Let's get started. First of all, good morning.
I'm so glad you're able to join us today.
Good morning to everyone in the east and even early morning in the west, everyone in between. My name is Dave Leopold.
I'm the sales director for media and entertainment at LucidLink, and we wanted to welcome you to this webinar where we're gonna be talking about the fact that between Adobe and LucidLink, we have figured out how to truly collaborate with people across the globe.
That means your team no longer needs to be in the same room as you. What happens if you're sent home for things like lockdown?
We figured it out, and we're so glad that you're here to see how this works.
So, I'm gonna be taking you through this presentation a little bit. We're gonna give you a little bit of an overview of what LucidLink is, talk about LucidLink file spaces and how they work, just briefly.
Then we're gonna get into the exciting part. We're gonna see LucidLink in action.
And when I say that a lot of people think that it's a sort of magical experience, you're gonna see exactly why because things are gonna happen in ways that you have not seen before.
And then we're gonna have a little bit of time to do some q and a afterwards.
We're happy to answer any questions you may have.
We do have a chat pod as well. So if you have any questions as they come up, there's the chat pod and there's also a q and a option.
So feel free to type in your questions, and we will, address them after.
So, just to go over who's gonna be speaking today, I'm the one in the middle. I'm Dave Leopold.
I am a twenty plus year media and entertainment creative. I've worked at, excuse me, companies, throughout m and e as an editor, motion graphics designer, as well as a workflow technologist. And I'm so excited that I got to join LucidLink and represent this amazing technology, just earlier this year. We also have Rich Warren, who is our sales engineer, and he's also an audio specialist. He's gonna be taking you through some of the audio side of the workflow.
And we're also very lucky to be joined today with by our good friend, Dave Helmley, from Adobe. He's having a a couple camera issues at the moment, so you'll see a secondary picture of him while he's talking if if, he doesn't get that sorted out. But Dave is the, head of strategic development for all things video at Adobe.
Many of you may know him. He's an icon, and we are lucky to have him here with us for this demo.
So if you haven't seen LucidLink before and you have no idea what it is, let me give you a quick overview. And I'm only gonna spend a few minutes on this because I really wanna get into the demo.
So LucidLink is a cloud storage service It turns object storage in the cloud into something that feels and acts like local storage on your computer It is easy to use. It works on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and feels like it's native to all three.
It's incredibly fast.
Now the reason it's so fast is because we stream data. We don't require you excuse me. We don't require you to download files. Now this is big because every other service out there, whether you're using a sync and share or an accelerated file transfer, you're spending time uploading things to the cloud and downloading things to from the cloud. And that full download not only causes downtime for each one of your end users, but you're also replicating the files, which means each user ends up with their own file, and you need to then work out local storage.
Are you buying extra drives? Are you doing media management? And how are you doing version control on all those replicated files? We get rid of that. Don't worry about it. You don't need to think about that again. The media comes directly from the cloud, and you can even edit media directly from the cloud.
It's unbelievably flexible. We work with virtually every tool in your workflow.
It we work with all the Adobe apps. We work with creative applications. We work with MEMS and DAMS and asset managements, integrations that you may have. We fit into it seamlessly.
We are infinitely scalable.
Why? Because we operate in the cloud. So as much as you can scale the cloud, that's how much you can scale your LucidLink file space.
So today, we're gonna be running a file space that's in IBM cloud, but we work with all the major cloud providers that are s three compatible or Azure Blob, so AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Azure.
We work with all of them. So we enable you to make your storage as big as it needs to be, And we're globally accessible.
So, again, because we live in the cloud, anywhere that you can get an Internet connection, you can ask you can access your loose link file space. And you can have multiple people accessing the same file space at the same time instantly.
So I'm actually gonna stop sharing my screen for a moment, and I will pull up the demonstration that I have. One second.
Here we go. So pull up my desktop.
So here you can see my desktop. I'm gonna move my Zoom out of the way, and I have my LucidLink client.
It mounts up here, on a Mac. For Windows, it'll be down at the bottom.
Again, we we're Mac, Windows, and Linux. But when I open my folder, again, this is storage in the cloud. It opens, and it looks just like it's an attached drive.
It's the USB drive that's scalable and shareable that isn't USB connected. It's through the cloud, with an Internet connection.
And here I have all my folders for this project that I'm gonna do. So I am in, currently in in Denver, Colorado.
Rich is across in, Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.
And, Dave, I believe today you are in New York City.
So we're operating from distances across the country, and our, our IBM bucket that we're using is in San Jose. So we're truly across the country right now.
And all of these files are coming up for me as though they were local.
So I can open up any project and just start working. I don't need to download the file.
Now in a moment, we're gonna work on a project together. Dave is gonna be working in Premiere. He's gonna be our editor. Rich is gonna be doing our audio, and I'm gonna be doing the graphics.
And so if I open my After Effects project right here, you'll see this project. Now just so you know, the project is in LucidLink. The project is being stored in LucidLink, and all of my media is also in Lucid link. I don't have anything here saved locally to my computer.
But I can open it up, I can play it down, I can step into pre comps, I can do everything that I could do if I were working locally, but, again, it's all in the cloud.
When I go to export, I can choose my location again in my LucidLink Cloud. I'm gonna put it right into my graphics folder, and I can save it right there. Now I'm not gonna do it quite yet. I'm gonna let it render out while Rich is going so that I can speak, to you about this. But what's gonna happen is the moment that becomes available in the cloud, everyone with access to that folder will be able to see it. Now let me talk about that just for a moment.
