Let's get started then. I'm Marcy. I am on the LucidLink community team.
I'm super excited to be here with the Pushkin team. Pushkin makes a lot of your favorite podcasts. I will let them give you the full list, but I'm so excited to have them here today talking about how Lucid Link is a very small part of how all of those podcasts come Oh, there we go. Okay.
Cool. Before we get going, I do want to remind everyone of two things that I would love for you to help me out with today. Number one, post in the chat as much as you want to. We can't see or hear you, so we can't see your body language or you nodding or any of that.
So let us know what's resonating with you, what you wanna hear more of, and that can be anything like a thumbs up or a woohoo or a heck yeah or whatever you want it to be.
Second thing is we are gonna do some live q and a today, probably for the last fifteen, twenty minutes of the session. And so, at any point during the session now in five minutes at the end, go ahead and put your questions in the q and a so we have a nice long list to get started with when we're done with our panel chat.
So that's that's it. I do have two polls that I wanna know a little bit more about you. So number one, I wanna know what type of workflows you're working on. We are gonna talk a lot about audio and video workflows today.
So I wanna know if that is in your wheelhouse or if it's something else, go ahead and put that in the chat so we know what type of work you're doing. And then second, I wanna know what type of role you're in. So you could be in a more, like, project management role. You could be in a technical or admin role, or you could be in a creative work role.
So let me know about that too. That will kind of inform how we frame the conversation today so we we know that it's valuable to you.
And panel, feel free to look at the poll results if you want to over there.
Okay. Before we get into all the good stuff, I would love for this panel just to kind of tell you who they are and what you do on the Pushkin production team. So, Ben, let's start with you.
What do you do at Pushkin?
Oh, I'm a senior producer. I work mostly on our history shows, so revisionist history and the last archive. And I mostly, report and write stories, but I also do some mixing sound design type things on Malcolm's episodes, which is fun. And I've been here for six and a half years.
Amazing. Okay. Sarah, what about you?
I am the IT and engineering manager for Pushkin. So anything, IT infrastructure related, I handle, and then anything tech related also comes through me. And, hopefully, we can set up everyone at Pushkin the best the best way that we can.
Yeah. Special shout out to Sarah for helping make this, virtual event happen too. Thank you for all your work on that. Lydia Jean, hello. Who are you?
Hi. I, like Ben, am a senior producer at Pushkin, and I think I've been at Pushkin one month less than Ben.
Three weeks last week.
I launched my own show, a true crime show called the Chinatown Sting, and I also report and write for, Michael Lewis, has a show called Against the Rules. We did a season about sports betting. And I also, edit some other Pushkin shows.
Very nice. Costanza slash Coco, hi.
How are you? Hi. Hi, everyone. Yes. My name is Constanza Gallardo, and I'm the EP and head of production here at Pushkin.
So I show run a few different shows and also oversee a lot of, like, just, like, staffing and overall production workflows here at Pushkin.
Amazing. Great. Hello.
I'm Jake, sound designer, mix engineer at Pushkin. I kinda get to work one way or another on most of our shows and mainly in the post production side of things.
Awesome. And last but not least, Rich, hi. How are you? Who are you?
I am. I am a senior SE here at LucidLink. I came here back in twenty nineteen.
Amazing. And SE means solution engineer for everyone watching. So Rich is one of the people who helps all of our amazing enterprise customers get set up, and have a really smooth implementation, with LucidLink.
Okay. So, I wanna start with the basics here. So, Coco, I would love for you to tell us just bare bones, who is Pushkin and what are you creating? And if you wanna, do, like, a shout out of all your favorite shows, that would be awesome too.
There's so many shows.
But yes, for those who might not know, Pushkin is an audio production company. We make a lot of podcasts and audiobooks.
Some of our shows include Revisionist History with Malcolm Gladwell, The Happiness Lab with Doctor. Lopez Santos, Against the Rules with Michael Lewis, Heavyweight.
Our headquarter is in New York City. Right? But we have people all over. We have people in LA, in Boston, Hudson. I'm in Miami, so we're all over. And we work with freelancers and hosts across the United States.
So that means we produce most of our content with remote teams and different time zones. Right? And I'm sure a lot of the people here, creatives and videos and audio people know that in order for that to work, in order for those teams to work together efficiently and meet our deadlines, we need software that will help us share a lot of heavy files constantly every day. Right?
So, So that's why our production team was very happy when Sarah Bruguere introduced us to Lucid Link, and it really improved our workflow and saved us a lot of time, which was probably one of my nightmares when we had our old workflow and just like fixing a lot of production issues across teams.
So yeah, Sarah, do you wanna add anything to that?
