How Cloud Storage is Changing The Face Of Post-Production – And Why You Don’t Want to Fall Behind
Let’s be honest, post-production used to be a nightmare.
Endless stacks of USB hard drives, painfully slow file transfers, off-line on-line workflows , relinking media and that constant sinking feeling when you can’t find the footage you need. Every editor, producer, and creative pro has been there, asking, “Where did I save that file?” or “Why is this transfer taking forever?” The whole process has been clunky, stressful, and way more work than it should be.
But here’s the good news: cloud-based storage is changing everything
Not just any cloud solution, but one that’s built specifically for media professionals. That’s where EditShare FLEX comes in. Unlike generic cloud storage, FLEX is designed to handle high-resolution media, multi-user collaboration, and even remote editing. If you’re still stuck using outdated storage methods, you’re making things harder on yourself. It’s time to upgrade your workflow and free up your creative energy
Is Your Workflow Slowing You Down? Here’s Why It Might Be Time for a Change
Moving to cloud storage isn’t just about making life easier, it’s about getting rid of the roadblocks that slow down your work. Here’s why sticking to traditional methods might be holding you back:
Searching for Files Shouldn’t Feel Like a Wild Goose Chase
When your media is scattered across multiple hard drives and local storage, finding the right file can feel like digging through a haystack. It’s frustrating, time consuming, and completely unnecessary.
With EditShare’s EFS, everything is in one place organized in mediaspaces, easy to find, and instantly accessible (subject to permissions!), whether you’re at the studio or working remotely. No more wasted time. Just stress-free editing
Waiting for transfers wastes time and money
Large file transfers have long been the bane of post-production workflows. Traditional FTP, email attachments, and even some basic cloud solutions simply aren’t designed for massive media files. EditShare FLOW automation optimizes your transfers, ensuring that large files are sent, received, and accessible.
Collaboration should be simple, not stressful
When multiple editors, VFX artists, and producers are working on the same project, versioning nightmares are all too common. Who has the latest cut? Did someone accidentally overwrite the master file? With EditShare’s cloud-enabled collaboration, everyone is working from a single, centralized source of truth, no confusion, no lost work, and no last-minute panic.
How EditShare Future-Proofs Your Workflow
With FLEX, powered by EditShare EFS and FLOW, you’re not just moving to the cloud—you’re upgrading every part of your post-production workflow. Here’s what that looks like in action:
Work from Anywhere Whether you’re in the studio, at home, or on set, your team has secure, real-time access to all media assets. No more waiting, no more limitations—just seamless collaboration.
Storage That Grows With You Forget about running out of space. FLEX cloud storage scales with your needs, so you’ll never have to scramble for extra storage again.
Collaboration FLEX integrates directly with Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Avid Media Composer, letting you edit straight from the cloud without worrying about local storage.
Power When You Need It Spin up high-performance workstations whenever you need them and spin them down when you don’t, so you’re never paying for more than you use.
Smart, Secure, and Reliable Automatic backups, role-based permissions, and MediaSpace projects keep your files safe and accessible only to the right people.
With FLEX, you’re not just storing files, you’re streamlining your entire workflow and making post-production faster, easier, and more efficient.
The Industry is Moving Forward, Are You?
Sticking to outdated storage isn’t just frustrating, it’s slowing you down. Teams using cloud-based workflows work faster, collaborate better, and avoid unnecessary headaches.
With EditShare, you’re always ahead. No lost files, no long waits, no versioning chaos, just a smooth, efficient workflow.
The future of post-production is here. Ready to make the leap?
System designed and installed by EditShare’s Partner Jigsaw24 Media
Overview
Intermission Film is an award-winning marketing agency for film and television, handling trailers, titles, social content and print work for hits like Baby Reindeer, Black Doves, Skeleton Crew and recent Oscar nominees A Real Pain and Maria. With offices on three continents all working together to deliver Clio and Golder Trailer Award-winning content for clients who don’t like to be kept waiting, a joined-up storage workflow is key to their success.
“When I joined Intermission, each of the global offices was busy, but they were very siloed,” explains Ben Cryer, Intermission’s Group Operations Director. “But as we started getting more work from bigger studios, we had to become much more 24/7 in our approach. When you’re working with a studio in LA and they’re on deadline, they don’t care about time zones, so we needed a system that would allow the team in Australia to jump on to a project when the team in London finished for the day. That meant we needed much better collaboration and connectivity. At the same time, our existing Avid NEXIS storage needed replacing with something newer and bigger.”
