Alright. People are starting to come.
Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining.
My name is Matt Schneider, from LucidLink, and delighted to welcome everyone, today. If you're here for LucidLink magic hour, you are absolutely, excuse me, in the right place at the right time. We're gonna give everybody about a minute to kind of, file in, take their seats, grab a coffee, and we'll get started in, just about one minute. So once again, this is LucidLink magic hour, featuring Nick Kaye, and we're gonna get started in one minute. While people come in, if you would like to throw into the chat where you are based, where you are located, that would be really fun just for our, collective understanding of where everybody is calling from.
Alright. So far, we have Saint Louis, Florida, France.
Germany, South Africa.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, fantastic. London. I've been to Albuquerque many times.
North Carolina, Durham, I'm gonna be there next week. Long Beach, California. Man, what a crowd, Nick. This is amazing.
Wow. This is really international. Right?
Bogota, Colombia.
Your football team performed very, very well. I'm sorry they didn't beat Argentina, but it was an exciting game.
More Canada, Zurich. Welcome.
No. Saint Louis isn't boring. We have a close colleague here at Lucid Lake, Mike Harp, who's from Saint Louis. Nashville, Washington, DC, Sofia, Bulgaria, home of our home office.
For those of you who don't know that much more about LucidLink, we are a a completely international company with teammates and colleagues located really all over the world, but our only brick and mortar home office is actually in Sofia, Bulgaria. And I've been there three times. It's amazing.
Manila.
Wonderful.
Alright. Well, I think we have, a good crew to get started. So I'm gonna kick things off, and I'll, recap by saying thank you again everyone for joining. This is the LucidLink magic hour, which is a relatively new series, from LucidLink.
This is actually our third installment. We kicked things off in June featuring our partner technology partner Projective. Then our second installment was a live demo of LucidLink that I offered last week, and now we are here today on our third installment of LucidLink, featuring Nick Kaye. So I'm gonna begin by talking a little bit about what magic hour is.
If you've never attended one of these, this is again, largely a new series. What is magic hour? Well, it's an entirely new live event series presented by LucidLink.
It's gonna be, a weekly learning experience focusing on a specific tool or workflow, and once monthly, we will have sessions hosted by guest artists and workflow experts who will be showcasing their favorite workflows and the tool they love the most. If there's someone that you know that you would like to see featured on Magic Hour, please, let me know. We would love to host them and would love to have them on the show. And the whole point of Magic Hour in particular when it comes to guest hosts is we want a guest artist or guest contributor to really talk about what they are most passionate about, the tools that they use, the tools that they love, the workflows that are so important to them, and ultimately how LucidLink, is the is the superconductor connecting all the dots and helping to make the magic, happen.
So, with that said, I also wanna, make sure I let everybody know that if you are new to LucidLink, if you've never tried LucidLink, please try our free trial. You can go to lucid link dot com and, sign up. It's a very simple, getting started process. Download the desktop client, create a Lucien link file space, and start to see why we are completely different from every, storage collaboration platform out there. So with that note, I wanna hand the microphone, to my friend and colleague, Nick.
Nick is an award winning freelancer and postproduction Jedi at NK Films with sixteen years industry experience in video editing, motion graphics, VFX, compositing, and grading. That's a lot, Nick. He is a certified NLP coach helping freelancers to do the work that they love the most at NK courses. So on that note, Nick, I'm gonna hand the microphone to you.
I do wanna note that anyone who has questions, please, put them in the chat or the q and a panel. I'm gonna be answering questions on the fly, in the chat as they occur. If there's something really, super relevant, Nick, I'll kind of put my hand in the air and say, Nick, we have this amazing question that I'd love to hear your your answer live. Otherwise, I'm gonna let you take the baton, Nick, and, delighted to hear what you have to say.
Awesome. Thank you so much for that intro. That was very, very kind of you, and I've, I've I'm so happy to be here. This is a real privilege to be part of LucidLink who I'm I'm just such a fan of since the last, what about three years now I've been using LucidLink, and it's really changed the way that I work. So, I I this is a real kind of treat for me.
Matt, I believe oh, there you go.
Sharing my screen, so feel free to grab the screen.
Thank you so much. That's just popped up. And yeah. Welcome, everyone. It's so great to see people, that I recognize in the chat that I've got to meet in person and, funnily enough, through LinkedIn. And we haven't had the chance to meet in real life. So, hopefully, this is one form of that to to connect, and I'm looking forward to sharing, hopefully, some some value today with remote video editing workflows.
So we're gonna get jump straight in. I'm gonna breeze through the the slide about me because Matt has done such a a nice job with, introducing kind of my background. But as a quick spill, you know, I am I'm originally from London. I am based in Barcelona now where, of course, I work one hundred percent remotely now. I've been freelancing for sixteen years now, and as Matt Cully mentioned, it's I'm a proud generalist. I I'm no shame about that.
I do like to dabble in other fields and skills, and that just really excites me. I love learning new skill sets and and jumping across different genres, especially when it comes from video editing to grading to VFX.
They're all tightly linked now.
And you can see a a little piece of some of my clients that I work with, and I'm luckily I've been really fortunate to kinda take a lot of this knowledge from freelancing and put it into another baby of mine, another love of NK courses where I share the world of freelancing and how to navigate this sometimes turbulent world or or how to get clients, how to yourself, and as we're doing today, you know, how to how to work remotely, which is a big, big passion and topic for me that really unlocked a lot of things in my life, and hopefully for some of you too.
And on that note, just before jumping into my story, feel free to pop into the chat how many of you actually work remote. How many of you would love to work remotely? Is that a goal of yours? Is that something you're moving towards?
And, you know, how have you found that journey? How have you found that is has there been a lot of challenges? Is there been a lot of pros? We're gonna dive into some of those today.