In the LucidLink control panel, I am logged in as the root user, so I'm controlling everything. I give permissions. It's very easy to do. Everything is done so simply. You have easy settings to go through. I'm not gonna go through them all right now. You can add users with a click of a button.
There there are snapshots so that you can easily recover things, protect against ransomware and user error. We also have SSO integration. But the one thing I wanna look at right now is is our user management.
So I can add a user just by typing things in here, and I can also see what shares they have. So what what folders does each user have access to? So right now, I see that Rich has access just to the audio folder. So that means that all he's seeing in his LucidLink file space is just this folder because that's all I've given him access to.
Now Dave Helmley over here, if I look at his shares, he has pretty much everything. He has audio. He has a special four Helmley folder, Illustrator files, the magic project where the, Premiere Pro projects lives.
We have a Photoshop folder, a Scratch share.
But there is one thing that he doesn't have that he's gonna need if he's the final editor compiling everything, and that is the graphics. So if I wanna give him access to the graphics, I can give him read only or read write, and all I do is click that plus button. Now I'm not gonna do it now because I want you to see it when it happens. So when we turn it over to to Dave and he's gonna be sharing his screen, that's when we'll click the button, and I want you to see how quickly he gains access to the entire folder.
Now the important thing to note is that he's gaining access to the whole folder regardless of how big it is. It could be a couple files, maybe a few megabytes in size. It could be a folder with nested folders and huge, you know, hundred gigabyte files, and he could be working with terabytes of data.
And it it doesn't matter. As soon as I click that button, he gets instant access to all of them. So we'll show you that in just a moment. But for right now, I'm going to export the after effects graphic. And while I'm doing that, I'm gonna turn over to Rich who's gonna take you through the audio side of this project.
Alright.
Let me, share my screen.
Alright. So what we have here is, I'm connected to that file space, LucidLink. Magic.
Down here you can see I'm connected as user rich.
If I open a folder, right, I look in Finder here, you can see mounted as a local volume.
And, as Dave mentioned, I just have access to the audio folder here. And in the audio folder, I have a folder for, mixes and my projects.
And all the files are also in here, for my audition session.
Now, if we take a look at the audition session, what's pretty cool with this is, everything this recorded everything in Audition and never used a local hard drive.
So when I did the when I did all the drums and everything, I actually used, Superior Drummer.
And then, exported that, brought that all in brought that all into Audition, and then recorded all the guitar tracks to bass and everything, recorded everything direct, to the cloud in a LucidLink Filespace in Audition. So here's where we are today.
Standard, Adobe Audition session that we have here.
If I go over here, you know, I don't work with this any different than any other any other audition session. It's I'm simply it's a local hard drive to me here. So everything is the same, just as, it would be. I mean Yeah. So nothing's different.
So what I could do is I recorded everything directly to the cloud using LucidLink.
Everything here was recorded in audition, so why not?
Let's do a mix down.
So what I could do is simply go in here, do a mix down of the entire session.
Let's give this a name.
We'll do this song for Dave H and I'm going to put it in my, LucidLink folder here in audio, in mixes. Right? I'm going to put song for Dave H.
And I'm gonna save it there. You could see I'm doing twenty four ninety six. There's no problem with this. It, naturally, you could do sixteen forty four one. Right? You could do twenty four ninety six. I could even do higher resolutions.
It's all gonna work the same. So when I click okay here, you can see my progress meter, and it's not gonna take very long. So what's actually happening is it's writing to the file space. It writes to a local LucidLink cache first.
This is behind the scenes. It writes to the cache first and then we flush all the tiny blocks to the disk. If I look in my LucidLink client, you can see I don't have some corporate, you know, huge bandwidth here. I'm in my home.
I'm actually using a WiFi connection to my Internet router upstairs on a home Internet connection.
It's flushing the data to the disk. It just so happens that my disk is a file space in the cloud. Now it's fully written and if you look here, in my audio folder, I go into mixes.
There's, there it is. Now I'm going to turn this over now, and, we're gonna take it, from Dave's perspective. Let me stop sharing.
Thanks, Rich.
Oh, and and there's Dave. So, let me just say that, right now so, again, I am here in, in Denver, Colorado. Rich is in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.
Dave Helmley, are you are you in New York right now? No. You're back in Annapolis.
Yeah. I'm back home. Yep.
You're in Annapolis, and the, the data center is over here in San Jose. So, again, without having to download, without having to fill up our hard drives, we are staying completely in sync as as a team.
So, just to to pull this up one more time, I'm gonna open my folder, and I'm gonna open the control panel so that I can show you so open the control panel, and because I am the root user, I'm I'm given the admin access. So, again, I can I'm about to add this graphics share for Dave, and I can give him read only access or I can give him read write, either one. So I'm gonna give him read write, and all I need to do is hit this plus. Now I'm gonna stop sharing before I hit it.
I will let Dave share his screen, and as soon as he has his file space open, we'll coordinate this, this adding of the share so that you can see it in action before he starts in Premiere Pro.
Thanks, Dave. I was just gonna let you know that they did not get the opportunity to see, where you were clicking. I can kinda show that here as well for for rewrite.
