Transitioning to Cloud-Based Workflows: Pros & Cons

If the thought of transitioning your production studio to a cloud-based video editing and storage solution makes you immediately feel exhausted, you should know you’re not alone. For a long time studios have resisted that change, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Often even the United States Postal Service could beat the time it would take to upload assets, transfer them, and redownload them, especially if that process needed to be repeated multiple times.

But we all know the scary truth: putting your video files on a hard drive and sending them through the mail is a risky way to do business. Let’s face it, the USPS isn’t exactly known for its timeliness, care, or security. You’re also putting a lot of trust in the person on the receiving end to properly handle potentially confidential or sensitive information, with no way to know what they might do with your assets, or who they might share them with. 

For too long, this has been too big of a problem. Thankfully, all of it is now changing. Faster internet speeds around the globe have drastically reduced upload times, with potential mbps only growing every day. The cloud is now used for more than just storage, and editing can happen without the need for repetitive download and upload processes.

Today, the technology is there. But beyond just being possible, cloud-based video editing and storage also has several major advantages over traditional workflows. 

1. Collaborative Workflows. Cloud-based solutions allow studios to store and edit all of their assets online, ensuring they are always available and easily accessible to their creators. No more waiting for your project to upload, transfer, and download before you get to work — your editors and producers can work on projects together in real time, even if they are thousands of miles apart. Never put a hard drive in the mail again.

2. Access New Talent. Maybe there’s an editor you’d really like to work with, but while your studio is in Hollywood, they live in Austin. Without a cloud-based solution, working with someone outside a commutable radius might not be worth the time, energy, and effort to share the assets they’ll need. Cloud-based options open up the talent pool, allowing your team to be just as efficient and accessible no matter where they put their desk.

3. Simplified Storage Management. Take a look around your studio, how many hard drives with sticky notes on them do you see lying around? Don’t worry, we won’t tell... and we wish you the best on finding the exact right drive you need six months from now when a client needs a new cut. By moving your storage online, you can easily organize all your assets and make them quickly searchable if you ever need them later. With infinite storage space, you can stop worrying about the next time you need to add a new server to your studio.

4. Real Security. With cloud-based storage and editing solutions, you can control exactly who has access to your assets and monitor what they do with them. Set admins and managers to have certain levels of access, and restrictions, and always have a log of who’s doing what, when. 

Until recently, all of this was possible, but none of it could happen without the help of an expensive outside vendor or multiple salaries to build out an in-house IT department. But today, with Suite Studios, there’s a fifth and crucial pro to working in the cloud...

5. No IT Department Necessary. With cloud-based editing solutions and virtual workstations through Suite, you no longer need an expensive machine, frequent equipment upgrades, multiple servers, and a tech team to support it all in order to operate a cloud-based workflow — we handle all that for you. Since you’re editing on the cloud through Suite’s virtual workstations, and not on your own computer, you can edit your videos from any machine, anywhere, any time. No more weekend trips to the office for last-minute edits, your friend’s Chromebook can get the job done just fine. And because we have the IT teams and tech wizards on our end to keep it all running, none of that is required from you. Meaning you can have all the benefits of your own IT department, without any of the salaries or overhead.

With all of these advantages, it’s easy to see why more and more studios are starting to transition to the cloud for their video storage and editing needs, and why every studio should take a look at Suite. But we did say this blog would include pros and cons, so here’s a con for ya:

You need an internet connection. Yeah, you’re gonna have to have one of those.