So I'm gonna give a very kind of balanced argument, but I would love to just hear kind of some of your experiences as well.
So I'll give you a quick overview of my story of why I actually decided to go fully remote. And it all started in two thousand and eight when I finished university. I was working on film sets, agencies, and postproduction houses and studios all around London.
And I found that it was an amazing experience. I would highly recommend working in a studio. I'm definitely not opposed to working in that kind of environment. I think it's so beneficial.
But after ten years, I kinda had this Alan from a hangover moment where I was working out all of the time I spent commuting.
And when you have a partner and a family and friends and their commitments, a lot of that really kind of dwelled on my mind. So I came up with, this on my on my notes. I remember being on the on the underground in London and just working out. If I'm commuting two hours a day to Central London, that's ten hours a week traveling on the tube.
That's forty hours a month, which is what most of us work in a week. Right? So that's four hundred and eighty hours on the underground per year. So I thought there was a lot of time leakage there, and and some of you may enjoy the commute.
Some of you may have a beautiful community to read a book or listen to a podcast.
But for me, it was a bit taxing.
So then I had an opportunity to move to Barcelona, and I kind of enforced this goal of mine from twenty eighteen to twenty nineteen to have a year to kind of inform my clients and and kind of lure them into me working remotely, which I'd done kind of on and off, but it wasn't consistent enough because I didn't have systems in place.
If any I knew about LucidLink back then, I was just using a weird mash of kind of Dropbox and Google Drive and, WeTransfer.
It was a a bit of a mess.
So as you know, we had this thing in twenty twenty called a pandemic, and that kind of there's still the lying into that event. It did open the world up to the idea of working remotely. And a lot of studios, post production houses, and every company essentially had to adapt to putting systems in place to make this happen.
It really gave us some rocket fuel to say we need to make this work.
So having said that, I've thought about this a lot, and I I speak to a lot of people in LinkedIn and and through my course that there's a lot of pros and cons to working remotely. And that's what I'd love to dive into with you today.
One of the key benefits I've found is that having autonomy to manage your schedule is such a beautiful thing where you can go to the gym in the morning and maybe sit in your desk and work at certain hours depending on your clients. You can have lunch at a different spot. You can spend time with friends. You can meet up with someone locally. You get to have more control, maybe not always down to your schedule because you obviously have client deadlines, and you need to kind of work with your clients to cater from their schedule as well. But you certainly have a lot more in my opinion than working in an office environment.
There's no commute.
I, when I was doing this slide yesterday, I actually paced, and I I found it was eight meters to the bedrooms to the office.
So maybe some of you got a short commute than me. If so, you're really lucky. Maybe it's a blessing at Anacom.
You get to case your environment to you. So you get to design your workspace that is conducive to you. And and only and Matt have spoken about this before, but, we'll go over some tips around that and and also how you can just, make it work for you in a way that kind of helps you to focus and avoid distractions.
Of course, you get to use your own hardware. For me, this was huge.
I don't know why I found that a lot of studios I was working at, some of the machines they had were just sometimes a lot slower. Sometimes you had to call in the tech guides to install something or just get a administrative password just to kinda do something quite basic to install, like, a plug in.
You know, do you have your own shortcuts or any hard you know, maybe a MacBook Pro or a laptop that you can take into an office? But if you have something at home that has all your shortcuts and plugins and software set to your liking, you're way more effective.
And of course there is a huge time and cost saving as you mentioned difficult travel and not having to commute and pay for transport costs.
So there's a a huge benefit there on both time and costs.
Just have a quick pause. Are we doing okay in the chat, Matt?
Are we Oh, we are good.
No questions so far.
No questions so far.
So I think silence is a good thing. You are focused.
So we've now talked about the pros. It wouldn't be fair without talking about the challenges.
And these are ones that I actually kinda surveyed a while ago as long as it incorporates in with some of my experiences.
But speaking to people on on LinkedIn and and through the kind of freelance course, I found that the number one slash number two difficult and challenging thing with working remotely is building relationships, building peer and client connections.
So I've separated this into two, but the peer and client connections can be more difficult, but I'm gonna show you with each of these challenges how to overcome each one.
So those distractions is and focus is also a, it could be a blessing in the con. Like, we myself and Matt was talking about if you have maybe a pet at home or you have kids or you have something that is a form of distraction, working at home, then it could be a con. If you have you have quite a great environment or separate room or you have something that allows you to to focus and zone in, this could be a huge pro.
I've had a real mix in studios. Sometimes you kind of get a room to yourself and you get to go into this kind of flow state, which you may be familiar with.
But for me, for the majority of kind of open office spaces, I found that I was gonna be dragged away to meetings and conversations, and it kind of made me fall behind on a lot of the the editing and post production tasks I had.
Maybe some of you guys would find that, depending on the project, the places that you freelance at or you work at.
This is, another big one that ties into the first point about social and isolation. So, of course, working at home can be isolating, and I and I know this is a real, a real challenging one that there are ways to overcome, which we'll come on to, but it's something to consider if you do wanna work at home. It is a bit more solitary.
Another huge topic that we can probably have a whole master class on, which is about work life balance and separation.
Again, being at home, you kinda have the dishes in your eyesight and you have laundry to be done and all of the things that that will come with kind of living in an apartment.
So it's just knowing how to separate those or integrate those.
And lastly, collaboration and communication, which is gonna be a big theme of today, of course, with LucidLink.
And we're gonna dive into each of these now just through some quick bullet point solutions.
So with the first point about building relationships, some of the best ways I've found to build relationships online, like I said at the beginning of the call, is I've come to Zooms and webinars like this one and gone into kind of breakout rooms and started speaking with some of the members and just exchanged details and hopped onto a separate Zoom one on one, and we found that we've built some kind of relationship with and, some kind of connection that we wanna kinda continue outside of this space.