For some reason, it looks like it was only sharing the presentation and not your Oh, oh, that's nice.
You a head a heads up for the audio.
Thank you. Yep. Oh, let me let me just Yeah.
I'll let you backtrack a little bit. Yeah. Go ahead.
Let me let me just show that quickly.
That is a that is key to how simple things things work.
So here here is the, the user management page.
I've added the path for the graphics share. That's the folder that contains all the graphics. I can do read only or read write for Dave, and all I'm gonna do is click this plus button in a moment.
Thanks for letting me know, Dave.
Yep. You bet. And let me know if that comes up okay?
Yes. It does.
Alright. So I'm just gonna put this over here. Let me just put these smiling faces elsewhere. And here is my LucidLink volume here. And, I've gone ahead, Dave, you might notice and also added an export. We'll talk about that in a minute.
And, a couple other things I wanna point out that at when I launched the premier project, since I'm the only one editing it, when other people, you know, attempt to go on to this, there is a PR lock file that is saved on LucidLink that tells people that I'm currently, in the project, which is great. So just all these things get written up to the LucidLink volume, no different as if it was local, and that's just another thing. And just to point out, here is the file, that Rich worked on. I'm gonna go ahead and put a red dot on that just to remind me, what's happening there so I can interact with this LucidLink volume just like it's a local Thunderbolt drive or better yet thumb drive.
So, Dave, let's go ahead and take a look at you. Let me close some of these up just to make the screen a little less confusing because we should see what happens when you make that available.
Sure. Here we go. One, two, three. Adding the share.
Oh, I Yeah.
I clicked Click to add a user instead.
Here we go. Let's try this again.
Yeah.
It's instantaneous.
Yeah. One, two, three. Adding the share right now.
And there you go. So now I have access to, to the the logo magic final, and you can see, that the file is here. And is there any other file you want me to use, Dave? At this point, I see the project here. Do you want me to use was it finished graphic?
Or is it No. You you can use the the logo magic final.
Got it. Okay.
And then use it to be exported.
Yeah. And then I'm just gonna go ahead and open up the, the audio file here, and I've got the red dot. And this is another thing just to point out as we you know, with any sort of network drive management, you treat it no different. So we could go in and start to say, you know, we're on the red dots today just like a script.
You know? We're on the on the blue page or the the red page. And you can prioritize this any any way you want to. You can start to highlight things and point things out to each other in real time even when you're on a Zoom call like, like this one.
The other thing I would look, Dave, when I saw your your project here is as some of this would drive me a little crazy. So I would just come in here and say, look. This is video, and I can start to organize this just the way that I want to to keep things, clean. Right?
And we would just go in and just keep creating this. And all of these changes, will happen, on, the other, people's if you're working a team project and you're updating your project or a production or if I save this project out and anybody, you know, Richard Dave reopen that, everything's right back where it would be as if we're working off the same the same project. There isn't anything any different than the way that you would work today. So I can import this or I can just, you know, drag and drop this just like it's a volume, the, like like any other volume.
The key thing to really understand here is we're not asking you to do anything, different than the way that you would that you would work today. There's no transfer apps. There's no, sort of odd behavior for how you might, start to work with this. You would just come in here and just start making some some real some real quick edits and some edit decisions here.
I can come in here and, see, I'll put a logo, a logo final over here, and you can see instantly I have access. I hadn't had to wait on anything. I can hear Rich's, awesome music there.
I did also notice that, there is this really cool PSD file here that was here. I can I can come over here and say, look? I can interact with a PSD even though this is read only, that I noticed you didn't give me access to change that graphic, as, probably by design to keep things on, on track. And, you know, I can I can come over here, and I can I can start to look at, you know, any of these and say, look?
What happens if I just wanna come in and add something like motion graphics template that Dave may not may not like, but he might say, hey. That's okay. And I wanna go ahead and start putting, you know, some graphics, in here. I'm gonna do a drag and drop, graphics function on this and say, yep.
That's the Photoshop file, that I want. It's gonna go ahead and and add that logo. Maybe I'll bring that down to, I don't know, ninety seven percent or so, see if that looks good. You see the logo just appear right there.
So I can even come in here and and start playing around with, you know, some of these, some of these, you know, different controls. I can come in here and edit edit this text and say we're we're gonna get in here and deal with, you know, card time or whatever the logos are. We can really start to interact with this as if we're all kinda local, you know, in in the office. And I'm gonna come over here, and I'm gonna misspell that on purpose.
And you'll notice we now have a feature, Dave. You might not have noticed this that has spell check, built in on graphics. I hid that one for Dave. Dave and I used to have this conversation many years ago about wouldn't it be great if we could get in here and spell check graphics?
So you can now do that. We just added this feature, just just recently. And now I have this kinda awesome graphic that I can come in here and, and start to deal with and really start to clean this up. And for me, it's it's kinda set it and forget it.
I'm working with this as as no different as I would with anything else other than I have awesome talent all all around the planet to help me, work this way and be able to get these things happening exactly the way that I want to. And I'm able to preview these things in in real time.
So really excited about, about how this works, and I'll work on an export, Dave, while while you take that, on, and then we'll get you to play that back. And what I'm gonna do when I export, just just to make sure the, the audience is is kinda tuned into this, one of my favorite things about the way LucidLink works is, you know, I'm currently on the LucidLink magic volume. I'm in my folder that, Dave set up for me, and I've created another folder for him called exports.
