Suite File Streaming vs. Shade vs. Lucid Link

Flame Between Renders
1

Hi everybody,

Curious if anyone here has had experience with Suite for collaborative workflows with remote Flamers, etc.?

I was loosely planning on getting into Lucid Link, but my IT guy gave me a note of caution about that, via a report from another Flame shop:

"We have been using Lucid for a while now and it’s been ok. Many of our remote artists are using it. There were a couple times in the last two years it went down, not for long, but too long for a reliable production hub. This week they are undergoing some unannounced maintenance and it left us pretty hobbled for a couple days.

Cartel switched to Suite a couple years ago and loves it. It’s more expensive than lucid but seems more stable, so we are going to give it a try. Seems like they are basically the same type of service, though."

2

Tested Suite. It’s lacking a lot of the grown up tools that Lucid has.

Sounds like your contact is using Wasabi out of Oregon, which you can’t buy anymore anyway as it’s no longer offered for new customers.

The maintenance happening this week on Wasabi / Oregon was scheduled. It’s listed on their support page.

Have.

A.

Backup.

I like Shade. Averages $40/TB ish and has had more development and features released in the last 4 months than Lucid in 3 years.

3

Ah, cool. I’ll look into Shade then. Thanks, Randy.

4

Or build your own

Or have your it guy build your own

Or something

Time them

Make sure you get your moneys worth

Particularly if someone else can do it faster and cheaper

or whatever

5

I have used Lucidlink from the start. It seems much more stable now. That said, I never lost anything on it.

I cache everything from lucid in the flame Framestore for performance and a little redundancy.

I also render EXR from flame to lucid and run a synchronised backup to a local server as well as doing an uncached archive from flame.

Works for me and archives are tiny.

6

I have to mention a bad experience I had with Shade.

I started using it in place of both frame.io and testing out the lucid side of things. Unfortunately I had a Producer at the in house agency I was working with let me know that there sales people had started contacting him rather aggressively directly after this. It got to a point that within 5 minutes of him clicking on a review link, his phone would ring from Shade’s sales team.

At that point the decision was made for me, I couldn’t use them anymore. The e-mail I wrote to their support team about this was never answered.

7

When the joke writes itself: shady business practices have short feet….

8

Holy lol. Thanks for the warning!