That's kind of about it, right? Yeah, I mean, before in our workflow, there was a lot of syncing involved, which I feel like is the story of many people to work in any sort of remote creative environment. And we were kind of just busting at the seams quite a bit where, you know, what we were using was not really able to handle the file sizes and the amount of content that we were producing. And, LucidLink handles just that. It's been really, it's been a really great tool for us, and a tool for me specifically where I'm not having to address multiple IT issues in regards to syncing and people log in and, they're able to access the files they need.
Yes. Amazing.
And I think one thing that's unique about a lot of your shows is, I mean, they're very highly anticipated. I would say if they're not all coming out at the same time, people are, like, on the edge of their seat, like, Tuesday at nine or, like, whenever they drop to listen to the next episode. So how does that turnaround time kind of dictate what you're using and how you're, like, creating your workflow? Does that have any impact on the way that you work together, Sarah?
Sure.
I mean, I think that it's definitely on a show to show basis.
So, for our weekly shows, something that definitely saves me a lot of time if I'm engineering them is, you know, setting up templates for the producers. So that way, they can work directly from the raw files. They put them in Descript, and then they'll put the layup directly into the mixed template. So that way, we're kind of, you know, on a really good start right off the bat.
From there, once they hand it off, I'm able to really, like, incorporate any sort of presets I have for the host, anything to make the mixing stage go as fast as I can depending on, you know, when whether I receive it or and then also when it's due. And and we try to work with presets. We try to work with templates as much as we can.
Of course, when it comes to our narrative shows, those require a lot more build up time. So those require a lot more research, a lot more revisions, and everything. So I would say it's on a show to show basis. But for the most part, you know, the engineering team really works with production to make sure that they have the tools that they need.
So that way, not only they work efficiently, but when it comes to hand off, we can kinda hit the ground running.
Awesome. Yeah. And, Ben, you were just telling me that you're currently creating the tenth anniversary episode of Revisionist History, which is crazy. No. I remember listening to the first season, which makes me feel really old, but in a good way.
So I imagine a lot has changed over those ten years. Can you kind of tell us, like, what were early days like? What and, I mean, you don't have to go into too much detail because we'll get there, but, like, what are the important things that have changed for you?
Well, I think the the we make a lot more episodes now than we used to, which means that we make you know, it used to be, I think, like, eight to ten episodes of revisions a year, and now it's somewhere around twenty four. Wow. So the the size of our team hasn't grown considerably. I haven't been at revisionist since the very start.
I joined the team a couple years ago and pushed in a while before that. But I think we we tend to work with a lot more, like, this sort of a stable of freelance and mix engineers. And being able to get them files, pickups, have them have direct access to all the archival material in case they want to pull something else in when they're sound designing a mix, because we've begun to have engineers do a lot more sound design on a on a mix level, which is not the way the team used to work. And so having this single place where freelancers can very easily get up to speed and find the material they might need to, like, further adorn the mixes is super useful, and it's especially essential to get it to them quickly.
When I started at Pushkin, I think the way that we shared files is we would just click and drag into a Google Drive browser window, which is extremely slow. And then if you, like, god forbid, close your browser, you're kinda screwed. And there was, like, all sorts of problems that arose from this. Like, you couldn't really like, Pro Tools didn't really translate to Google Drive in that way, and you couldn't, like, automatically save onto Google Drive.
You had to, like, sort of delete everything and reupload it. And so we often had like, I remember one time I sent a mix to someone, and this might not have been a syncing issue. It might have been something else going on, but somehow, like, the sample rate changed in such a way that the whole thing became, like, very slurred and kinda, like, staticky. And things like this happened not infrequently.
And from there, we switched to a third party client. I wanna say the name, like, the word rocket was in the title. I can't really remember. But we were using this client to, like, upload things automatically to Google Drive, and, like, that was better because we had a folder on our on our desktop that allowed us to, like, save a virtual session in there.
But even when we upgraded to a Google owned client that allowed us to do something similar, Like Sarah said, we would often have these, like, massive caches of files that we're syncing, took up a lot of space on your computer. Like, I would save things in like, late in the in the night and just, like, let it run all night and, you know, keep my computer open, hoping that would somehow fix the problem. But often files would get kind of lost in the sauce or you would just have things like permanently syncing or randomly your entire Google Drive would vanish from your desktop. You'd have to resync everything.
There were a lot of hiccups like this.
They always happen at the most inopportune moments. And we've we've really never experienced something like that, since switching to this, like, which is huge.
Awesome. Yeah. And, I mean, no knock on g drive.
Like We still use g drive for a while.
That is perfectly adequate. But to your point, like, you have scaled production so much. So I imagine that that also requires a bit more sophistication of tools. Yeah.
Thank you for sharing that. And, Sarah and LJ, I think, you decided to test LucidLink, I believe, during the first season of Against the Rules.
What made you take that chance? Like, was there a specific thing you were trying to solve for, or you were just like, hey. This looks cool. Let's let's try it out.
