The time wasters
Time waster #1: shipping hard drives
Remember the "sneakernet": physically walking or shipping drives between team members? Remarkably, it's still happening in 2025.
The real cost:
1-3 days of shipping time (best case scenario)
Anxiety about drives getting lost or damaged
Project delays when files arrive corrupted
Security risks during transit
$50-200 per shipment in courier fees
For teams regularly shipping media, the costs stack up fast. At $50-$200 per shipment, two drives a week adds up to over $5,000-$20,000 annually — not to mention projects delayed just waiting for files to arrive.
Real-world impact: project delays and travel headaches
In our virtual event on how the cloud fuels storytelling, filmmaker Shaheen Nazerali shared two stories when working with hard drives proved painfully inefficient (and pretty stressful).
The first example saw a drive stuck in customs for days, holding up an entire project. The next saw Shaheen personally flying a drive packed with high-stakes footage home. What could go wrong?
Luckily, nothing! But today “that footage could’ve just been uploaded directly to LucidLink from the shoot,” she said.
Time waster #2: on-premise server access problems
Your on-prem server might feel secure inside your office walls, but what happens when your team needs to access those files remotely?
The real cost:
VPN connections that drop at the worst possible moment
Painfully slow remote access speeds
Team members who can't work because "the server is down"
IT spending hours troubleshooting connection issues
Creative momentum killed by technical roadblocks
When VPN connections drop, it’s not just frustrating — it’s expensive. A team of ten creatives losing just 30 minutes a week to connection issues racks up over 260 hours of lost productivity annually. That’s more than six full workweeks.
When VPNs become roadblocks
For Emperor’s Creative Director Noel O’Connor, VPNs didn’t cut it in a workflow with large files: “We had access to our data, but it could be unacceptably slow.”
“Our team had to download media locally in order to work on them efficiently. That's fine if it's a word document, but invariably we are exchanging files of several gigs worth of data."
Want a closer look at this topic? Read on premise vs cloud: which is best for creative teams.
Time waster #3: the download-edit-upload spiral
With traditional sync-and-share tools, the workflow becomes a download doom cycle:
Download (wait) > Edit (create) > Upload (wait more) > Repeat (ad nauseam).
Usually, it’s not just one person stuck in this monotonous loop. If five team members each spend 15 minutes downloading files a day, that’s over six hours of lost time every week — and more than 12 full workdays a year.
The real cost:
Hours spent watching progress bars
Creative flow interrupted by technical processes
Late nights waiting for uploads to finish
Projects delayed when someone forgets to upload the latest version
Storage costs multiplied across every team member's device
Greater security risks from storing sensitive files locally
Drowning in downloads
In their early days using remote workflows, the team at Bemo experienced this pain first hand. Using a sync-and-share tool created major slow downs.
Editors had to download an entire job — often a terabyte or more — just to start working. Then they’d render, re-upload and wait. No one else could begin until syncing finished. Multiply that across 20 collaborators, and one project meant syncing 20 terabytes of data (and endless hours wasted).
Time waster #4: onboarding collaborators and freelancers
Bringing new collaborators or freelancers into a project often leads to delays and security concerns.
In traditional set ups, working with a new distributed team member means VPNs, creating user accounts and ensuring they have the necessary hardware and software. All of which can be time-consuming and complex.
The real cost:
Delays in project timelines due to prolonged setup processes
Increased risk of security breaches with multiple access points
IT resources stretched thin managing user permissions and support
Potential inconsistencies in workflows and tool usage
Real-world challenge: scaling distributed teams, fast
Sometimes deadlines are tight. You don’t have time to worry about onboarding collaborators, or getting them up to speed on tech.
Filmmaker Philip Owens needed to produce 50 films in five weeks across 21 locations and “not a single person ever met in person during the whole project.” Trying to onboard that team the old-school way? Impossible.