So the brilliant thing is you can meet clients. You could meet other peers, other freelancers, other artists, all through these online meetups, webinars, Zooms, anything like we're doing today.
I would highly encourage going to in person networking. So meetups, meetup dot com is a great website, Eventbrite.
I know that when I moved to Barcelona, those were really key to to go into these websites and just find any other local themes that I felt like I could connect with people over here. Maybe that's a business orientated, meetup. Maybe it's about video editing. Maybe even it's like Adobe Premiere group or DaVinci Resolve group. Typing in keywords for your interests are such a good way to find out, just kind of meeting like minded people really.
And I call this actual social media because the idea is for social media, we want it to be social. We want it to link to something that builds real human connection.
So one way you can do this with your clients as well is, I'm a big fan of this on LinkedIn is, if you wanna meet with a new client and you wanna show them a showreel or talk about something that you love with them, maybe some of their work that inspires you, send them a Zoom link. Send them a link to your calendar, book in calls, and just bridge that connection from digital to eventually in person.
And one of the biggest things I see, I'm I'm sure we're guilty of this, but we've also been the victim of it, is just getting templated stock messages.
I know on LinkedIn, especially, you kinda get that quick sales pitch straight away sometimes.
So I highly highly recommend, please research who you're talking to. Just do a little background dig in.
Check out their website, check out their showreel, and, you know, giving giving them even a small compliment that is specific about their work or something you enjoyed about their website goes such a long way. So it's a really customizing your outreach will help you to build client and peer relationships.
So I hope this pace is okay. I know I know we're gonna come into a demo later, but hopefully some of this is useful for you guys.
So we spoke about a another challenge, which is distraction and focus.
I know that when myself and Matt spoke a couple weeks ago, we came to this term environmental hygiene.
So that's the way I like to see that term is just having a workspace that is conducive to the way that you like to work.
So I know some of us may not be in that position to have a separate room or a separate office space to have your desktop, but you can put a desk in the corner of the room or have, like, a console table or somewhere that is associated to work. And there is a lot of psychology behind that with kind of an anchor, something called a spatial anchor, and that's where you kind of associate your bedroom to a place of rest. The kitchen, place to eat. And in this case, a workspace or a desk space is where I am focused, and that's what I'm doing. So some other tips are having noise cancellation headphones if you live in a noisy environment, Having an organized workspace for me, I've just got, you know, my panel, my iPad there to take notes for meetings, too many monitors that can't fit in the camera. So just making it work for you so you're set up for success.
Another way to stay focused is to define your work times. So there's a lot of books on this, and and I I love this topic about kind of time management.
Some of you may have heard of the Pomodoro technique. That's where you may work for say thirty minutes and have a fifteen minute break.
You could give or take those kind of timings. Some of you may work better in that style where you kind of have set breaks and set working times.
Of course that depends on the kind of work that you do.
You can set time blocks.
You can batch tasks together. So this is my email admin time.
Eleven to twelve PM is my kind of client meeting time.
One to five PM can be your editing time.
And setting this schedule the night before or the AM that you're working, I found has been a real game changer for me just to really stay on top of what I'm gonna do that day.
And also just having productive windows, again, a really huge topic, but some of you may have heard of, circadian rhythm. So some of us are early birds, some of us are morning people, some of us are night owls. A lot of creatives tend to be night owls.
So we we we tend to work better at night and we're more creative and more energized.
So this is kind of if you can communicate that to your clients, see if it works with their schedule.
I know there's a time difference as well. Sometimes that might be a benefit to working with your clients. If some of you have you know, there's some brilliant time zones here from London to Canada to America.
These sometimes are a benefit.
So, you know, for example, today, I'm on a Google project. They're based in California.
So I know that what I've sent this morning, they're gonna wake up and see, before you see it already, actually. So you get these beautiful kind of, ways that marry your personality with your client's kind of, expectations and delivery.
Alright. So the third challenge is social and isolation.
We discussed this a little bit with LinkedIn, but going to Slack groups, Discord groups, Facebook groups, you'll be amazed at how you can build, connections by just engaging.
So be someone that comments something specific, rather than just liking the post, say something, message that person, and just see if you can build a community that way online.
One that I love is even a sports app. Going to your local gym, finding a sport you're into, if there's paddle, tennis, football, hockey.
You'll be surprised there's an app sometimes in your local area that organizes games to connect you with other players.
I found that so useful for Barcelona to meet new people and just join in local football games. So, you'll find that in your local gym sometimes, and even check out your local communities at home.
So another way to tackle co social and isolation issues are to challenges rather to join a social club after work and a big fan, a big I'm a big fan of working in coworking spaces.
This is something that you can, there's loads of apps actually for this, but you can get kind of like a pay as you go coworking in your local city.
I believe the one I used in Barcelona was called Krason. I'm not a sponsor of them or anything like that, but this app called Krason allowed me to kind of hop around Barcelona and work at a different co working space every day. That was brilliant to just meet people in their kitchen and talk by the water cooler.
So I would recommend to if you find it difficult to focus at home, go to a co working space.
And if there are no events out there, you have to be someone that can force that and create it. By creating events, you can attract the right people to you. If you do live in a an area where you say, Nick, I can't see any, local video editing groups near me, then maybe start one.
The best way to overcome this is if there's something that doesn't exist, create it. Okay. So on to number four, I'm sure we recognize this gift I've got. I'll put it in there.
This was, I believe, a BBC news reporter who maybe didn't know how to separate work and life balance or just didn't have the things in place. Maybe, I think the nanny comes in after and kinda shuts the door as the other kid comes in.
This is another big topic but it's just about setting boundaries of if you want to separate work life balance, the two arguments are you can separate those and say to your partners, to your families, to your clients, I'm working from nine to six.
