucidLink): about 1.2 TB across 3 seats, 400 GB each, growing as the team grows.
- Archive (Wasabi): finished projects, final renders, and anything kept long term. The cost per gigabyte is much lower than Dropbox.
- Policy: don't keep large RAW footage in live storage unless it is needed. Render, then archive. RAW gets archived or deleted.
The rule that paid off most: keep live projects lean and predictable, and archive renders and RAW separately. Don't let the live set become a junk drawer.
How it rolled out
Latency was the first thing to solve. After testing with LucidLink support, the team settled on the Frankfurt region, the best fit for where people sit. Ops led the testing, with hands-on help from LucidLink on server choice and storage planning as well.
Adoption took workshops and repetition, as it always does.
House rules for every project
- Pin active projects, including the B-roll they need
- Keep the live set disciplined: don't pin everything "just in case"
- The same After Effects version on every machine
- Fonts and plugins installed on each machine, because the file system streams files, not installed software
What's next
- Automate the move from LucidLink to Wasabi instead of doing it by hand
- Trigger it from monday.com, so marking a project "shipped" archives it
- Scheduled syncs on a virtual machine where needed
