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."
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.
I made a streaming server that work for my cases.It runs on my old x60 IBM ThinkPad.
Using Cloudflare, it is accessable from anywhere in the world. Multi-User, Multi-formats, Shows resolution / exact timecode / codec. HLS can be switched of by any Admin User. And Client can point to any frame-> Send Frame with TC via Email/Messenger/Telegram with his comments.
If there is any Interest, I can adapt it. Cheers, Xteve
I’m the CEO and co-founder of Shade, and I’m really sorry this was your experience. I want to make it right.
First, your email should have been answered, and it wasn’t. That’s on us. I found it and just replied personally with my phone number in case you’re open to a call.
I also want to be transparent about what happened. Back in May, we didn’t have any prospecting tools set up at all. Even now, the only signals we look at come from people visiting our website, shade.inc. We don’t track any activity in app.shade.inc or on sharing links.
We reach out to a lot of people in the media space who we think could benefit from Shade, and your producer was contacted because he works in the industry, not because of any connection to your workspace. It was a truly unfortunate coincidence, though I know the timing made it feel a whole lot worse. Our outreach also should never have come across as aggressive, and I’m sorry it put you in an awkward spot with someone you work with.
For what it’s worth, since then we’ve built a dedicated success team for both enterprise and growth accounts. We want every Shade customer to have a real person to talk to (if they’d like one) to share feedback, ideas, and features they want to see.
We’re genuinely trying to bring a human element to this space, and we fell short with you. I’d love to connect if you’re up for it.
I had a good conversation with Brandon, it does indeed seem that what happened was an unfortunate confluence of events, use of the product timed with a big sales push.
I will say there are not too many products I’ve used where the founder or CEO takes this level of personal interest. He owned the mistake on my support email not being answered.
Evaluate the product for yourself, this hiccup aside, I was definitely finding it solid and useful!