I'm out of office, LLO, the rest of that time. And you don't check emails. You don't do anything work related to that at that time.
Another argument, which I like, you may be a fan of Chris Do as well who talks a lot about this with work life integration.
And that's where you kind of co balance and coexist working and life together, and you may be kind of incorporating chores or going to the gym or doing anything that you enjoy kind of tactically within the work.
So during, an example I have here is during a long render in After Effects, maybe it's an hour render if you're doing some heavy three d work. That might be a time to work out.
And I think I'll have a pause off to this slide, Matt, but just to wrap up on the fifth point and the big point today as well. So I hope some of a lot of those these human based issues are so important.
But one of the big technical challenging points that we're coming on to is working remotely used to be so much harder. Even pre pandemic, which, you know, you think four years ago, the position we are in now to do what we do and to work with really heavy four k, five k, eight k files instantaneously is pretty insane. So I'm I'm so grateful to be in this time and in this age to to to do what I do in this career and and for many of us to have access to these tools. But some recommendations I have here are if you wanna schedule calls, you can do something like Calendly.
I think it's pretty new, but I've just started exploring that kind of Google Calendar. You can actually book, people's availability through Google Calendar.
Maybe I'm late to the party, but that that seemed news to me.
Communication, obviously, Slack, Teams, Discord, email. We we know the kind of tools to communicate with our clients.
But collaboration is something that sometimes gets a bit tricky.
We we do have Frame. Io, which I love for for video and for my client reviews.
There's this company called LucidLink. I I guess we'll we'll talk about them at some point today.
Figma is great for kind of design collaboration, and there's a lot of project management tools out there like Notion, ClickUp, Trello, Monday. I'm a huge fan of Notion and ClickUp.
So that's why I manage my client projects, and I just have a whole kind of workflow for how to onboard clients, invoice, track my progress, and bring on team members into that ClickUp space, which I have a whole other master class on actually. So we've I've dived deep deep into that. If you wanna learn more, I can share a link.
So, Matt, before we kinda jump into the next section of just the technical challenges, I could take a question if you feel that there's one ready there.
The the only question thus far in the chat was any advice we could offer about working specifically with Final Cut Pro.
I gave a a quick answer that LucidLink in general is entirely tool agnostic since since it mounts like a conventional hard drive on pretty much any any desktop Mac, Windows, or Linux. So the front end creative application is really unaware of the difference between a local hard drive and LucidLink where the data is stored in the cloud but presents itself like a conventional hard drive.
If there are nuances beyond that in terms of Final Cut Pro, please, direct those questions to the q and a panel.
I think you've nailed it. I I was just to piggyback on that, I would have given the same answer because it which is link is agnostic.
The odd projects I get with Final Cut, bro, and I think it's Jason who answered that, who is a a trainer for Final Cut. We met on on LinkedIn.
I would I I mean, I actually do. I use LucidLink with Final Cut Pro and the combination of just sharing, review links through Frame. Io using their extension.
So exactly the same answer, really. I mean, just using boosted link to manage and store those files and collaborate.
The final cut is is the best way.
Cool. So thank you for your question.
I am speeding through this because I do wanna come into a demo and and allow the kind of time for that and a q and a at the end. So I apologize if I'm speaking too fast.
For those of you on replay, you can watch one point five speed. Let me see quickly.
So we have identified a lot of the challenges with remote working, but what about remote video editing specifically?
So there's a lot of technical challenges that I know I've faced, and I'm sure many of you have as well, which are communication and team collaboration.
So, you know, speaking to to people and and knowing which are the latest files, how do you access those files, things like that.
Hardware limitations.
If you don't have much hard drive space and you work in the video space, especially with kind of four k being the kind of standard now. It's kind of reds get HD projects these days.
That fills up pretty quick, and it gets very expensive.
Another issue I mean, this this still happens to to this day where someone might package up a project, they send it to you, and you have to relink and reorganize everything because it was stored in a different system and a different format.
And no one likes seeing this graphic media offline.
So we wanna avoid that.
So far transfers, we've all been there with slow Internet connection or sometimes just websites that force you to download things for their site, like Google Drive, it over two gig. I I might be wrong. It's forced you to zip that file. And the amount of times I've I've tried to download two hundred gig on g drive from, like, a client project and it just fails halfway, I I can't tell you an example of this happens.
So we wanna avoid that as well. And also version control, just knowing that we're working on the right version for all our projects, and we know that we're not missing anything on the project file or even the actual media we're working with.
And lastly, data security. You wanna make sure that the files we're working with, if it's sensitive or you're on an NDA project, you wanna make sure that those files are secure and there's no kind of security issues there.
So you're thinking, Nick, what what is the fix? You'll keep alluding to all these problems, but, you know, we wanna hear a solution.
So the solution that I've been looking for over years are thinking of the fix needs to be something that has a lot of secure storage and and lots of it.
Like the matrix reference guns, we need lots of guns. This is the storage version of that. We need a lot of terabytes.
We have minimized, downtime for starting projects. So when you get like, client projects for the door, if you're a freelancer, like myself, you wanna make sure you can start that project straight away.
You wanna be able to seamlessly sync files as well so there's less downtime again with uploads and downloads.
You wanna share file space to work with multiple people around the globe, which again is so common now to work in a team on just any given project.
So there's gotta be a way. Right?
So that is where LucidLink comes in. This is the the holy grail, the the solution I've been looking for for years, and it's finally here. It's been here for a few years. And at least I've been using it for the last few years, and it really has changed my whole remote workflow.
So we're gonna go into a very kind of basic overview, and we're gonna go into a demo in a moment just so we get a lot of the kind of terminology rights and and just give you a sense of how it works if you're new to the LoosLink. For those of you that are more experienced, I'll hopefully have some gems for you coming up, which are just kind of some workflow hacks that I've plugged into the LucidLink, and I hope you could benefit from them as well.
