How Zaki Rose built a faster, centralized creative workflow with LucidLink

About

Zaki Rose is a creative studio built around storytelling, production and long-term partnership.

Their work spans global brand campaigns, live event capture, performance-driven creative, digital experiences and long-form originals. 

They partner with brands like Fanatics Sportsbook and Casino, State Farm, NCR, Zillow, NBA, HP, Pepsi and Caesars Entertainment, while working closely with athletes, artists, creators and executives to create work that actually resonates.

Introduction

Creative studios built around brand strategy, production and post are always juggling a lot behind the scenes.

For Zaki Rose, that complexity only grew as the studio scaled: more collaborators, more complex shoots, faster timelines. The work was moving quickly, but the systems behind it weren’t keeping up.

So the team started looking for a better way to stay fast without breaking collaboration. That led them to LucidLink. 

Since implementing LucidLink’s file streaming platform, they’ve:

• Eliminated dependency on physical hard drives across projects

• Enabled live event teams to deliver rapid edits to client-accessible folders

• Enabled editors, designers and social teams to work from the same files simultaneously

• Built a centralized creative system that scales with project complexity

We spoke with President and Head of Creative Wael AbouZaki, and Senior Director of Production & Creative and Lead Editor Samer AbouZaki, about how their workflow evolved as the studio scaled.

The challenge: scaling creative production without slowing down

Before LucidLink, Zaki Rose’s workflow leaned heavily on physical storage and a patchwork of systems.

That included:

• External hard drives assigned per shoot

• Dropbox transfers for sharing and delivery

• Editors waiting for downloads before starting work

• Frequent relinking of assets across projects

• 30-40+ hard drives circulating at any given time

It worked, until speed became a non-negotiable.

“If we put it on Dropbox, you’re waiting — uploading, downloading, depending on internet speeds,” Samer shared. “Turnarounds just started getting really tight. Passing a project meant someone had to rebuild everything just to pick up where you left off.”

Then things got worse. The team’s 36-terabyte QNAP system was hit with ransomware, locking critical files behind encryption.

“It got hacked. They left a note asking for half a Bitcoin. Everything was locked,” Samer said.

That moment forced a reset. The team lost confidence in traditional storage, but the need for speed, collaboration and reliability wasn’t going away.

Finding LucidLink

The team explored a few options, but LucidLink stood out for one reason: it made working in the cloud feel just like working locally.

The shift started with a simple change in mindset: instead of downloading files to work, they started working directly from a shared workspace.

The team could pre-cache projects and jump in right away, start editing while uploads were still running and move between roles and locations without duplicating or chasing files.

After some early onboarding challenges, LucidLink quickly became the foundation for a more centralized  and connected creative workflow.

The solution: a centralized, always on-creative workflow

Today, LucidLink sits at the center of Zaki Rose’s production pipeline.

Everything lives in one structured, shared environment. Editors, designers, animators and VFX artists are all working off the same files in real time. Without duplication, version confusion or waiting for handoffs.

Work flows naturally between teams now. An edit can move straight into social, or from design into motion, without the usual stop-start in between.

“We’ve seen increased efficiency and more refined collaboration,” Wael shared. “We don’t have to go back and forth anymore.”

And because everything is already live and accessible, scale stops being a blocker. Teams can spin up faster workflows, reuse shared assets, and start new projects without rebuilding from scratch.

The results: faster, cleaner, more connected production

With LucidLink, a lot of the friction that used to slow things down is gone:

• Turnaround times are faster

• Teams collaborate in real time

• Physical drives are no longer a dependency

• File management overhead is reduced

• Assets stay centralized and accessible

What stands out most is the speed of delivery.

What used to require coordination and transfer time now happens almost instantly.

What’s next: scaling into more complex creative systems

As Zaki Rose continues to grow, the focus is on pushing into more complex workflows.

That means leaning further into VFX-heavy work, larger multi-team productions and increasing real-time collaboration across disciplines, where editing, design and social can all happen at once instead of in sequence.

With LucidLink at the core of their infrastructure, the team can take on bigger, more complex work with confidence that their streamlined workflow won’t miss a beat.