The team considered a straightforward Avid expansion, but having added Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve seats to their editorial workflow they wanted something which, as Group Post-Production Engineer Kat Earles puts it, “would work with the way our company was growing, and make sure that no matter the software people were using, they could access secure storage at a larger scale.”
A switched-on storage partner
Enter Jigsaw24 Media. Having worked with Kat on previous projects at other facilities, they were brought on board to advise on a storage setup that could handle Intermission’s fast pace of growth and demand for a globally joined-up workforce. Their recommendation? EditShare’s EFS storage with built in FLOWworkflow management tools.
“Talking to Jigsaw24 Media and EditShare, it was very clear that EFS storage was a constantly evolving piece of kit from a company who were very switched on the more global, multi-site sort of solution that companies like us need, and who were bringing new ideas and new ways of working to the table,” Ben explains.
“The additional features of FLOW were really interesting to us because they meant we could work more closely with our wider post-production team,” Kat adds. Things like the review and approval features built into EditShare ONE mean that the storage isn’t a standalone thing, it integrates with other processes and allows us to cut costs by reducing the number of additional platforms we have to use.”
Ben Cryer – Operations Director, Intermission’s Group
Connecting global offices
Working with the Jigsaw24 Media team, Intermission began their transition to EditShare by setting up two EFS servers in their London office: one to act as a hub for video workflows, the other to handle print work and project documentation that needed to be accessed by all team members globally.
This streamlined approach to media management was particularly important to Intermission, who are operating a rapidly-expanding global business with a very small ops team who have to handle everything from innovation to support for multiple territories.
To help keep their IT estate to a manageable size and complexity, Jigsaw24 adited Intermission’s systems and recommended a series of simplifications, including consolidating all their remote access workflows into the user-friendly platform Parsec, automating archiving processes through Archiware and bringing their Mac estate under centralised control with Jamf device management. In order to keep things low-touch for Intermission’s busy team, their team handle licence management for these services, plus the company’s Avid estate.
Once the new workflow was established in London, an engineer was sent to Amsterdam to install and test EditShare at their offices there. “Having a partner like Jigsaw24 Media takes a big weight off my shoulders for projects like the Amsterdam deployment, because they’re able to give us that support on an international basis,” says Kat. “I’d actually just had surgery right before the install, so it was great knowing there was someone on the ground to handle things and I didn’t have to worry about it.”
“Knowing we’ve got someone at the end of the phone who can help us if the wheels come off is important,” agrees Ben. “Particularly the fact that it’s someone who has been involved since the beginning, knows our setup and knows what we’re trying to achieve. If I call Jigsaw24 Media, there’s no-one asking ‘okay, how is that configured?’ they already know. And that makes the whole problem-solving piece that much easier.”
”The whole relationship feels very collaborative; we’re able to meet regularly and let the team know what we’re working on and what we want to achieve, and they can come up with solutions that are suited to our way of working rather than trying to fit us into the mould of a big post house.”
Ben Cryer, Group Operations Director, Intermission
“We can look to the future”
“Our ultimate goal is to have EditShare in every office globally and an independent FLOW server in London that everyone will access via a DMZ [de-militarised zone],” says Kat. “Obviously that’s a big outlay so we’re not moving every office at once, but there’s been a lot of positive momentum and people want to change,” says Kat.
“We’re growing quickly, and because of how responsive EditShare and Jigsaw24 Media are, we’re able to set things up and change things as we go, which we wouldn’t have been able to do with our previous infrastructure, and they’re constantly releasing new types of storage and software features that give us more options,” says Kat. “We can look to the future and trust that we have storage that will work with us.”
EditShare is an Emmy Award-winning technology leader, supporting storytellers through collaborative media workflows across on-premise, cloud and hybrid architectures. It offers scalable storage and collaboration for media businesses and at every stage of the video production process from storyboarding to screening.
The software is inherently open, encouraging workflow collaboration, third-party integrations and content sharing across the entire production chain. Where required, the software is backed by high performance, high availability designed specifically for the demands of media storage, management and delivery. The comprehensive offering covers multi-level content storage for production and post, along with innovative asset and workflow management software, plus specialized and highly valued tools for content review and distribution, the creation of customized and branded pitch reels, and secure preview of high-value pre-release content.