So LucidLink is a storage collaboration platform that offers a new way for creative teams to work together on projects in real time without downloading and syncing media locally.
The keywords there are real time and without downloading and syncing media locally. That is mind blowing.
The fact that you can do this on the fly I'm not joking. I'm gonna show you. I'll show you a real example.
So imagine no more proxies.
This, of course, is dependent on your machine and and the projects, but in many, many cases, I rarely ever use proxies now.
No more shipping physical drives, the amount of scooters and mopeds that are saving their petrol. Now thanks to LucidLink.
There's no more downtime downloading files. There's no more file re linking and missing assets. There's no more manually copying files between your computers, especially if you like myself. You work on, say, desktop, like a Mac Pro in this case. And then if I wanna go to a coffee shop or a coworking space, I just pick up right where I left off on that Mac Pro.
So say hello to a cloud based workflow, insanely fast playback, unlimited hard drive space, instant collaboration, accelerated uploads, which are so fast. I can't tell you. And file encryption as well so you again know that your files are secure and safe.
And you get to share files across teams.
So the reason I put the kind of mind blown emoji here is just to show you a quick illustration, which Matt has been really kind to to help out with, which is to illustrate a typical project that you're working on. If we say, for example, you as the editor, which is illustrated by Premiere Pro here, are downloading files from a client that takes two hours.
Let's say you then need to maybe hand that off to a transcriber.
Those two hour downloads become four hours. You've had to download it two hours, They'll have to download it for two hours.
Then maybe you wanna take someone on to maybe do a separate cut. Maybe there's cut downs for this project. Maybe there's a nine by sixteen version.
And then you're getting the point here. Right? Then you have to reversion, subtitle, language, make other cuts for different formats for Netflix or YouTube, whatever it may be. Those seven hours have turned into fourteen hours of pure download time.
And even if those people go away, they've done their transcribing, they've done their reversioning, that time is still wasted. It's still lost. You stripped back the team.
And then if you wanna expand it again and rescale to bring on, a motion graphics artist in this case with after effects, you will then have another two hours.
And just to go through this, you're getting a point. I probably don't need to to go further, but if you have a colorist, then you have to do an audio mix. You can see the ten hours becomes twenty.
Whereas LucidLink is just that one time with zero hours needed.
And the reason is there isn't any downloading needed. If you plug into that worksite or that Filespace rather and someone has shared the files with you, you can access them instantly in the cloud.
It's unbelievable.
So all of this comes down to all of those people connecting and and kind of collaborating with you throughout the project just means that there's zero download hours that used, and that's just one project.
Can you imagine how many hours you'd save over the course of your career?
So this is for me, that that was a win itself, that one feature from LucyLink, which may be gonna not be looked at other solutions and and not look back. And it's just really a real integral part of my post production workflow.
So I'm gonna skip over this just for now just because I think the demo will cover this, but essentially, the reason it works is because it's sourcing one true file, one kind of the source of truth of this is one file that all these other people look into and, whether you're on a shoot, whether you're on location, you're on another computer, it's all referencing the same file whereas something like Dropbox or Google Drive, you kinda have to take that file, save it locally to your computer, and reupload, and LucidLink doesn't work like that. It's very unique in that sense.
So as you've already gathered, this is Lucy Link is for video editors, motion designers, designers, live production colors, VFX artists, animators, anyone creative, anyone that needs a lot of hard drive space and wants to work on the fly.
And as I mentioned, it's able to do this because it's not downloading and uploading a file. I I really had to get my head around this. It is proprietary technology that lets you stream files.
So the way I like to, explain this is imagine like when you click on Netflix and you just wanna view that portion of the film, you wanna jump in twenty minutes. LucidLink kind of does that with your files. It lets you playback that section of the file instantly without any kind of a buffer in and downtime.
So that's such an interesting way to work. You don't have to take everything from the Internet from your download.
You just work with what you need to in real time.
Okay. So I know we're coming on to our demo, but just before jumping into that, I'm gonna give you an overview of just how I use LucidLink and plug it into some of the tools that I use, which are, starting with LucidLink as my my base, my storage, the way I I store all of my files.
I have a tool which is essentially a template for Premiere, After Effects, and Final Cut, which is a project template and filing naming system, an industry standard one that just keeps the same folder structure, for all of my projects. So I know exactly where everything is gonna live no matter the project.
And it also comes with some premier templates and objects templates. So I just double click on it and it all mirrors what you have inside of finder or Windows Explorer.
So that will tie into our video editing editing application, which we're gonna go through. And then I use something called Watchtower, which, I'm a big fan of. I reached out to the to the developer.
It's by a company called Knights of the Editing Table, really cool medieval name. And it allows you to essentially mirror what you have in finder or explorer inside of After Effects or Premiere.
So I'll give you a demo of this as well.
Just to show you how that works in real time.
And then I show all my clients, the final edits and reviews for the effects and grays and things like that in frame IO, which I love as a collaboration school as well. And that plays really nicely with this workflow.
This is something probably for another magic hour, but I thought I just wanted to chuck this slide in here that kind of after the editing's done, it's so important to have an archiving backup workflow as well. So once you've sent your invoice and you're celebrating and and you finish the project, I have a really kind of automated backup system, which, just to give you a quick rundown, my LucidLink files and projects and assets go into, well, I use a software called Carbon Copy Cloner.
Some of you may be familiar with that. It essentially allows you to mirror folders and hard drives automatically.
So with this hard drive here this, this carbon copy finder is looking at LucidLink and then copies that to a physical RAID drive. So I can archive that and have the physical copy.
I actually have another two physical drives that then goes on to down the chain.
But, you know, having at least one or two copies of physical backup is is absolutely a recommendation.