I'll take that one. It was a little bit different, and it wasn't season one. It was actually the sports betting season. The one that came out last year.
And, we started production, I believe, in July or August last summer is when we started to really play around with Lucid Link and seeing you know, when you see the ads, it's like, no syncing necessary. It's like, what is this? And then when we were able to give it a shot, and I knew we knew the season was coming up, and Jake Gorski even mentioned that it would be really good to even just try against the rules on Lucid Link to see what would happen. And it was a really small team.
We had two producers, one of which was freelance.
LJ was the lead producer on this. And then Jake and I were handling the engineering, ten narrative episodes and then ten chat episodes.
And so while it was a small and mighty team, it definitely proved to the point that, you know, we can have people in multiple different time zones handling a large amount of files. LJ can go into how how many files because she did extensive reporting for that season.
And it all turns out that everyone was able to access what they needed appropriately. And I didn't really hear anything from the team even when checking in. Was like, is everything okay? And everything went pretty pretty well.
I'll hand it off to LJ to speak more on the season.
Yeah. I mean, I remember when Sarah was like, I hate change. So when you pulled me aside and said you were gonna be trying LucidLink and we were gonna be the test case, I was like, god. Why?
Because I feel like when you're in production, like, you have so many things that you're thinking about that the idea of doing anything different feels like over like, really overwhelming. But as you said, Lucid Link ended up being entirely, like, a nonissue. And we were I was working with a freelance producer, and I would say this was our fifth season. And in every season, there would always be an issue with the Pro Tools upload or download or something would be wrong.
And it was so seamless. I think we had one like, just like learning how to use it moment where we reached out to you. And then after that, I don't think we yeah. I don't think we had a single problem.
And it was also way better because yeah. When we were using Google Drive, lot of times to like I feel like I was doing a lot of like if you can't just like click on something and play it, you have to like download it and then play it on your desktop versus on LucidLink, you can just play it directly off of LucidLink, which was way faster. And that was just really nice. Like, our lives were a lot better once we switched over.
That's awesome. Yeah. I feel like if you aren't hearing anything to your point, Sarah, it's probably a good thing. Like, when tools just work, you don't hear about them, and that's kind of the best case scenario.
And no news is good news. I see some people on the chat talking about syncing. And I guess in our context, when we were using Google Drive, we would have to use the smart sync function where, you know, you have the green check mark on all your files, and then it basically it syncs onto your local hard drive. So it acts like you're accessing the files locally. You're accessing the full version of that file.
In the LucidLink version, that is pinning, I would say, where it's like you're accessing the full data of that one file.
And it is dependent on your hard drive size. You know? The larger the hard drive, the more files you're able to access.
And sometimes peep you know, what would happen in all of our cases, sometimes our hard drives would fill up with a cache. That was really difficult to clear.
So it just required almost like a Google Drive surgery every time we needed to, delete that.
Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. That was constantly happening to me in past seasons.
There was also, like there was the sense of, like, impending doom. I remember you kept suggesting that, like, at one point, we were going to update and, like, the Google Drive Pro Tools link was going to break or it was I it's nice not to live with this sort of, like, sword hanging over you.
I really hope no one from Google watches this. I'm gonna feel really bad.
But We we use we use Google Drive for, like, all of our research scripts, you know Yeah.
Documents.
It's still an essential tool for that. It's just sharing Pro Tools files and and, like, large audio assets is a is a different game.
Google is wonderful. We love our Google Workspace, and it serves us really, really well. Just in terms of sharing large files back and forth, it can be unless you're sending hard drives back and forth constantly, which is can be difficult with the expanded bench of freelancers and mix engineers that we have.
And if people have different, like, WiFi power or, you know, like, we don't know where how they are, and sometimes we would have freelancers that it would take hours to really, like, upload something, and then then your whole production team might be delayed. Right?
Not anymore. Yeah.
And, LJ, I'm curious, how has this affected how you're working with other tools? Has that made it more complicated, easier? What what, like, what is that like with, like, Descript? I know y'all use Descript a lot.
What was the setup like when you were thinking about how to integrate this?
I would say it hasn't really, like, had an impact on how we use Descript or, like, the because now we just, like you know, we'll cut something in Descript, and then we'll, like, export the Pro Tools session to LucidLink and share it that way. So, Ben, I'm curious. Do you feel like it impacts how we use other tools?
No. We use some things similar, and it's I think it's we have, like, a what is useful is because it's, a seamless upload when we have tracking that we record in the studio computer.
It's we're able to get it onto Loosen thing quickly and then, like, import it into Descript on our work laptops. And then from there, like, export a virtual session that oh, sorry. I think you may have just lost me.
Cool. And then, Jake, what is this like from a sound perspective? We haven't heard much from that today. What is it headed for?
Yeah.
