How CNN Create built a fully cloud-based post-production workflow with LucidLink

Meet CNN Create

CNN Create is CNN International's award-winning in-house brand studio, now celebrating its 20th year. As part of the Skydance Corporation family, the studio offers an end to end solution for brands, delivering multiplatform campaigns, films, digital and social content connecting brands and people.

Background

Ben New is the Head of Post Production at CNN Create. He runs a team spread across four to five offices worldwide, each staffed with two to ten editors, turning out 60+ films and thousands of individual assets every year. 

It's a job defined by coordination as much as craft: keeping projects moving between editors, offices and time zones without losing time, files or quality along the way.

The challenge: local drives and remote desktops couldn’t keep pace 

“CNN Create has been at the forefront of branded storytelling, combining CNN's pioneering spirit with a relentless drive to innovate.” Ben said. 

By 2021, CNN Create had already moved its archive entirely to the cloud, pairing AWS for long-term storage with day-to-day production that still ran on local drives and remote desktop connections into an OpenDrive server. 

That split created constant friction:

• Editors regularly hit "file not there" errors

• Remote desktop latency made fine-cut editing unreliable

• Teams had to document detailed notes and track down files scattered across individual servers.

For a global team shooting 60+ films and thousands of assets each year, this manual work pulled editors away from progress every single week. 

The solution: a single shared space for global editing

LucidLink gave CNN Create the cloud access layer that brought day-to-day production in line with the cloud-first archive they’d already built. 

This closed the gap between where files lived and where editors needed to work.

Instant access, no handovers 

With LucidLink in place, every editor works from the same shared space, replacing the old handover process entirely. An editor picking up a project from a colleague can simply open it. 

"Editors can pick up projects instantly from colleagues in different countries, with no file transfers, missing media or delays,” Ben added. “It simply feels like everyone is connected to the same shared drive, wherever they are. 

Integrations into existing tools

For larger productions, LucidLink’s integration with Adobe Premiere allows multiple editors in different locations to work within the same project simultaneously, making complex, multi-editor workflows far easier to manage and deliver.

Meanwhile, the team can now collaborate confidently across locations, without file integrity issues. And with Snapshots, editors can iterate freely knowing they can always roll back if a file is overwritten. 

The impact: more time editing, more content delivered

Since moving to LucidLink, CNN Create has made clear gains across the team:

• More time for editing work: eliminated nearly a full day’s worth of manual documentation work for handovers.

• Appropriate resource allocation: because files are instantly accessible anywhere, the team can easily pivot if they need to put different editors on different projects.

• Secure data in the cloud: files are protected with zero-knowledge encryption and previous versions are recoverable through Snapshots if needed.

“That's the highest compliment I can give any technology: it quietly does its job, so we can focus on ours," he added.

Want to simplify your post-production workflow? Try LucidLink free today.