And I also have something called back place, which is a really cool cloud system that essentially backs up my entire computer with unlimited storage automatically in the background continuously.
So if you have the bandwidth, every project I'm working on, if you forget to save or forget to someone to leak your files in the cloud, this will constantly back up your computer in the background.
And if you stick around to the very end, I have a link. I've got discounts to some of these, some of these great software companies and and partners.
Okay. So, Matt, we're gonna jump into the demo. I do realize I'm speaking very fast and running through because I know time is flying by.
But I hope you have time for, a couple quick demos.
Absolutely. And there's been a lot of, good questions in the chat. I'm answering them on the five. So if you see me typing feverishly, that's what's going on.
Oh, brilliant. Excellent.
We will aim to answer as many as we can at the very end.
And what I'm gonna do just at the minute is I'm gonna share my screen with my Zoom content, just so we can see I'm jumping to Premiere. If you guys can let me know if you can see a premier window. Okay?
Might be a select delay on it?
Yes. Indeed. We can see the premier pro window and the LucidLink integrated panel.
Lovely. Good spot on the panel.
So it wouldn't be fair to jump into Premiere without a very, very brief overview. I think there's some amazing content. Some of them that Matt Snyder has done, on his Thursday sessions where there is the whole setup process of something that's very easy to setting up a file space, what's called a file space, which is essentially your LucidLink, almost like a work area. Imagine like a cloud access to see all your files, and you can also, I can get my panel up here on screen.
What you can see here, with with LucidLink open is you have a control panel where you can manage users and see who has different, you know, write position permissions.
So if you have a client that you kind of want them to be able to write files to your user link space. You can give those promotions.
There's some great, videos on there on YouTube, and and I know Matt has pretty got some demos coming up, for how to set that up. So I'm skipping that first step, and we're going to sort of reduce the stuff and and an overview of of this link.
So to give you a quick overview, I'm sorry if it's very small, but, I have some arrows I can point to here.
On my desktop, you'll see something called projects here. And this is it looks exactly like a hard drive that lives on my computer, but with some kind of sorcery that I don't quite understand. Institutional link, are allowing me to see that folder as a hard drive on my computer where I can go in here and see all of my projects in terabytes and terabytes.
What you'll see here actually. I have seventeen terabytes of content. Now projects I've worked on and and portfolio pieces in the cloud.
And I'm seeing that as a hard drive. And what I would love to just demo for you is I'm just showing, I'm just promoting into my my laptop here just to make it a bit neater. Can you see that okay, Matt?
I sure can. It's a tad small, so you may wanna make it slightly bigger.
Okay.
Make sure they'll glitch out here, but I that's where I can hang. Cool.
So just to give you an example, if we look at the right hand side of the screen it was glitching a little bit, so I'm just gonna make it online.
So the right hand of screen is my Nexa MacBook Pro. Right? You can all see that here. This is my MacBook Pro. And on the left here in my desktop that I'm currently working on. We're looking at the same file space here.
And what I'm going to quickly demo for you is I have some files on my desktop with demo content.
I'm gonna drag this whole folder here which is that's only two point seven gig.
If not, I've got another one that's six point three gig. I'll just drag this in for now as a quick demo called stock footage.
And can you see instantly that's showing up on my MacBook Pro, which I'm gonna switch to now.
And if you can see, there's these icons here that are showing that it's loading in.
And if I go through and just, you know, just check, that will come through. There we go. You see all the thumbnails generating?
I appreciate this is on Zoom, so you may not you may see a bit of kind of lag on playback, but this is playing back one hundred percent smooth on my side.
So that this is incredible. What this means is I can work with this content straight away, and I can edit this. And as you can see, I'm scrubbing through. This is just some stock footage.
I have some story blocks, and it is playing that from the cloud instantaneously.
This is pretty crazy. Right? I can work with this without any downloads. I mean, even being too big, that that might have taken, you know, ten minutes on some Internet connections.
That's just been instant.
Nick, if I can interrupt with one quick question. Very smart question here.
One of our guests was asking, which cloud service are you using with your LucidLink files, Filespace?
Good question. Thank you for that. I am better than tell you, I can show you. I currently have wasabi e u west two.
And this is I'm based in Barcelona, so I'm I I probably not too sure if that's the best one for me, but this was one that came as a a recommendation.
So I know that the LucerLink support team are amazing, so they can always advise as well what might be the best, cloud connection for you. But I'm curious where that person, asked that question, where they're based, and I guess that would inform which cloud service they would connect to.
Not sure where they're based, but, perhaps the person who asked the question can throw that in the chat.
Awesome.
Cheers, mate. Thank you.
Okay. So we are back in earlier, and we're gonna do a very brief demo today.
Just to at least show you two main workflow things that we spoke about, which is say, for example, you've you've been given a project and you wanna just start working straight away. And what we have now, we have this stock footage folder that's copied, from my desktop into UCEDD link, which you can see here, put stop footage. I'm just gonna drag this into this demo.
Oh, I actually had it I had it copied from before, but copying against you. Yeah. Instant is.
And you know what? I'm gonna be organized. I'm actually gonna put it inside of media.
There's an empty folder there.
So what I have here is inside of Premier, you can see that I have what is I've described before is project jumpstart which are these mirrored folders here. Can you see that we have assets, we have projects, media, audio, etcetera.
This is mirrored exactly as what I have set up in Premiere.
And the reason for that is this is, a tool I have, which I created is called Project Jumpstart and it's a templated folder structure and premiere project file that when I double click this, this is the folder structure that comes up.
And what's great is I've got all of my subfolders and everything mirrored here as, as you would have it inside of finder.
So with this in mind, if I jump into my stock footage folder that you remember we just copied across.
Just scale this down.
So I can keep the same folder structure that we have here inside of Premiere.
