FYI Shade Inc, an alternative to Lucid LInk and Frame IO at the same time, has a Rocky Linux 9.3 friendly client now in addition to their Mac and of course Windows options.
Back in April, a few of us met with their team and while the platform looked promising, Rocky Linux was not supported. Over the past few days, a few of us worked with them to share the ADSK Rocky kickstart for 9.3 so they could get us up and running.
I am personally quite interested in consolidating our tech stack. It feels so dumb to pay one site to host media virtually, download and then upload to another to present, use another to transfer high speed media from one continent to another, and then move it to another platform for long term archival storage. At least I can solve a couple of those hopefully. Kicking the tires with my personal media as we speak.
Might be worth a look if you’re into these types of workflows.
It looks like some of my LucidLink contacts have made their way over there. @randy have you sunsetted LucidLink for Shade Inc? Just wondering if that’s a painful process
oh wait - if you only have one mount point, and it’s in someone’s home directory, but it’s supposed to be a nas, how do you cover identity management and permissions?
@randy@cnoellert Have you guys given this a go? Curious to hear what the performance is like.
There’s a potential upcoming project where I might need to use this or Lucid for just a couple of months but I have experience with neither. The pricing for Shade is far more attractive so it’s tempting to just go with them and see how it is, but if anyone has any real world experience, then it’d be great to hear.
I will add that I’m a little disenchanted with Lucid classic as of late. Each update seems to make things just a tiny bit shittier, but never enough to completely force me off.
Hey @kyleobley It’s pretty good so far. I’m missing some things that FrameIO has like Version Stacking using the API, Custom Ordering, and Dynamic Links. What do you think?
I’m working on converting my FrameIO scripts to work with Shade, but I’ll need to put this project aside for a few weeks at least. If anyone here is using Shade and wants to test this, go for it and let me know what you think. Once it’s installed (ideally to /opt/Autodesk/shared/python/shade) simply launch Flame Main Menu → Shade → Config Editor, enter your API key, and validate it. Next you pick your workspace and you’re good to go. There’s even a little button in the User Settings’ page to help you generate your API key.
Interesting to hear, thanks @john-geehreng. I’ve only just spun it up this week and, so far, only using it in the same manner as Lucid. Next week I’ll start to dig more and see how it’s working with another artist.
Shame about the version stacking, that’s indeed a nice feature in Frame. I don’t have a massive amount of experience with Frame so the dynamic linking is news to me. Have you gotten in touch with their dev team? I’d imagine they’re keen for feedback like that.
What I have found so far is the upload/download speeds are great when using ShadeFS. It maxes out my connection (1gig) so that’s definitely a plus.
I’ll play more in the coming weeks and report back.
Version Stacking works in the UI, but since it’s a new feature it isn’t available in the API just yet. I exchanged emails with someone from their dev team and they are working on that, the other things on my list and more. They have responded really well to my feedback and am sure they would like to hear from more users. Looking forward to hearing how it goes for you next week.
So only 4 days into actually using this and I’ve resorted to ditching it and moving over to Lucid. During the trial days, everything was going super smoothly. Once we really started to use it, things started to go downhill.
The primary issues we noticed were:
Slow, slow, slooooow upload and download speeds. We’re talking KB/s. This was surprising as previously I saw very good upload speeds. No reason why…but everything came to a crawl.
Pinned directories becoming un-pinned and no longer able to be pinned again.
Syncing just seemed to stop (most likely related primarly to #1)
We restarted, mounted and unmounted the filesystem, etc numerous times but come this morning, it just wasn’t doing anything. We couldn’t work at all…so we pivoted. I’m seeing full line speed with Lucid and everything is syncing immediately as expected.
I sent the support person I’ve been in touch with all of our logs to help them figure out what went wrong. Long story shot, the app (on Macos at least) seems to be pretty f’ed and they still have quite some bugs to workout. It’s a shame, I was liking the whole offering.
@kyleobley Oof, that’s rough. We’re mainly looking at it as a potential FrameIO replacement and so far it’s fine. We’re not using the Mac App for anything other than basic organization, so uploading compressed mp4’s has worked well. We’re also not mounting shade drives at this point. I know they’re working on the things on my list, but not being able to version-stack using the API is a deal breaker for us. Any of the Lucid functionality would have been a bonus for us, but until the stuff on my list works, we probably won’t even test heavier file transfers.
Yeah, it’s a shame. The file sharing aspect of it is really handy. Being able to share links and set permissions to either just view/download or contribute/edit without having to create a user and adding them to your team is pretty nice (at least for viewing/download).
What I like about Lucid, beyond it just working, is that the UI gives you feedback about download/upload and pending so you get live feedback about what’s going on. Shade only says how much needs to be synced without any details about what’s happening that moment.
All in all, if they could get the filesystem aspect sorted and the version stacking, it’s a pretty cool product.