When I was at NAB this year, I was there looking for a couple of very specific things. Cloud shared storage was one of them. But attempting to track down anything like this before you go is near impossible. Luckily, I had a meeting set up with a contact I have here in Toronto who I was bouncing ideas off of, and when I mentioned cloud shared storage, he mentioned Suite Studios right away. Now, let’s be honest, cloud editing normally requires a very specific setup that can cost you thousands of dollars a month, and there’s a ton of thought that needs to go into workflows for getting media into the cloud, and that’s not what I’m looking for. I need a cost effective (on the cheaper side), stable way to edit that I can share media across my team, that doesn’t require rocket science to install or maintain. My contact said Suite Studios was exactly what I was looking for, so we headed over to their booth to check them out.
CLOUD STORAGE vs CLOUD EDITORIAL
Now, let’s be 100% clear before we move forward. I wasn’t looking for a place to store files, or share files with other team members. I was looking for a shared, collaborative environment where editors can work on the same files at the same time with as little to no lag as possible. When COVID hit, budgets for high end infrastructure were gone, and a hybrid work-from-anywhere solution was required. Suite Studios promised that, but did they deliver? The demo at NAB was very cool. Drive is mounted on the desktop, 4K files are on it, editorial works very smoothly, all seems good. Now, as we all know, demos are designed to be just that. The absolute best and smoothest process you can have, to entice you to buy. I’ll be honest, I was super impressed based on what I saw, and signed up for the free trial the Thursday after NAB 2025 was done. I have four team members that needed this kind of access, so I wanted to put it to a real world test to see if it would function as promised. Well, it not only worked exactly how it was demoed, but it completely exceeded my expectations in the process. I’m going to walk you through the process, and show you exactly how Suite Studios works, and why it’s perfect for my team.
So, the first thing to keep in mind, much like with any cloud workflow, is that you’re going to need a pretty fast internet connection. To give you an idea, here’s my setup when working with Suite Studios.
I’d call this standard fare internet upload/download speeds for anyone working in post, or who’s a huge gamer (not me anymore, but sometimes). So, how does Suite Studios work? Well, once you’ve signed up for the free trial and downloaded the software, you’ll install Suite Studios and when you launch it, you’re brought to an interface that looks like this:
Now, you know that no one is worrying about anything on the screen except for the button that says “Open Drive”, and once you click it a drive opens.
Well, I guess that’s pretty much it. Plain and simple. If you’re a team member working in Suite Studios, that is really almost everything you need to know. That drive is now connected to whatever team members have access to the Suite Studios account, and they can all share the media that is located on that drive. It’s pretty cool, and pretty simple, but let’s dive a little deeper and see what’s going on under the hood of your Suite Studios drive.
WHAT’S ACTUALLY GOING ON?
STATUS WINDOW
When you launch Suite Studios and are brought to the main STATUS window, you’ll see two very important things that you’ll always need to keep in the back of your head. 1) the drive icon with the green light and the “CONNECTED” wordmark in the upper right corner, and 2) the “ACTIVE” with drive size icon in the lower left of the interface. Green means good to go. Your Suite Studios drive is in good working order, and there’s nothing that needs your attention.
If the icon was to turn yellow, it would mean that Suite Studios is doing something like uploading files to the share. Keep in mind, you can still work with the file locally, and once the upload is done, the interface would turn green again, meaning that your entire team has access to it now.
If, for some reason, your file upload was to fail, or there was some kind of issue (loss of internet, etc), your Suite Studios drive would turn red, and you’d be able to get more information about why the failure occurred.
I’ve been working with Suite Studios since NAB 2025, and haven’t had one issue where the drive turned red on me, so that’s a great thing! Normally, I put the Suite Studios window on another monitor, just so that I can see the nice green glow out of the corner of my eyes. Also, since you are billed per TB that you use ($75USD/TB), it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on your usage in the lower left of the interface, as you don’t want to be using Suite Studios as your personal dumping ground, or you’ll end up getting a massive bill at the end of the month. I’m going to skip over the next two options, Time Machine and Cache Settings, as I want to talk about Team Settings first.
TEAM SETTINGS
The whole point of Suite Studios is collaboration in the cloud. You’ll have to decide what you want your users to have access to. You might have a small team of 5 users, or a huge team of 50 users, and assigning permissions to single users is fine on small teams, but building groups and mass assigning permissions is more ideal. That’s where your Team Settings come into play. When clicked on, your Team Settings are broken up into two categories. Users and Groups. With each Suite Studios account, five users can access the cloud storage, with each additional user costing $10 USD. To add users is pretty simple. Just click “+Add Team Member”, enter their details, and they’ll receive an invitation to join. You can also decide (at this point), whether you want them to be an administrator or not. Administrators have the ability to add users, access billing, and assign permissions to users. Once you’ve on-boarded a user, you can assign them the ability to provide up/download links, as well as decide exactly what they are able to access. Do you have a producer that you want to give access to, but only let them have access to a folder in Suite Studios called “Approvals”, or maybe you want to give an editor access to a “Projects” and “Media” folder. This is where you do that. The difference between “USERS” and “GROUPS” is that you can assign a bunch of users to a group, and then mass assign permissions to them, to make your life much easier!