And under my media, if I should just delete this one here, I can copy or import rather into Premiere Pro. And this is really to show you that the Lucy link files that I've just added into Premiere Pro will be something I can work with right away.
And what's amazing is if I just drag this all into a new timeline, there may be some kind of internet buffering but you can see here I'm scrubbing through this content as if I have saved it to a hard drive. And you can see here we have a loose link panel, which is giving me some information that this is two point five gigabytes of content in this sequence.
And, something we haven't even spoken about yet is that this is playing this, by streaming it. But Loosy Link have a very cool feature called pin in. And pinning works to allow you to put this locally on your hard drive, not so much downloading the files.
It it pins it. So it references it on LucidLink, but it saves the file locally to your computer.
A big difference in that compared to something like Dropbox is it allows you to keep that same kind of file structure as well so that there's no more file relinking and there's no more kind of destruction of the original file.
All of our team members are looking at the same source file here.
So everything they have inside of finder, if I pin this by I can right click inside of finder and I can go ahead and click pin.
And another option is I have this solution link panel here where I can click on these cute little dots and I can actually pin all these clips and that will save them locally to my computer. So this is a very quick, demo of kind of integrating Project Jumpstart and LucidLink into Premiere Pro.
And hopefully some of you that are new to this are just blown away by how fast this is.
What I'd like to show you is a second element.
And this is really kind of an overview level, kind of class because I really could go a lot deeper into a lot of kind of tricks here and tips. But to give you a sense of a real project, this is something I'm working on at the moment. I felt like I needed a grading reel. I'm a big fan of making purpose placed reels, especially if you are a hybrid artist. It's so useful to just have a purpose based reel. So I have a lot of this heavy four ks content as you can see like these breakdowns.
A lot of this content is four ks and it's playing back smoothly. And I was just skimming through that but I'm playing it back and there's no lag.
And just to to prove to you, this isn't even pinned.
This is streaming this from LucidLink.
So I'm just revealing in Finder.
You can tell there's no pin icon next to this. This is all coming from LucidLink and playing it directly from the magical cloud of how LucidLink actually do this, how they make this work by streaming these files.
Just to point out though there is this pin here that is half filled up which shows that some clips are pinned.
So there are some files that may have caught up and and, pins to my computer.
But what's great is many of these are just kind of streaming kind of natively from LucidLink, but I do have the power to go into individual bins and see how much is pinned and how much how many gigabytes is this taking up so that I can bring up space or just see if I actually need to keep these pinned or not and and free up precious hard drive space.
So this is a really, kind of quite a basic overview, but to give you a kind of feature set of how cool it is that I can just chuck something in and work with it straight away.
I'd love to take this to the next level if we have time, which I appreciate. We're kind of running into the q and a time if that's okay to go five minutes over or so. I can see Matt nodding over here.
I'm just gonna show you something.
I'm gonna break my show real, with this new project.
So let's say you've got a brand new project here. And just to show you what I've done actually, what I tend to do to tie in a program called Watchtower is I open up my project jumpstart, which are these same folder structure tips that we mentioned where it's like a same, industry file naming that we have inside of finder. And in your case, if you're on a PC in Windows Explorer, Essentially what I do is I delete folders one to six.
And the reason I do that is I use a tool called Watchtower.
And I'm going to show you how this works. This is going to automatically bring in the content that I'm working on in this project. So right here we have my showroom projects here with the same folder structure. You just notice the files, one, two, three, four, ones that we deleted.
I'm going to drag those onto this watchtower panel.
And we'll see a little dialog box pop up, which gives us more kind of in-depth options to label them by colors and, to see if it's an image sequence or anything like that. I'm just going to skip all of that to show you the the impressive part which is what we're seeing now is you might notice on the left hand side as this is coming in.
My media folder has started to import.
And what we're going to notice if I bring back that finder window here, these folders here, as it's just imported in the background, I'm just going to show you that it's gonna bring in the same folder structure. In this case, media, I guess, media then raw then Adidas, All these sub folders and and files within those it's linking them. If you're familiar with what what is a watch folder, essentially it's creating a link between what you have in finder or explorer and matching that and mirroring that with premiere pro.
So the incredible thing with this down the line is, have you ever worked on a project that is just forever scaling and growing and you're always having to download or add in new files to your media folders to work on a project?
Well in this case once this is finished importing this is quite a heavy example I'm showing you still still just ticking away but once it's kind of linked it's so fast. You can see here now the audio is coming through. We've got some stills.
And by the way, this is all on, the remote desk top end. I'm plugged into a LucidLink. We're doing a Zoom so the bandwidth is being tested and it's still working right with LucidLink.
So I've had those folders now come in and I wanna show you something very cool. Once we just dip into those, I'm just gonna make Premiere smaller here.
And the idea with this workflow to save you guys so much time is once you have this all set up now, as we can see mirrored here, if I go into media, raw so for example, let's dig into Adidas, stuff I created. Yeah. There's a few so can you see here? This is playing back, first of all, instantly.
I'm just scrubbing through. But if I play back, without the sound sorry. That might be playing the sound through there. But the idea is this is playing back buttery smooth, and that's a four k heavy file.
This file now, if I go into this folder, so that was Adidas. It was called zedlin e, the first one there.
I'm gonna take, do you remember that stock footage was in the beginning?
Just let's chuck in some group of freelancers into this folder here.
And what we should see is that's now added into my loose link space there. And you can see these icons disappearing that they're ready to go. Straight away. I can that's come from my desktop by the way. So that's that's not going from LucidLink to LucidLink. That's an offline file going into the LucidLink cloud.
And you have an option here to automatically sync or you can just kind of press this manual button here and that kind of tells Watchtower to sync anything that's new inside of finder into Premiere Pro.