And I'm gonna go ahead and just call this version two, and I'm gonna go ahead and start to export that now. And Dave will be able to play that, in probably, about forty seven seconds. It's gonna gonna choke on this for a second, and then it's gonna bullet right out. So I'll turn that back over to you.
Great. It's always so cool when you see how quickly this happens. I mean, the idea that we were able to collaborate.
I made a graphic. Rich did some music. Dave put them all in together, and he's now exporting them, and I'm gonna be able to play that down in just about a minute. I mean, we we did this in ten minutes approximately. So the idea that we're able to do all of this from across the country or even across the world, you know, I I really just see it as a game changer.
One thing I do wanna mention, someone asked a question. I'm not doing full q and a quite yet, but I do wanna mention this because, Dave, this is up your alley. Someone asked, how does this work with Adobe productions?
And my answer is excellent. It it's flawless.
It's it's phenomenal.
Tons of people use it.
Productions is the is the professional level collaboration tool that that video editors were were waiting for, but the one limitation was that it required some some, central storage.
And everyone was doing that on prem. There wasn't a way to to put your centralized storage in the cloud prior to LucidLink.
But And your file's done, Dave, just so you know.
Oh, great. So I'll I'll pull that up. So after some testing, you know, we pulled it open. And and Dave and I had some productions going back and forth, and we've worked with Adobe on a lot of this.
And it is just a seamless, really excellent, We have done some extensive testing on productions.
And production is just for people that know is really designed for local shared storage only. Like, it really requires you to be in the office to make this work. And LucidLink, so far is one of the only solutions we've seen that actually allows productions to work, over the cloud because, LucidLink, you know, sort of, you know, tricks premier, if you will, to thinking it it's local, that it's a local file system, which is just great in this example.
So I see in the four Helmly folder, there is the exports that he made, and here is, the the export that just came out a minute ago. And even if I just wanna preview, I don't even need to open it in in QuickTime or in Premiere.
I can just hit my space bar, and immediately, I start previewing it. No drop frames. Super smooth. All the audio, all the video.
And, again, I'm never I'm never quite sure how it plays down over Zoom, but on my side, it could not be smooth.
So that is how LucidLink works. You can access your own files if you're just working by yourself from anywhere in the world. That means that you don't need to drag around hard drives with you or have to download, every time you get to a new location.
For example, right now, the secret is out. I'm actually traveling for work and I'm running this from a hotel room. So I'm not even at my home on prem anywhere that I would have my files. I'm running this on hotel Internet.
And if you are working with a team, you now no longer have to worry about where your team is located. You get the best talent no matter where they are.
We really make distance irrelevant. You we it's no longer a part of the conversation. As Dave mentioned, you don't need to change the way that you're working. You stick to your old workflows, not your remote workflows that you're finding solutions for. You stick to your old original workflows, your workflow classic, and, you can collaborate with with your team. The great thing too is that we're finding that LucidLink is actually opening up the possibility for all sorts of new workflows, better workflows that enable remote collaboration.
So just very quickly to discuss LucidLink and how you can get your hands on it. First of all, we have a very if you go to lucidlink dot com, we have a pricing page that lays out our pricing. It's very straightforward. It's very reasonably priced.
We take advantage of cloud storage partnerships. So we give you a really good price on IBM Cloud, if that's the way that you wanna go, with reduced egress costs. We do also allow you to use your own storage. If you always work on AWS, Azure, Google, or, anything that's s three compatible, we can mount LucidLink on that as well.
The other thing to note is that if you go just to our website, you can click free trial.
And this is a free fourteen day free trial, where all you need to do is add your email address, create a password, and you make a file space. Now we're giving you the keys to the car. This is the real deal. This is the full product.
It's not a it's not a light version or a free version.
We give you the opportunity to really test this. So you can go on. You create a storage bucket in the storage provider of your choosing and test it out. We think that the best way to get a sense of how the experience actually goes in LucidLink and how magical it really is is to get your hands on it yourself.
So this is a fourteen day free trial.
If you like what you see, you can always just add a credit card, and we start billing from there.
Otherwise, if you want more information, you want a deeper dive into some of this stuff, we didn't even talk about all the amazing, security protocols that we use. I mean, the security is second to none, So people often are are hesitant to put their their IP up in the cloud. You don't want your data in the cloud because anyone can get to it.
We have the most secure that that you're gonna see out there, best security. So we have great security I can talk about, and Rich is, I'm sure, happy to talk to you about the technical side, what's going on under the hood, how do we create this magic. It's really great stuff, and we can help you also figure out how to deploy this to your teams. So feel free to reach out to sales at lucid link dot com if you want more information.
But from here, I'm gonna say, I'm gonna open it up to q and a. Let's start going through a couple of these.
Hey hey, Dave.
While you're reading some of those, I'm gonna I I can do a screen dance to move some four k files around to show them how that works because That would be great.
Chatter on that, and they they'll be pleasantly surprised. Sure. So why don't you read some of those, and then I've got, like, a a hard drive queued up and ready to upload when you're ready.
Yes. So would the speed of access to the files not be limited by your ISP and the bandwidth they assigned to you, or even throttling by your ISP? So what's great is LucidLink will take full advantage and really saturate your, connection. Now your bandwidth is gonna be the greatest limiting factor, but we find great results even with, I would say, decent connectivity.