I mean, from a post production side, it's great. It's, I mean, just being able to jump in quicker, not having to fully sync something and being able to quick do dialogue editing is super efficient down to just being able to share mixes without having it being fully synced. So I can share the link, send that out, and I could already move on to the next thing. I don't have to wait and then inevitably forget about it. Then I'm on the West Coast, producers are on the East Coast, and then they're like, it's eight pm for them. So it's just really great that once a mix is done, I send it off.
From a creative sense, it's been great because it's broken down silos a lot, I feel like, in the last year and a half that we've used it.
Typically, everything was just a push and a pull, like push a session, pull a session. And now I'm able to jump in more well into pre production, see what a producer's working on, they can ping me and maybe they're having a tricky music edit and I'm able to jump in there and do things with them more collaboratively in their session, which I think is cool because then they get to see how I maybe handle a problem, which before it would be the push pull and then I do my thing kind of on my end, it goes out to the world, and then it's never really talked about again just by the speed of production.
And that's even been cool on my side too because there's a show I'm thinking about where it was a younger producer Or not younger producer, but a producer that had mainly worked more on chat shows and this was their first time scoring a narrative.
And so I got to jump in early on those production sessions before I was even getting into mix, fix and go in mix mode and got to see what they did. And they did things that I realized I was kind of hindering my style based on, like, preconceived rules or notions or just like, you know, you work with a company and a company X, Y, or Z has a way they do it and then that kind of just gets into your mind of like, we don't main example is running one cue into the next. I worked at a company where it was like, We never run one cue into the next cue musically. We just never do it.
And then I found myself just not doing that, like three companies past that company. And then jumped into that producer sessions like, oh yeah, you can do that. And it's great, you can run two cues in together. So I feel like it's been great to have producers learn and then I also learn from producers.
Yeah.
This is I'm not super, in the know on podcast producing, believe it or not. So this might be kind of a dumb question, but what is like, what are some of the, big differences between, like, a show like Revisionist History and a typical chat show from, like, a production standpoint?
And Jake and, Coco, I would love for y'all to to take that one.
Yeah. I mean, well, maybe Ben and LJ can say more about the, like, narrative ones. But, like, the like, weekly shows, I mean, it's just, like, faster production. Right? So we we have to publish probably an episode every week. So it's, like, you're recording one day, then the producer is cutting and and and editing and and sending it off to someone the next day. And then by the next day, the engineer has to work on it.
And then the file is delivered and it publishes, right? Compared to maybe a narrative show that maybe it might take a whole month to do one episode or four months, who knows?
So time there's a time difference. But the workflows might be, you know, similar as to, like, how we, you know, like, record, cut, score, mix. You know?
Yeah. Ben or Jake, anything anything to add to that?
Yeah. I think Coco nailed it. It's like the chat stuff is it's topical. It's gotta go out quick.
It's gotta be in the moment, all about efficiency. And then the narrative stuff is like, there's going to be more checking in. Does the host sound good? What does the raw tracking sound like?
Oh, there's a ground buzz and they're tracking that. I can ping the studio manager wherever they're doing that tracking and maybe a little bit more involved from a post production standpoint.
Maybe a little bit more involved in a little more detail.
Yeah.
And I think Lucien's been great to handle both those situations, speed and just being able to be more detailed.
Great, yeah. And aside from kind of the the tech side of this, I imagine that is a lot on the team. So, Ben, what what is that like, managing a lot of people working on one thing? Like, how do you kind of manage their, I I don't love the term work life balance, but, like, how do you manage their burnout rate, I guess?
Oh, I don't know if you can hear me.
Ben, can you hear me?
I can answer for Ben.
Yeah.
Yeah. Thing is happening where I'm hearing everybody except you, Marcy.
Oh, great. Okay.
Just tried switching my headphones back on, so I'm just can you try saying something like that?
Yeah. Can you hear me now?
Yeah. No. I can't hear you. I can hear Jake saying he's gonna answer for me. So I'll he can answer, and then I'll see if I can infer what your question is. Cool.
Well, from what I've seen is, the team's great. It's, like, what, four producers? It's a it's a small, mighty team that's working on a huge show that really handles some really sometimes very heavy in-depth reporting and topics. And I think what's been great is, at least what I've seen, if a producer is getting into that burnout adjacent area, you guys are so great that you just ping Slack chat and someone else is able to just hop right in and carry on where that person left off and give that person a breather.
And I think the team in general has been a lot more collaborative in the last two seasons, which has been really cool to see.
We we've done a lot of handing off of mixes. And I think a couple years ago or maybe one year ago when the team was expanding more significantly, we went from, essentially, like, two producers to maybe, like, the three or four range.
We were bringing on people who hadn't done this kind of work before, and it was really helpful to be able to hand off first pass of scoring and, like, then pick it up from there.