And, essentially it will just update anything you change here inside of finder.
This will change that and add it into.
So Nick, if I can interrupt real quickly.
We are at the top of the hour, but we can stay a few extra minutes for those who can and those who would like to stay.
So please proceed. I think we can probably, give this a few extra minutes.
Absolutely. Yeah. I was just, just gonna say that I, I noticed the time there, and I appreciate we're running over.
But this is to give you a sense of these files, which you can see here, that have just come in. So that freelancer file here, there's just, you know, classic freelancer happy people here, showing the digital nomad lifestyle. That's mirrored exactly inside of finder into Premiere Pro and this works for After Effects as well.
So it's a beautiful workflow when you just wanna add in clips into your LucidLink space which goes into project jumpstart or template into Watchtower, which will just sync them automatically.
And you don't need to worry about organizing or managing your files.
So with that said, Matt I am going to come out of this demo which I've sped through and hand the baton back to you for any questions, which I'll I'll actually share I'll share my screen. I actually rather but I'm gonna share my presentation, and I believe we can open the floor to a quick q and a.
Absolutely. And thank you very much, Nick, for that outstanding, presentation. We definitely have a few extra questions and some extra time.
I'll answer this question real quick. Do we have an ETA and LucidLink three point o? We do.
The first iteration of LucidLink, three point o, we are targeting about the October time frame, and then the follow on release to LucidLink three point o will probably come end of December or early q one of next year. So stay tuned. LucidLink three point o is coming, and some of the big highlights for LucidLink three point o are things like, external, link sharing, which a lot of you has been have been asking about.
So that answers that question. And then here's another question. How best to manage used cache in a LucidLink panel?
Nick says four point eight terabytes or five terabyte used. You have Do you have two older projects and unpinned me not sure I follow the question. I think the answer to the question is that the LucidLink cache, in general, programmatically self maintains. So whatever the size is, it will always evacuate the oldest cached data that was least frequented or least last touched, to make room for more cash.
The one exception, of course, is pinning. Pinning by definition means that that data is not evacuated. It's not deleted, when the cache needs to self manage. The limit on the cache size is ten terabytes, and you can pin up to eighty percent or eight terabytes.
Thank you for answering that, Matt. I think it's a much good answer then.
I hope I I hope I answer that, adequately. If not, please, ask a a refinement question.
Absolutely. And I am sorry. I I completely missed out, just a a couple very quick slides that some of the tools I talked about today, I do have, discounts for as well inside of my course, which kind of teaches people about freelancing and how to how to get clients, how to price yourself, how to, where you could connect with other people like yourself where we have a community, and we sometimes offer jobs to people and just help each other out.
So that's part of the course and there's also a summer twenty twenty four discount code if you wanna scan the QR code to get for the jump start for fifty percent off for people watching this stream. So I I just wanted to give something out to some of the people watching today.
Wonderful. Thank you. I have quick note to everybody who is still on.
I threw my email address into the chat. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me, if you have other questions or you would like to follow-up.
Also, I should add that I do a demonstration of LucidLink both on its own and in conjunction with other tools to demonstrate workflows in action every Thursday. So every Thursday, there will be a magic hour session of some kind. As I said in the beginning of our session, we'll have a guest host such as Nick once a month, and then I will be doing demos or a close colleague of workflows in action every Thursday at eleven AM eastern time, New York City time.
My email address is matt dot schneider at lucid link dot com. Again, don't hesitate to reach out if you have any other questions. If you want, to see a demo either independently or as part of the webinar.
If you need to speak to a salesperson, I can definitely connect you with the right people and the right resources. Please don't forget that you can download our free trial. The free trial is fourteen days. Lucid link dot com.
Download the desktop client, create your LucidLink file space, and start to see, why this is a a fundamentally different experience when supporting remote and distributed workflows. Nick, I think we can probably close it out. Anything else from from your perspective?
I just wanna say a huge thank you for for this opportunity to yourself, Matt Schneider, and the team at LucidLink. We've all been so good to me over the years. Just kinda connected and and just helping with any kind of technical questions and just thanks for creating this as well. Like, it's something that is is rare that I've kind of I've partnered with companies on on something I believe in.
But I I really feel like this is gonna enable other people, and I feel like there's other people that should should have known about this for years. When I mentioned it to clients now or to other freelancers and the ones that don't know about it, I kind of I have, like, this brainstorm moment, and I'm like, okay. Let me show you. Let me just show you what it's about.
So I wanna say thank you for everyone for tuning in and that, yeah, I just have the slides up as well. If anyone wants to find out more or has questions about freelancing or or just post production workflows, I love talking about that thing. You can connect with me on LinkedIn as well, with my very complicated name to to pronounce. I can pop in a link actually in in the chat, but, I think that's it. Thank you so much for for bringing me on to the show.
Thank you for joining. I'm delighted you could be here. Excellent presentation.
Really enjoyed it, and thank you everyone for coming. Great questions or really some outstanding questions about LucidLink and Premiere Pro and how this all comes together in a remote workflow context. I see a few familiar names in the, attendee list. Delighted, to see some of you here.
Delighted to see all of you here. Remember, every Thursday, there'll be something as a part of magic hour. Again, either me doing demos or workflows in action or inviting a guest host, such as Nick, once a month. Thank you again for coming.
Hope to see you in the next magic hour, and enjoy the summer.
Thank you, Nick. One.
Bye, guys. Matt. See you.
What are the biggest challenges of remote video editing today? How can you work effectively, be creative, and collaborate seamlessly with your team over distance? When does the "new normal" actually feel normal?
In this master class, Nick Kyriakides will share insights on how video editors everywhere can overcome the common challenges faced by creatives working remotely.
Join our LucidLink Magic Hour to discover how LucidLink helps Nick and countless others streamline their remote workflows today.