Rich, do you wanna comment anymore on It's all it's all about bandwidth and bit rate.
Alright? So, remember, we don't download I I don't care how big the file is. That's irrelevant anymore. Because just like when it's on your local hard drive, you don't care how big the file is because you read and write to the tiny little pieces of that file on demand.
That's what we have done. We made the cloud work like a local disk. So I don't care how big the file is, but audio and video files have bit rates. Alright?
I gotta feed the beast at this rate. Okay? So if my bandwidth is this and the bitrate of the stuff I'm working on at the current time is this, we're good.
If my bandwidth is this but the bit rate of maybe this multicam sequence that I got, right, far exceeds my Bandwidth, well, now I have an issue.
So how do we resolve this? Well, proxy workflows is one way. But let's say, I always say, what about the colorist?
Colorist doesn't want a proxy.
So what you can do is we have a feature called pinning. I could simply right click on a file or folder.
I can now say pin this to my local LucidLink cache.
That means the first read of a frame comes from my local SSD drive and not the cloud because I pinned it to my cache.
Now you might say, oh, does that sound like that's like Dropbox I'm downloading. No. No. No. Here's the difference.
If Dave has something pinned and he has a folder pinned, If anything changes in that, I changed something in there, it's automatically updated in Dave's local cache, thus maintaining the single source of truth as that file space in the cloud.
Yeah. I I I think I can I can expand on that that too, Rich? Great great, explanation.
This is the way I explain LucidLink to a lot of people that ask me. By the way, this is not sanctioned by LucidLink. This is Dave's brain showing you showing you what how he's thinking about this. But if you look at the blocks up in the LucidLink, cloud, they're able to be streamed to Premiere just in time for playback on a fairly simple Internet connection. You know? I have customers using a hundred a hundred, for four k editing. No proxy needed.
That does pretty much saturate that bandwidth, and LucidLink does give you some tools to limit that if you've got other things going on, you know, certainly, on your on your network where you don't wanna, you know, sort of saturate your Internet. But you sort of see this green area here. This is where when you put the playhead, for example, in Premiere, it's able to build those blocks just in time. And I think a a really good way to, you know, also explain this is I I had someone ask, just in the chat, what about one gig, two gig files?
I went ahead and uploaded for everybody just, some of these files. This is one six nine one one four two. There's three gigs where the four k files up up and ready to go, on on LucidLink. Anybody can play those back.
Right now, I can come over to my my project over here. I can create, you know, a new four k folder like this, and I can just sorta open this folder up. And now I can just go over to LucidLink, take these two ProRes files that I just uploaded, and bring these onto a timeline and play these back in real time.
Now, by the way, if I wanna put it in nerd mode, no drop frames.
And by the way, this is playing at full quality. There's no tricks here. That's the one thing I love about LucidLink. It's what you see is what you get.
So now when I put it in full screen, because we're on a little bit of a, screen share here, I'm getting a little bit of kick there, but for the most part, it's doing pretty good. Like, I could always reduce the the resolution right down to half. But once LucidLink figures out what's going on, she's good to go. So I just, you know, I just wanted you to know that it is it is exactly what we're talking about.
When have you ever been able to scrub a four k file just just like this, in real time? The other thing is, you know, Dave, I think it's worth sort of showing. If I come over here and I'm gonna drag another file over here, I'll stick it in the in the four family folder over here. And this file is and we can talk about feeds and speeds in a second.
This is only eight forty four, so not not quite a gig. What I'm able to do is say, look. I wanna bring this into Premiere.
And now what I'm gonna do is drag and drop this down here, and you're gonna get bored with, with me chatting on screen. But, this is, you know, look how fast I can work with this. Right? I'm scrubbing this. Right? And it's it's it's available to me to work right now. And if I go over to, you know, my my LucidLink, volume over here, if I go back over here and I delete that, so just get rid of it.
Go. You're gone. Premiere is gonna go, hold on. What happened to my media? Because it's no longer in the cloud, and I can try to relink that media and say, you know, where where are you?
And it'll say, well, I was on this volume, and now it's gone. So, again, I always say, you know, the right things happen the way you would expect them if they were if they were local. So, you know, there isn't there really isn't any smoke and mirrors. There are some things to pay attention to as Rich was alluding to too.
You know, we can't reinvent the Internet as far as the speeds go.
Dave Leopold and I have talked about this for years with some international customers that are lucky to have a twenty gig connection. Right? But a twenty twenty will give you a pretty good experience on a ten eighty edit.
Right? So if you have to go down to a local Starbucks, but the other things to think about let's say you had twenty down and, I don't know, five up, which is which is possible in many many areas. Think about what you're able to do. And and and as Rich already said, you could use proxies.
You could cut this down to one half or quarter depending on what it is you need to to to work with, just as if you had a hard drive that was too slow to keep up with your media. That's not really LucidLink's fault or, say, Premier's fault if the drive can't keep up. And, Rich, I think that's the best way to sort of look at it from a technical standpoint is is it really depend you know, it it depends on what your feeds and speeds are, but how else would you work?
Right? And you still have the ability to work within your within your confines. And we are really seeing the efficiencies of how the metadata blocks work with, with LucidLink. That just in time streaming of information down to say, give me the blocks. And by the way, it's not creating a real time proxy because I have a lot of people go, oh, it's just creating a real time proxy.
