Leveraging LucidLink’s pinning feature in your workflow

Editing directly out of the cloud as if it were local storage has attracted many to LucidLink Filespaces technology. Gone are the days of using legacy technologies such as file sync-and-share solutions, storage gateway appliances, and 3^rd party data transfer tools in the media and entertainment field. However, bandwidth and latency still determine your workflow. Every video file format has a specific bitrate requirement. i.e., How much data in Mb/s is required for playback? Due to bitrate requirements, leveraging proxies in workflows are necessary and common. 

But what if you need the original high-res asset for editing or playback or don’t even have the bandwidth to support the bitrate of the lower-res proxy file? Are you forced to use outdated and inefficient technology where one would need to download an entire file, edit it, and then re-upload it back to the cloud? NO!

LucidLink has a very powerful new feature –  pinning. 

LucidLink’s pinning is tied directly to the local LucidLink cache. Remember that our cache is configurable up to 10TB and has a default configuration of 5GB. LucidLink’s cache is for the tiny blocks (256KB default) that are read and written to and from the cloud storage. So, if a block is read from the cloud, it’s placed into the cache. The next time that block is read(instead of going up to the cloud storage for it) it simply retrieves it from the local cache. 

Now, what if you could pin a file or folder to the cache and not have it overwritten? That would mean you could essentially read that file’s blocks straight from the local disk. 

But there’s more … 

You can pin a file or folder to the local cache, but the single-source-of-truth always remains in the cloud storage and NOT on the client’s local machine. Any change anyone else makes to the file or folder will get updated in the local cache wherever clients pin the file or folder on their local machines. Also, note only the changed blocks are updated in the cache and not the entire file. Examples of LucidLink’s pinning feature in workflows: 

Not enough bandwidth for a high-res video asset

A user needs to edit a video using the NLE tool of their choice (Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, Media Composer, etc.) and does not have the bandwidth available to support playback of the high-res video asset. With LucidLink, the user can pin that media asset to their LucidLink cache and successfully edit it. All changed blocks are automatically updated in the cloud with no user intervention required.

Rendering with insufficient bandwidth

Using the NLE of their choice, a video editor needs to render a new file from an edited timeline, which consists of several different video clips. Bandwidth is average but not enough to allow a seamless, successful render. Pinning the video clips to the local cache enables the clips to be read at local disk speed, and the new file is also automatically rendered to disk first (the local LucidLink cache) and then uploaded in the background by LucidLink over multiple channels to the cloud storage. 

Collaborate on the same project from anywhere 

A recording studio uses Presonus’ Studio One but has high latency and/or limited bandwidth to cloud storage. Using LucidLink Filespaces, a recording engineer can pin the Studio One project to their local cache and successfully work on that project, regardless of the number of MIDI and audio tracks involved. Since the LucidLink Filespace is globally accessible, any other studio using Studio One (or any DAW) can access the same project. 

Regardless of whether you’re using NLEs like Premiere and Resolve, DAWs like Studio One and Ableton Live, AEC tools such as Revit and AutoCAD, or a plethora of other great software tools; remote users with a wide range of internet bandwidth connections all accessing a global “Cloud NAS” becomes a reality with LucidLink.