And I think in this most recent season where we were doing our first binge drop, on revisionist and everything had to be done by a certain date and we were reporting sort of right up to the limit, Some dates were changing, and it was really useful to be able to, like, move around who had the session at what time. And so that was LucidLink was a was a big enabler in that way.
Awesome.
And going to that on the engineering side, you know, Jake and I, we're the only two engineers here full time. And so we do have a freelance bench, you know, whenever we'd also get really crunched up to the line as well.
So to be able to have someone come in and, just immediately, like, be part of the show that we're working on, has been really crucial for both of us.
Awesome.
And, Sarah, I would love to stick with you for a second. I know y'all are moving into video a bit, with some of your newer podcasts. Can you speak to what's happening there?
Sure. So right now, we're, venturing we're kinda dipping our toes into video. We're being very cautious about it. But our first video first podcast is business history, and it talks about business of history.
History of business is the slogan. And, so I guess going back to entire production, we needed something that was very nimble, just because we have a very tiny, tiny studio here, but we also have, a very collaborative space down the hall from us called Buzzy Space. So that's where we shoot the video, and we're actually shooting on iPhones using the Blackmagic camera app and and also SSD drives hooked right into the iPhones. And so we're able to record at four k quality but also to be very the idea of being nimble, we can also record everywhere and also take up a very small footprint, which is really nice.
From there, once we gather all the footage, I ingest it right in like, copy it from the hard drives through Premiere and then also out of the proxies and everything all from LucidLink.
And so from there, I set up the project for the video editor who is actually based in London where our show showrunner is. And then I also premaster the audio files, which actually helps me on the back end whenever I have to go for, like, mix and master for publish. I'm basically, like, eighty five percent there. I'm mostly just checking edits, making sure everything is hitting spec.
But I after the premastered files are done, I import those into the video project, sync everything up, and match the proxies, and I hand it off. From there, the video editor is ready to step right in, especially working off of proxies, it's able he's able to work pretty efficiently. And then once he's ready for me to do the final mastering pass, I export an AAF from Premiere, work in Pro Tools to make sure everything is hitting correctly, export the stereo, put right back into Premiere for final exports. Wow.
So it's a pretty we've it's taken a while for us to get to this point, but it's been, so far pretty pretty seamless so far.
Hopefully, stays that way.
Yeah.
I think Sarah needs a special shout out that with this year, she's, like, essentially taught herself how to be a video editor and set up a film studio, and I don't think there's any way that she could have pulled that off.
Just there's no human that could pull that off if she was getting pinged with all the day to day, like, whereas my mix, my Pro Tools session is corrupt. I think that has a lot to do with us all being unlucid.
Absolutely.
Also, kudos, Sarah, for teaching yourself all of that. Just a new career casually. That's amazing.
Okay. Great. And last question for y'all. I know bringing in any new tool is you know, can be kind of a headache to make sure that the whole team is on board, but also leadership is on board.
What was that process like to kind of convince folks that this is something LucidLink was something that you, needed and it was worth trying out?
Sure. I mean, it was the, against the rules, the, sports gambling season. That was the blueprint, really, and that's what I used to in my pitch deck to the c suite to say, like, this is where we're at right now. These are, like, pros and cons of what we're working with.
And these are also, like, the very real day to day things that we encounter from sync issues, from, you know, oh, I uploaded it, but it didn't make it to the other side. You know? Why isn't the other person able to see what I uploaded overnight? And also, like, what are the pain points?
And then also comparing it to what happened with against the rules. It's like, this is how we set them up. This is how they operated, and this is how they've produced this entire season, and they've just ran with it. And then the fact that, with everything that Lucid offers, and especially now on three point o with external link sharing and being able to send links through email and everything, it's been able to that was able to convince the c suite to really, this is a product that we should invest in.
And if we since we have the ability to invest in our production teams, we need to make sure that they have what they need to succeed. And, you know, if we needed to pitch the c suite today, would probably say the exact same thing.
Awesome. Great. I think we're ready to go into q and a if that is cool with y'all. Can I throw some questions at you from the audience? Okay. Great.
And reminder for everyone watching, please put any questions you have in the q and a, so we can make sure that whatever you're curious about, we get an answer to.
So I'm gonna add some of these to the stage. Rich, I would also love your help if there's anything more a little bit more technical back end of LucidLink. First one, since LucidLink streams, are there any issues with linked assets from design programs like Premier InDesign, etcetera?
In my experience, if something isn't in LucidLink, basically, it won't find it.
Or if I export an a f AAF from LucidLink, and if someone else has been, like, in either the premier project or anything, if those assets aren't living in LucidLink, then it will not export it. So I just have to make sure that all assets are hosted within LucidLink no matter what. And then that way, we're able to keep things appropriate.
If, I'll say this. Try to this is the way because there's a lot of questions I see that are kinda similar here coming up.
LucidLink mounts and functions as local shared storage for every Windows, Linux, or Mac machine connecting to the LucidLink file space.