About Jigsaw24 Media
Jigsaw24 Media is a specialist division of Jigsaw24 and provides services and technology solutions to the media and entertainment, education and corporate sectors. It’s the only UK-based company of its kind that has in-house system integration capabilities. Jigsaw24 Media’s team of industry-recognised experts design, deliver, integrate and support end-to-end solutions for some of the nation’s biggest broadcasters and facilities, underpinned by partnerships with over 30 leading technology vendors including Avid, Adobe, AWS, Nutanix and EditShare. With headquarters in Nottingham, an office and demo space at the heart of London’s post-production community, and a nationwide support team, Jigsaw24 Media provides local services on a national scale. For more information visit https://media.jigsaw24.com/
Press Contact Katharine Guy katharine.guy@editshare.com
One thing I see a lot in my line of work is a lot of talented, creative, and passionate people being forced to do really menial tasks in order to start the edit or start the production. Right? A lot of MAM companies will promise you the world when it comes to automating away these menial tasks, but usually there’s a pretty hefty price tag and a lengthy professional services process to get through. One of EditShare’s most exciting products actually remedies that.
Let me show you three things you can automate today using FLOW Automation.
QC Quarantine Automation
This first one I like to call the QC quarantine. This automation allows you to set up a watch folder for an ingest path. Anything that hits that watch folder immediately gets sent over to a QC server, something like Baton or QScan.
If it passes, we copy it into the proper media folder, and then we set the metadata to show that it passed at a certain date and time. If it fails, we move it into a quarantine media space that’s only accessible by one user, in this case, patient zero.
We send a notification email to patient zero saying there are clips waiting for you in the quarantine folder. Patient zero can now manually look over these clips that failed QC and determine what to do next.
This cuts down significantly on the per asset QC time because rather than you having to manually upload them or upload them to the QC server, they already live on the EditShare and proxies are being generated in the background during this QC process. Plus, there’s no way for editors to accidentally use assets that failed the QC check.
Mezzanine Automation
The next automation is a mezzanine automation. Oftentimes, you’re gonna be working with footage from multiple different cameras as well as graphics packages. All of these are gonna be different codecs at varying bit rates, and it’s gonna make it really difficult for you as an admin or a media manager to predict how the system is going to handle X number of editors on the system. This works by immediately taking any assets that are dropped into the ingest folder and transcoding them into a house mezzanine codec.
This is usually a codec that is in line with your absolute highest res spec for output. Once that transcode is done, it takes the original footage and moves it up to a cloud archive so that you always have access to it. And it also preserves the original file path in case you’re using something like a Sony camera with a really important file path structure. The new transcoded footage goes to the media folder that the editors will access for their actual projects.
And if this transcode fails because of some exotic codec, it actually sends an email to IT or the admin of the EditShare server to take a look at it and see what went wrong.
Metadata Trigger Automation
This last one is great if you need to organize a package of assets to send off to a remote contractor somewhere to download and edit. It starts with a metadata trigger, so we can take all of the assets we wanna send and say push to MediaSilo. Once that’s triggered, it transcodes to an .mp4 that’s a little lighter weight and easier to transfer. Then it runs a metadata check to see if that asset is confidential or not.
If it is confidential, then it sends a notification email to your security team saying that someone tried to upload confidential assets. It also notifies the original uploader, although this is optional. If it’s a green light and there are no confidential assets, we push it up to MediaSilo, and then we update the metadata on the clip in FLOW to say this was uploaded to MediaSilo on this date and time.
As you can see, these three automations alone could save dozens of working hours on your team every week, and you can make and adjust these at your leisure rather than having to call someone like me.
Ensuring Your Pre-Release Content Gets Reviewed on Time
Building a Better Reviewer Experience
At Screeners.com, we believe that great content deserves timely coverage. Yet, for many creators, studios, and networks, one question consistently comes up:
“How can I be sure that the press actually watches and reviews my pre-release content on time?”
The truth is, getting the content into reviewers’ hands is only half the battle. The other half is making sure it stands out in a crowded queue of screeners, stays top-of-mind, and is easy to access and review before those crucial deadlines pass.
What We Heard: The Challenges Reviewers Face
As we dug into the challenges press reviewers face, three key pain points came up again and again:
1. “Sometimes I forget what’s expiring—I miss it, and that’s it.”
Challenge: Reviewers juggle multiple deadlines, often losing track of what’s expiring soon.