It's it's it's not that magic because it's really more simple than that. It's the real data, the way it's formatted up in the cloud. They have these microblocks that break up the data, and we feed you what you need when you need it. And my favorite thing about LucidLink, I did see some other questions on this, is it is not a typical sync and share environment.
So when Dave first shared the project with me, let's say that I I didn't really look to see what size it was. Let's just say it's five hundred gigs, which is fairly routine.
I did not have to download five hundred gigs to my machine. I only, dedicated, say, five gigs for this cache that, Rich and I talked about. Right? Or maybe I want ten gigs.
Whatever it is. I think five is the minimum that we normally see. Then that's the hit I will only ever see. And then there's some smart ways to work, as they describe with snapshots and and pinning, which allow you to sort of control what always stays on your on your hard drive.
So that's kinda my my, way to look at this, Dave.
Yeah. And, thank you for that. That that's really helpful.
I I have a few questions about the cache size too. So that that's a perfect segue.
By default, when you first log in to LucidLink, your cache size is set to be five gigabytes, and that's all it takes of your of your local hard drive. But you can set it as low as a hundred megabytes, which I wouldn't do unless you absolutely had to.
You're not gonna get great performance out of that, but you can also set it as large as ten terabytes.
So what we often, recommend is maybe getting a one terabyte or two terabyte SSD, some sort of fast, responsive drive, and use that as your as your local cache. It's very easy to reset the cache location, but then you're working with a terabyte worth of of of, cache. And, therefore, anything that streams down to the cache stays in there until it needs to make room for something else. So at that point, anything be below one terabyte in size would be playing back locally from your cache no longer, having that extra hop to the to the cloud. So that's Yeah.
The other thing to mention, Dave, that a lot of people may be wondering. Look. If you have if you have a local drive, a thunderbolt drive, and I need to make sure that I can get to that audio, folder that Richard set up because, you know, there's a snowstorm coming, there's a hurricane, wherever whatever it is, you just grab it and drag it just like you would any other service or move it from one drive to another.
Do the work you need to, and then when you when you wanna upload it, you just drag and drop it. You know? If for some reason you can't work off of the cloud a hundred percent of the time, you know, due to some restriction, because it certainly wouldn't be LucidLink, you can drag that up. And I would think that that would would really give you that comfort level that if if you need it local and that's just the way you wanna work, move things up and down as, as necessary.
But you'll soon discover you don't need to move the file at all, unless, again, you're having an Internet problem. That's probably, Dave, the biggest realization that I have customers say, well, why am I even wasting my time? Like, you you saw me export directly to that folder. Why would I export local until you guys give me the, the approval, until I know I have a final?
So if I can just upload to the cloud and Rich can instantly say, ah, that was the wrong, audio, you know, intro on that. Let me go in and fix that for you. Then we get this instant feedback. And I don't have to send out a Slack note or something that says uploading file now.
Right.
Yeah.
Now, Alexander's asking about after effects working in Premiere and collaboration with Audition.
Dynamic linking, absolutely. You know, the the great thing about LucidLink is everything that you can do locally, you can do with LucidLink.
LucidLink basically tricks the application into thinking that your files are local on your on your machine.
Yeah. And Dynamic Link is sorry to interrupt you there, but just while I leave it on the topic, Alexander, you'll be pleasantly surprised that I think with the next update to Premiere, we'll be able to keep up with LucidLink. Because right now, you're waiting on the, you know, the MOGRT or whatever dynamic link to sort of figure out what's going on. And with multi frame rendering, that new feature we have in After Effects to take advantage of all the CPUs, you'll get much better performance, than you would.
But you you know, for LucidLink, I don't think you really see any difference whether it's a local project, or not. And, Rich, I don't know. I think you were getting ready to jump in there a second ago. Anything you wanted to add?
I I just, just backtracking a little bit. Always keep in mind, I I would say nobody's ever complained my car was is too fast.
Nobody ever complained my cash is too big. And one of the reasons why people like bigger cash is let's just get down to dollars and cents.
Egress.
If I don't have to keep going back up to the cloud to grab a tiny block, think about this over multiple users.
If I have stuff that I'm commonly accessing and I just grab that little block once and it's on my local cache, When I grab it off my local cache, I ain't get I'm not getting an egress fee either.
So that's that can that can add up as well. So we're using LucidLink and with the cache, we don't download the file in its entirety And those little blocks that we're accessing, once we access it once, if it's in the cache, I'm not going back up to the cloud to egress it.
Yeah. Yeah. That's good point. And I do see some questions on Audition. I think you answered that one, Dave, for Alexander.
That that's gonna work just as it does local. And and for Jeff, again, you know, for multicam, it really has to do with the speed of the clips. So if if you can get access just like any local drive and you've got the speed that you need, that's gonna be fine. I think if your your connection gets to be limited and you're doing a multicam, it's a bandwidth issue at that point.
Again, it's very efficient the way that it does it. You might have to work with proxies if you're trying to do, say, a four camera four k edit because that's just a lot of data that you're trying to get, to get access to, and a proxy may actually work, work better there, for you. So but but, again, it's not a limitation so much of the LucidLink environment as it may be, your connection.
And for for those of you who are curious about how this works with Frame.
Io, Dave, do you wanna Yeah.
It it, it it works great with, with Frame. Io. Remember, with Frame. Io, depending on for those of you that that don't know what it is, we recently acquired a company called Frame.