So you have local shared storage that is able to be connected to on a global basis.
So, treat it no differently than local shared storage, right? We just make everybody local is what we're doing. It's local shared storage and yeah, if you put everything in LucidLink, everything's gonna be available for everybody.
So think of it that way. Yeah.
And there's also a question that comes up like, is there a local cache? Yes. It is not a file cache. We don't our cache, we don't bring files down and put them there and you can address those files there.
No. Our cache is it's it's disk cache. It's a buffer to the storage. Just like the cache on a RAID controller is a buffer to those slow spinning disks.
Right? That's the way our cache works. If sometimes when I do demos, I'll have a a an m p four file, a video file over sixty gig in size.
And I'll do I'll just go. It'll play back. Beautiful.
And then I'll say, watch this. I'll turn off the cash.
Plays back beautiful. Now, I'm not saying. I'm not advocating using LucidLink without the local cash, right? But the point is, what LucidLink, you're not bringing the data down to your computer to where you use it. You're working on the cloud itself as a local drive.
That makes I will say in our experience, if I may, that, you know, the better your Internet connection is, the better the playback will be.
And if you don't have super strong Internet, it's gonna be a little bit of a challenge, but that's also where the pinning comes in handy.
So that way, you're able to access the full data of that file.
To what you're saying, Sarah, yeah. If I you we all know what this is.
Right?
This cable in a LucidLink world, this drive is a LucidLink file space. This cable is your Internet connection.
So the more restrictive this cable is, sure, it can interfere with performance. And like you said, Sarah, then you have to pin. Look. If you're gonna go down to your local Starbucks, use their free Wi Fi connection, you're probably gonna have to pin this stuff before you go.
Great.
And just to double click on that, I wanna make sure we get Steph's question answered. So the cache is in LucidLink. There is no like, Rich, is there a way to have that live somewhere else?
Our cache, like I said, is not a file cache. It is a disk cache. It must be a locally attached SSD or NVMe drive Period.
Cool.
Okay. And then Edwin is asking about MAMs. Do you have a recommendation for a cloud native MAM solution that works well in conjunction with Lucid? We're currently in the process of implementing Iconic as our MAM, but I'd love to hear if there are other options you would suggest.
I think the closest thing that we have to a MAM right now is also our is our Google Workspace. So we use Google. And before we move to all content on LucidLink, Google was our entire media asset management system that handles you know, we have shared drives. There's one shared drive per show.
So every project that we work on has its own dedicated drive, if you will.
And we're also I saw someone in this chat asking about how to set up the file space, and we have our file space set up the same way. So there's one folder per show that we're working on.
And so as of right now, you know, what we have in Lucid, in a way, mirrors what we have on Google Drive, but we specifically use Google Drive for all of our documents, our scripts, production, So anything document related lives on there, and then anything content related lives on Lucid.
Great.
Perfect. And if anyone has Ma'am suggestions in the chat too, please put them in there.
Sam is asking, how do you how does your team structure file spaces? Do you have one dedicated file space for Pushkin or a file space per show?
It is one file space for the entire company, and then we break that into folders. So all folders get all each show gets its own folder, and then we have a structured, file structure folder structure that we use from there.
Cool. Okay. That would be a fun community project. Like, everyone share how they structure their file spaces. That would probably work some very interesting conversation.
Cool. Thank you, Sarah.
And Bill is asking, what are some of the challenges you encountered when first moving to Lucid Link?
When we first started, trying it out, I was just basically sharing large as large sessions as we could back and forth with Jake Gorski, saying, like, does it open on your end? Can you open this? Like, what is you know? And, basically, getting the hang of, like, you know, if you have an extremely large file, it's gonna be best if you pin it and work from there.
Do you have any idea or what would you add?
Rich, anything you typically hear? Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Jake.
I don't have anything.
I'll I'll say this.
Audio and video files have one thing that no other files have.
And that's a bit rate.
So, I don't care about the file size. Okay. If it's a video file and I'm in an NLE, do I care about the size of the video file? No, I just, I mentioned before. I'll do a demo with a sixty gig MP four file and just open it up. I'll be here in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania and my file space, I set it up in Frankfurt, Germany and I'll just go and play it. It works because the bit rate of that video file fits within my bandwidth of my internet connection.
If that wasn't the case, I'm down I'm gonna go down to Starbucks, use their free Wi Fi, then I may have to pin it. Right? That's what I'll have to do. And Pro Tools workflows, I'll I'll pin the stems.
Okay? Otherwise, I'm gonna get I'm gonna get that error saying you're just getting fast enough in that. Right? So then I'll just pin the stems and life is beautiful.
Okay. Oh, I just saw one. I was excited about where to go. Okay. Is your master file space SSD or NVMe or RAID spinning?