Impact: Missing the expiration window means missing coverage opportunities, undermining release strategies.
2. “I’m swamped. It’s hard to stay on top of what I’ve watched and what I haven’t.”
Challenge: With numerous screeners coming in, reviewers struggle to track progress and prioritize effectively.
Impact: Content gets lost in the shuffle, delaying or preventing reviews altogether.
3. “Some platforms are just clunky. If it’s hard to use, I’ll skip it.”
Challenge: Reviewers want to focus on content, not wrestle with a frustrating UI.
Impact: Clunky navigation reduces engagement and increases the chance content won’t get reviewed.
What We Built: Unveiling the Press Reviewer Dashboard
A successful screening experience starts with eliminating the obstacles that slow reviewers down. Instead of wasting time navigating clunky platforms or hunting for content, reviewers should be able to focus on what really matters—watching and critiquing films and shows. That’s why we created the Press Reviewer Dashboard, a re-designed review interface that simplifies the screening process from start to finish.
The new dashboard organizes content dynamically, surfacing what’s most relevant to each reviewer—whether it’s new screeners, in-progress titles, or expiring content that needs urgent attention. With an interface that feels familiar to industry-leading OTT platforms, the new dashboard ensures a smooth, intuitive experience. A streamlined navigation system makes it easy to find content without unnecessary clicks, while personalized watchlist functionality allows reviewers to effortlessly organize their workflows by saving the screeners they plan to watch to one place.
By eliminating the guesswork of what to watch next and making it effortless to keep up with deadlines, the Press Reviewer Dashboard transforms the pre-release screening process into a seamless experience. Below, we break down exactly how each challenge has been addressed and what makes this new experience different from the status quo.
The Ask
How it Shows Up Today
What We Built
I waste too much time searching for the content I have to review.
Reviewers spend valuable time navigating a fragmented landscape of screening links, emails, and various tools, making it difficult to efficiently surface and prioritize the content they need to review.
Personalized Dashboard:A redesigned reviewer interface familiar to industry-leading OTT platforms, surfacing relevant content faster reducing friction in the review process.
I keep losing track of my watch progress.
Reviewers rely on manual tracking methods (spreadsheets, notes) to keep track of what they’ve watched, increasing the risk of missed deadlines.
A Continue Watching section that allows reviewers to pick up where they left off and track their viewing history effortlessly, plus clear indication in the UI helps reviewers determine at-a-glance what they’ve started versus what needs to be reviewed.
I need to know when content’s expiring before it’s too late.
Reviewers often lose track of content expiration windows, leading to missed opportunities for timely coverage.
Ability to browse content by an Expiring Soon category that highlights content approaching its expiration date, helping reviewers manage their time effectively.
There’s no easy way to organize the content I need to watch.
Many platforms don’t allow reviewers to bookmark content, forcing them to search for titles repeatedly or rely on external tracking methods.
Add to Watchlist functionality allows reviewers to bookmark content for later, empowering them to organize their workflows efficiently.
Reviewing isn’t just watching—it’s choosing what matters, hitting deadlines, and keeping track of what’s next. The Press Reviewer Dashboard clears the path. See what’s expiring soon. Pick up where you left off. Save what you plan to watch—all in one place. No digging. No second-guessing. Just a faster way to get through what matters. The dashboard’s live: check it out.
Storage systems don’t fail overnight. They wear down, slow down, and eventually, they stop keeping up with your workflow. The tricky part is recognizing when that tipping point is near.
Maybe you’re noticing that issues are becoming more frequent. Maybe your team doesn’t trust the system enough to work at full speed. Or maybe you’re just hoping that nothing critical fails before you can budget for an upgrade.
The challenge isn’t just dealing with aging hardware—it’s knowing when “good enough” isn’t actually good enough anymore. So, how do you know it’s time for a refresh?
Regardless of which shared storage solution you use (EditShare’s or someone else’s), this is our take on the key signs to watch for, the questions you should be asking, and how to think about when it’s time to refresh your system.
What Happens to a Storage System After 5-7 Years?
It’s not just about age—it’s about workload. A production storage system isn’t just sitting there. It’s constantly reading, writing, rewriting, fragmenting, and filling up with massive files. And after 5-7 years, a few things start happening:
1. The Hardware Wears Down (And Becomes a Bigger Risk)
Storage systems aren’t built to last forever. Drives spin millions of times, SSDs wear out, and cooling fans run 24/7. Eventually:
Drives start failing. Even enterprise-grade HDDs have a finite lifespan, and after years of non-stop use, failure rates start to climb. The real risk isn’t just one drive failing—it’s multiple failures happening too close together, putting your media at risk.