Io, which is just a truly amazing experience inside of Premiere Pro and After Effects. And, you know, hopefully, we'll be taking that a little bit wider. You can talk about that at another time. But but we've kinda solved the the, real problem with what we showed today where Rich has got his version, Dave's got his, and then, you know, we we've got maybe Julie on the team.
She's kind of the program manager, and she's like, okay. I really need to see when all this is coming together. You know? And and and we've got Sam, the lawyer, who needs to do the work that he needs to do.
He's only gonna use it in Slack, for example. Our new collaboration environment allows you to do all that. We can upload versions, download versions as we need them in the cloud, comment, draw.
It also works in Slack. So if someone doesn't wanna get into a creative cloud environment, they can do that. But I think the important thing is it works great with LucidLink from the standpoint that if we have five of us, working in Premiere Pro, and we've got the master up on, on the Frame. Io space, I can take those files, put them in a working folder, which is what I advise customers to do all the time.
I mean, you cannot really beat LucidLink as a working environment as you're seeing today. So you have it sitting up on LucidLink. Everybody's hitting those files as they need to. You're communicating with Frame.
Io for all the review and approvals that you would expect. And then maybe when you're done, you can say, I'm gonna go archive back up and put it, back up on on, on Frame. Io. So there's some there'll be some new information coming out about that, on Creative Cloud.
So, so stay tuned. But just like with LucidLink, if you haven't tried the trial, which I'm sure Dave will get to that in just a second, you wanna do yourself, you know, some good and and have some fun with this. It's it's the least nerdiest experience I think you'll have because it just works. For those of you that wanna nerd out, I think, Dave, you can probably point them to, some, some tech docs, but I'll turn it back over to you.
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Dave. Yeah. It really is a fun experience. And, you know, the the two reactions I I tend to see are either the jaw your jaw hits the floor the way that mine did, or you say, I don't understand because it's kinda like seeing negative space. It's it's when everything works so perfectly, there's no there's no hiccups.
You kinda say, what am I looking at? But that's the point is that you don't need to think about the solution. We wanna be an invisible solution. So once you log in to LucidLink, you're not thinking about the fact that you're working from the cloud anymore.
I see a a few questions about the, the pricing.
So, this is, you know, first of all, this is separate from Adobe Creative Cloud.
We we partner with Adobe, but we are a separate company. But we manage the, the LucidLink service. And so that would be, we you can either bring your own storage or we bundle it with our service, and we give you access to your files wherever you are.
It is there is a per user fee. Once you get above five, we give you the first five for free. One of them is an admin, and that admin is is the person who's gonna set all the, policies.
So they'll they'll do permissions. They can set up, single sign on integrations if they need to. And one of the very important ones too is that, the admin, the root user is the person who's gonna also set the retention policy for all of your snapshots, your your snapshot cycles, your your retention policies. Because, again, and and Rich did a really cool demo recently that I'm hoping he'll do again of sort of best practices for setting up, snapshots so that you're getting as much coverage as possible, and you will never lose a, a single bit of data, until that policy expires. So, again, the more common is just human error, but this also protects you against any sort of malicious, actions as well.
Let's see. Few more questions.
How about the workflow?
We're kinda talking about test accounts.
If you and I wanted to test this together as a team, what's the best way to trial that?
Yeah. So so if you if you click to create a free account, you will get your your five free users. You will be the root user, the administrator, but you can also create four other users to test along with you. So that's that's sort of what what Dave and I did early on was he he when he called me up and said you have to see this, he created a user for me, and he put something up in the cloud.
And I was able to see it right away and play it. And one of the things that we didn't even talk about is that the way that this works, you don't even need the full file to be in the cloud before someone on the other side can start using it. So there's there's some really cool things here. And and, I would say the best way to get up to speed on these things is, first of all, sign up for the free trial, but also reach out to us so that we can walk you through all these really cool bells and whistles and and features that are that are really just gonna accelerate your remote workflows and collaboration beyond what you imagine.
And, you know, one thing, if you needed to send someone, a client, the final file, and you could set them up on just, I know, a username delivery, whatever you wanted to. You know, give them the ability to, you know, full access to a folder as just as you showed. Right, Dave? And as soon as they download the file, you can just delete that user. And the same thing with contractors. If you had a contractor doing some work while they're working with you and you are the you know, it's your account. You're the administrator.
You can add, users, you know, as needed depending on the plan that you have, but, as needed. And and, I think that's a pretty easy easy way to work. And I'll also tell you, you're exposing, you you know, that client to sort of this new way of working, with, you know, cloud storage, which, again, I think is very different the way that LucidLink does it today.
Right. So it it really makes it easy for any third party, collaboration or freelancers.
And, you know, to Dave's point, as quickly as we saw that share pop up on on his side, that's how quickly users can receive or have or revoke or have their permissions revoked.
So you can add an entire user with all the shares with a click of a button. You can set it all up for them before you add them, or you can add it as they go along. You can go through individually revoke shares or just delete a whole user. And at that moment, they immediately lose immediately lose access, and anything that might be in their cache is useless at that point. So it's just encrypted blocks of data that they can't make use of.
So And I think for enterprise organizations, it's also important to note when you and I first talked, you would ask, is it SSL?