We we use s three compatible object storage. That's what we work with, s three compatible object storage. We do not have we do not have our own storage. So we have bundled solutions with AWS. We have customers using GCP, IBM. We we still do bundled solutions with IBM on our classic product.
There's a prod there's a a broadcasting company in the Philippines and they set their file space up with Alibaba in the Manila data center location. So, it's S3 compatible storage. The best cloud storage providers out there, well, let's look at the Formula One guy, Formula One in terms of cloud storage, AWS, IBM, Google, and Microsoft.
Sure. They're gonna be the best performing.
Awesome. Do you miss having automizations within LucidLink like folder creation?
Oh, we have we have in outside of media and entertainment in, the AEC world, architecture, engineering, and construction, that's huge.
Right? They'll do a lot of we're gonna we get a new project, we create this folder and, you know, like a billion subfolders in it, right? And then you have to assign the permissions to users and groups and all that. They don't do it by hand, they script it.
That's that's how it's done with LucidLink. The scripting is still there.
This is an interesting question because we can talk a little bit about file locking.
Tara's asking, how do you recommend two editors work together on a Premiere project and Lucid Link without stepping on each other? Is there any documentation you could point us to?
I'll tell you right now. It's really easy. So couple different ways.
So, go into Premier, go into settings, go to collaboration, and turn on project locking.
So, when I go into the project, right?
And Sarah goes to go into the project, she'll be able to open it, but she'll have it only read only. She doesn't get write access until I let it go. But you gotta turn on the project locking in the collaboration settings in Premiere to do that.
You could also use Premiere Productions, which enables multiple editors from anywhere in the world when you use a LucidLink to be able to work on a single production and have different components out of that production that they could be working on. Media Composer, use a third party tool like Mimic or Osiris.
DaVinci, you could set it, you spend the five dollars for their project server, and you can use it that way. So project locking with NLEs, if it's there, it's gonna work.
Pro tools, we we we don't got that. Logic, we don't got that. You know, it's like, Marcy, I'm gonna be working on this Pro Tools session. Stay out.
I will. Great.
Okay. And then, Sarah, this one's push continue. This one's for you. Do you use LucidLink for, currently active projects only?
For example, I have well over twenty terabytes of old raw video files, and sometimes I go back and forth to use those files.
Yeah. So recently, I mean, we're kind of experiencing this now where for twenty twenty five, we put all of our, content, both old and upcoming, on to LucidLink. So that way teams had everything at their fingertips if they needed to access something from season one, you know, eight years ago. But, you know, given that we have a forty terabyte forty terabyte file space, throughout twenty twenty five, we actually, like, almost went over that with what we created.
So now I've been working with the teams to say, like, okay. What we're gonna be keeping on Lucid Link is our sound effects and music libraries as well as the current and past season. And then any other thing that you may need, you know, we'll we can definitely transfer over. But I think it depends on how much of that old content that you're using.
And so it's kind of case by case show. But what we're trying to for twenty twenty six is really focus on producing, like, the current season that we're on as well as, like, if we need a past season or any assets from the past season, we can move those over.
Alright.
Great. Okay. We're running low on q and a. So if anyone has questions, let me know. I also see you answering questions in the chat, Sarah. Thank you for doing double duty.
Okay. And then I I don't know if I totally understand this question. Can you run LucidLink without a cloud service? As in, could Sarah host everything on a local server and still share dynamically with collaborators?
So here's here's what it is. We we are compatible with we work with s three compatible object storage.
What does that mean? Well, I could go to Pure Storage, get their on prem object storage appliance. Right? I could do on prem object storage, but it's object storage.
I can't take block storage, like have, like, a a NAS or a a file server or something like that. We don't work with that. We work with object storage because we take the functionality of local block storage, put it on top of object storage to take advantage of, you know, the redundancy, the infinite scalability in that. So, yes, it could be local, but everybody just use, you know, the object storage is available easily in the cloud.
Great. Okay.
Alright. That was all the q and a we have. Oh, we just got another one submitted. Sorry. I lied. As far as removing old files from LucidLink, is that an admin role, or can others delete them to make room for current files?
I have actually taken over that part because I am a little scared of deleting things.
A little bit of a digital hoarder myself. But, anyway so I've actually just created LucidLink archive. So I've actually just been copying, like, the full what we've created on LucidLink back to an archive. And so that way, you know, if people do delete something from LucidLink, say a producer deleted a session or something like that, we have the snapshots we can go back to, of course.
But, you know, removing old files and archiving, I've taken that on to make sure that that way, you know, point a to point b, and I'm able to manage that. Very cool. We actually didn't talk about snapshots. Do you mind explaining what that is and how you use them?
Sure. So snapshots are almost like in moment backups.