RAID protection isn’t bulletproof. Most systems ship with RAID 6, which can tolerate two failed drives. But when a drive fails, it takes time to rebuild, and during that time, the system is vulnerable. If another drive fails mid-rebuild, data loss is a real possibility.
Rebuilds stress the system. The very process of recovering from a failed drive puts extra strain on the remaining disks, making cascading failures even more likely.
Think about it like a car that’s been idling for years without ever turning off. At some point, parts start wearing out. And the older it gets, the harder it is to find replacements. That brings us to the next issue…
2. Performance can potentially drop (Even If You Haven’t Noticed Yet)
At first, the slowdown is subtle. Then one day, you realize renders are taking twice as long. Here’s why:
File fragmentation increases. Video files aren’t small. Over time, data gets scattered across drives, making read/write speeds slower.
Capacity gets tighter. Running at 80-90% storage usage? That alone can slow performance by 50% or more.
New formats push old systems past their limits. Your storage was built for yesterday’s workflows. Today, it’s handling higher resolutions, heavier codecs, and larger files than it was ever designed for.
Software moves faster than hardware. Your system may technically still run, but much like a 7-year-old phone trying to run the latest OS, performance drops as software evolves beyond what your hardware was built to handle.
Bottom line: If your team is fighting dropped frames, sluggish exports, and unexpected slowdowns, your system isn’t keeping up.
3. You’re Probably Out of Support (And That’s a Risk You Don’t Want to Take)
Most storage systems have a support lifecycle. Once you’re past that window:
No more firmware updates. Security vulnerabilities pile up.
No guaranteed replacement parts. Older systems rely on components that may no longer be available.
No vendor support if things go sideways. At some point, you’re on your own.
And even if your system technically can run the latest software, newer features and updates are designed to perform best on newer hardware. The result? A system that once felt “screaming fast” starts feeling sluggish and outdated.
So How Do You Know It’s Time to Refresh?
It’s usually not one big thing—it’s a series of little frustrations that add up. Here’s what to watch for:
1. The Work Feels Slower
Video production isn’t just about skill – it’s about momentum. The best teams move fast – ideas flow, cuts come together, the energy is high. But old, slowing systems can easily kill momentum.
Like any form of electronic storage, media spaces can become overloaded, especially when they become a “dumping ground.” Millions of objects relegated to a project can make bootup, searching, and waiting for screens to load slower and more frustrating.
If your colorist spends more time fighting dropped frames than actually grading, your system is slowing you down.
If your render queue has turned into an overnight hostage situation, your system is slowing you down.
Unfortunately, this situation rarely improves on its own. Cameras aren’t getting less powerful. Files aren’t getting smaller. If your system is already limping, it’s not going to miraculously keep up with next year’s workflows.
2. When Downtime Becomes “Normal” (And the Bigger Problems You Don’t See)
Every production team has dealt with a crash at the worst possible moment. It happens. But when slowdowns, dropped frames, and storage bottlenecks stop being a rare annoyance and start feeling like part of the job, that’s when you have a real problem.
When your team saves after every small change because they don’t trust the system to hold up.
When “try restarting it” is the first response to any hiccup.
When a simple export means crossing fingers and hoping for the best.
3. When Your System Stops Fitting the Way You Work
It’s easy to think of a system refresh as a “nice to have”—until one day you realize your setup is actively making things harder instead of easier.
Your storage architecture was built for on-prem workflows, but half of your team is remote now.
Your editors keep running out of space because the system wasn’t designed for today’s file sizes.
Your infrastructure was optimized for HD, but you’re working in 4K and beyond—and it’s showing.
The Risk No One Talks About: Team Morale is Built on What You Tolerate
Nobody’s walking out the door just because you stretched your storage system another year. But every decision you make about your tech stack sends a message—whether you mean it to or not.
If the system is slow, unreliable, and frustrating—and everyone knows it—what does it say when leadership shrugs and moves on?
At the end of the day, you encourage what you tolerate.
Keep tolerating lag, breakdowns, and workarounds, and you’ll get more of them.
The only question is: How much longer are you willing to put up with it?