You know, single sign on, does it have an active directory, you know, depending on the plan that you get into. Again, these are separate topics, but for enterprise organizations, LucidLink is quite common for some very large media and entertainment customers that had that requirement.
Right? Because I also see Jonathan's note on media corruption. Right? Like, we've done a ton of testing, just at Adobe, really trying to get this thing to, to screw up. And I think Rich was explaining, you know, the micro blocks and just the the reason they use that system. I don't know, Rich, if you wanted to mention anything on media corruption that, Jonathan had brought up.
Two two things. Once we utilize once we use object storage.
Object storage has negated the concern for the lifespan of media.
In other words, the data that you put on object storage today will outlive you, outlive your children, outlive your grandchildren, and everyone else because it doesn't matter if hard drives fail, storage arrays fail. Right?
Object storage platforms negated the the concern for the lifespan of media. That's number one. Number two is let's just say ransomware, human error, a piece of software corrupting something that would happen on local disk anyhow.
That's our immutable snapshots. Our snapshots are immutable. You cannot change a snapshot. So if I do a snapshot every fifteen minutes and keep ninety six of them around, I could roll back in any twenty four hour period to any fifteen minute point in time and recover file, folder, whatever I want.
Yeah. That's a good point. You know, one thing, Dave, we didn't talk about that. I'm surprised we didn't get asked. You know, I certainly test a a ton of cloud storage solutions that are out there. I mean, it's just, you know, I'm sort of the the the tech guy here, on the video team. And this is one of the only solutions that supports Mac.
And for the people in our world on visual effects, right, for the people that need Linux, they can play on the same, on the same storage, right, and have their folders and moving VFX files around. So you've got, you know, audition people, Pro Tools people. You know, everybody putting together all of these things and assembling this. Everybody is living and breathing on the OS that does the work they need to do to stay creative.
Right? Linux, Windows, and Mac. And when you really start to do your investigation, and I would tell you go go out there and poke around and see what's available. You know, there are, you know, a number of them, on Windows.
I think they work a little bit different than the way LucidLink works. But when it comes to cross platform, who's the client that's gonna be looking at the work or may or or or some other contributor, like we had talked about? You know, OS shouldn't be a limitation. Right?
It should work like any other drive. So I just thought that was worth bringing up because, it's something that people don't really realize they're actually seeing here.
It's a great point. Yeah. I mean, the the idea that for me as a Mac user having to, switch over to I've I've worked on PCs plenty, but when I'm in the middle of a project and suddenly I have to, log in to a virtual machine somewhere and even if I can remap my keys to be more of a Mac, setup, there's still a few things that aren't quite right and, you know, just the operation of the machine is gonna be different. And so the fact that we can keep everything native and allow cross OS collaboration to the same files is just really a game changer.
So, well, I think, oh, I I see one other one other question just noting locations across the world.
The the last time I I the last time we did this demo, we were actually working with our colleague, Alex, who is in London.
So we do have people collaborating across literally across the globe. We recommend that you put your data center. You you host your your cloud storage, in a location preferably closer to your end user. So if you have people that are just uploading, it's not as critical that the data would be as close to them. But, but that's all stuff that we can also talk about as far as helping you to figure out, best practices and and where to set everything up and how to deploy. So, again, thank you so much for joining us today.
I hope you enjoyed what you saw.
We would be thrilled to talk to you more about it. Please reach out, sales at lucid link dot com. I think it's in the chat pod too. We'd be happy to walk you and anyone else at your organization through a demo, talk about how to get you all set up.
And, again, thank you for for joining.
This has been fantastic. Thanks thanks for the invite. And, by the way, I just just that was that got me thinking. I'm now connected to LucidLink in Japan, my Japan office, and I play files all the time.
So we work with the Adobe Japanese office and India offices, quite often, Dave. So I just wanted to point out that while you're absolutely right, you should work within your zone. But, you know, our team is about sixteen people worldwide. We have a central loose LucidLink folder.
Everyone kinda kinda has their own LucidLink in their own countries, but we do share each other's LucidLink spaces, and we drag stuff all the time back and forth, you know, demo files. And I'll end with people always ask, why are you so, you know, high and happy on LucidLink? Because it actually allows me to put all that over there so I can start talking about what's new and cool about Premiere Pro and After Effects. So I just wanted to to to end with that because I am a huge believer in sort of this worldwide community that brings us all together.
Thank you, Dave. And thank you so much for joining us because we love we love having you on the demos.
And, Rich, it was good to see you again, sir.
So And thank you, Rich.
Same here. And and please, you know, sign up for that for that free trial, and reach out and let us know what you think of it. We'd love to hear about the the user experiences.
I've I put the the sales, email address and my personal, LucidLink email address in the chatbot for anyone who wants to reach out. And, thank you again for joining us today. Hope you have a great rest of your day.
Happy holidays.
Take care. Bye.
Check out this webinar recording to see how teams can work together in real time on massive media files from anywhere in the world, all using Adobe Creative Cloud and LucidLink’s storage collaboration platform.
In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:
Instantly access media assets from any location
Edit files in any Adobe Creative Cloud application directly from the cloud
Eliminate downtime waiting for downloads, uploads, or syncing
Keep assets effortlessly in sync across teams of any size
Collaborate in real-time, no matter where your team is based
Watch to see how Adobe and LucidLink can streamline your creative workflows and let you collaborate seamlessly, wherever you’re working.