So say, you know, you were working really, really fast and then, oh, no. Like, I accidentally deleted something. I think we've all probably accidentally deleted something in our workflows one way or another. You know, they we have snapshots set up so, like, every fifteen minutes, we can actually go back and access something. So, you know, you're able to load them, I think, exactly from the Lucid Link app, and then it's opening them. And then you can just access exactly what you need, move it back in, and then you're on your way. Awesome.
Okay. And Tara is asking in the chat, when you're talking about archiving these old files, what storage are you using to archive, and how are you moving those big files?
I use this app called rclone view. And so you can use, the program rclone, which I think you can actually use through terminal. Terminal can be really difficult, for it's difficult for me. I'm not the best at it. But having rclone view is actually an app that actually does the same thing. You can actually really see, what files that you have on your drive, and you're also able to access and add if you have a NAS or if you have, you know, Google Drive where you can log in and give access to specific shared drives. You do need the shared drive ID, which you can get into your from your Google admin.
And so once you have that, it's able to see it, and then you're actually able to transfer without filling up your hard drive or because if you try to do a manual transfer from just, say, LucidLink all the way up to Google Drive, it takes a lot of bandwidth and everything like that, and also can potentially fill up the cache on your computer, which we don't really have time for that. So our CloneView has actually been a huge tool in moving terabytes of data.
Awesome.
Okay. I want I want to add this. And, Sarah, you may want to speak to your customer success manager here because one of the things that we, do is we say put it give it all to us, including your archive because we have options when it comes to pricing to where you don't pay that same price for all your data.
So to avoid having to move stuff because that's a pain in the butt, right?
We have different options to where it can be priced accordingly for you guys.
I understand in that we I had extensive meetings with our customer service, person, but, it wasn't approved by our finance committee. So had to stick with what we had.
And you made it work beautifully, it sounds like.
Alan is also asking, Sarah, what is your outside world connection?
What speed? Sorry. I didn't ask that correctly.
What do you mean exactly?
I I think they're asking what speed is your outside Internet connection.
You know, for in office, we have gigabit Ethernet. So that way, like, all of our computers are hardwired to that. So that way we're all set there. But, at home, I have gigabit Ethernet that I try to just plug right into.
And then if possible, I try to make sure that I'm on our VPN to make sure that I'm behind the firewall.
Great.
Okay.
I think that's all the chats and q and a we have. If anyone wants to throw out another, you're more than welcome to.
But I wanna say a huge thank you to the Pushkin team both for being here and also doing what you do. Y'all have this amazing superpower of storytelling in a way that makes people wanna learn, things that they probably typically wouldn't otherwise, and I think that is just such an important thing for the world.
So thank you all sincerely for doing that.
And thank you for sharing your Lucidling story too. It was fascinating to hear kind of what goes on in the background of creating these amazing podcasts and stories, and we really, really appreciate y'all.
So thank you for being here. Really appreciate it.
Alright. I will send out this recording afterwards. So anyone watching, you can watch again. You can share with your team, whatever you wanna do. And, hopefully, we will see you very soon at another Lucid Link community event.
Yeah. Thank you for watching, and thank you for being here. Thank you.
Thank you.
Bye, everyone.
Thank you.
Thank you. Bye.
If you work in media production, podcast editing or remote post-production, you know traditional cloud storage can slow your entire team to a crawl.
Join us for a candid conversation with Pushkin Industries, the production team behind some of the world’s most popular podcasts, like Revisionist History and The Happiness Lab. They'll share how they completely reworked their workflow, moving away from Google Drive–style syncing and into real-time, high-speed cloud storage with LucidLink.
In this webinar, the Pushkin team breaks down the framework Pushkin used to modernize their production environment, streamline collaboration and eliminate delays caused by large audio and video files. You’ll learn:
How their migration process worked and how they replaced “sync-and-wait” with instant access to massive media files.
Seamless integration with key creative tools like Descript, enabling smooth editing and faster turnaround times.
What their workflow looks like today using the new LucidLink, including real-world benchmarks and day-to-day improvements.
The simple, data-backed arguments that convinced the C-suite to invest in a more scalable, efficient workflow.
Whether you manage a production team or edit files yourself, this session gives you a practical blueprint to upgrade your media pipeline, boost collaboration and eliminate file-transfer headaches for good.
Stop managing file transfers and start mastering your next hit. Get the details on a real-world workflow transition and walk away with a blueprint for your own team.
More about Pushkin Industries
Pushkin Industries is dedicated to producing audio in any format that challenges listeners, encourages their curiosity and inspires joy. Their podcasts span history, current affairs, true crime, business, culture and more. They are hosted by singular talents, are idea-driven and are sprinkled with what we like to call "audio magic." Our chart-topping podcasts include Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History, Against the Rules with Michael Lewis, Broken Record, The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos, Heavyweight, Maya Shankar's A Slight Change of Plans, Cautionary Tales from Tim Harford and Jill Lepore's The Last Archive to name a few.