TIME MACHINE
Ah yes, the age old question….”I ACCIDENTILY DELETED SOMETHING FROM MY SUITE STUDIOS CLOUD STORAGE….IS IT GONE FOREVER????“. The answer here is simply, NO! Suite Studios has a feature called “TIME MACHINE” that lets you mount an image of your Suite Studio drive from up to seven days in the past, and access all the content you had at that time, so if you’ve deleted something by accident, you can always get it back with Suite!
CACHE SETTINGS
Alright, before we talk about how external users are going to get media to and from you. We need to talk about Caching, as it’s an important feature inside of Suite Studios, to keep your media playing back in real time. We all know what caching is, but let’s talk about how it works inside of Suite Studios. The problem with the internet is that there will be times where the internet can’t keep up with your media or, a perfect example is that if you’re like me, there will be times where you want to play back 10 streams of low quality 720p 23.976 media in a DaVinci Resolve multi-cam timeline (wow, that was pretty specific). The cloud is awesome, but that’s a lot of bandwidth required to playback that timeline. That’s one example. Maybe you’re at Everest Base Camp, and the internet is sketchy at best. That’s another example (well, maybe not Everest Base Camp, but maybe on an island working on “Popular Reality Show”). That’s where Suite Studios’ caching comes into play.
Suites’ “On-Demand” cache is built with performance in mind. Instead of saving entire files like some cloud-based systems do, it focuses on storing just the most important, recently accessed bits of data. That means it only keeps the pieces you actually need in the moment, helping everything run smoother and more efficiently. Very nice! This approach really pays off when you’re working with large or complex files and timelines (like the multicam example I used above). By having Suite Studios only cache the essential data and not the whole thing, Suite helps reduce the chances of lag which for me has been very unnoticable (and I’ve been working with UHD content in Resolve). Even better, the On-Demand cache takes care of itself. It’s a “set it and forget” it type of thing. It automatically clears out old or unused cached data to make room for what’s needed now—no manual cleanup required. You can simply set it and forget it, knowing Suite is quietly managing everything in the background so you can stay focused on your work.
With the above said, there are times where I need Suite Studios to cache something specific, whether it’s a specific file, or an entire folder of files, and you can easily do that by pre-caching items, available as a simple addition at the bottom of the caching window. Suite Studios also gives you a visual look at what is being cached at any given time. Very nice!
HOW DOES THE OUTSIDE WORLD ACCESS YOUR SUITE STUDIOS DRIVE?
So, the fact that Suite Studios functions exactly like a hard drive and is shareable across your team is very impressive but, there’s a larger issue here. What happens when someone that’s outside your circle either needs to upload a file to you, or download a file from you? Well, that’s where the External Transfer function comes into play.
EXTERNAL TRANSFER
At the bottom of the Suite interface, you’ll notice that you have the option for “External Transfer” (you’ll also notice that it’s still in beta, but I’ll be honest, I haven’t had any issues with it so far, so I’m not overly concerned writing about it). It’s the only way that an “outsider” (someone outside the circle of trust), can have any kind of access to your closed environment. First, you have to decide if you need to have files uploaded to you, or have a client download files from your Suite Studios drive.
In the first example, we’ll set up an upload folder for the client, simply called “Upload”. Once I’ve created it in my Suite Studios drive, I’ll click on the “+New Upload Link” button, and am now greeted by many more options. Let’s break them down.
First, you’ll have to enter a link name and password for your client to use. Then, you’ll want to select an expiration date for your uploader, and the destination location they will be uploading to. What’s important to keep in mind is that they won’t actually know the folder hierarchy on your Suite Studios drive. If you’re waiting for them to upload some camera cards, you can create a folder in your project folder called “Camera Cards” or something like that, and they can upload into subfolders of subfolders, so the files end up in the exact spot you expect them to. Once you’re ready, you can simply press “Create Link”. You’ll now see all the folders that you have given upload access to, you can manage them (reset the passwords if necessary), and get links to download from here as well.
Now, this does beg the question, how does the client actually use this information to upload files? Well, Suite Studios did provide a link to the folder, and when used, they will be greeted by a website that will look like this:
The client/uploader will need to download Suite Connect to actually Upload or Download content from your Suite Studios drive. Once downloaded, and installed (either for Mac or Windows), you’ll be greeted by this window, prompting you to enter your provided URL link and password (which is what we made two steps ago).
Once entered correctly, you are brought to the uploader that shows which active links you have (on the left), but the ability to upload not only individual files, but folders as well. You can set up an upload queue if you want to upload as much content as necessary. Keep in mind, though, that once you select the files/folders, they’ll start uploading immediately.
Alright, so that’s uploading to Suite Studios for clients and uploaders. What about downloading? Well, once you select the “Download” button, assuming you’re just getting rolling with Suite Studios, the window will be empty, so simply hit the “+New Download Link”, and you’ll be brought to a window, almost exactly like the uploader, where you’ll need to enter the link’s name and password, the expiration date, and whether you want to make files or folders accessible for download.
Process is now exactly the same for download as it was for upload. Simply copy the link and send it and the PW to your client/downloader. They’ll download Suite Connect on their system, log in with the link and PW, and they’ll now see the file(s) that were made available for them to download. They can now simply hit “Download” and they’re all set to go.
Pretty quick, pretty simple and I’m really digging the Suite connect app, which is easy to use. The only thing that it needs is the ability to stop or delete an upload if I realize that I’ve uploaded the incorrect files. That would be super helpful, but it’s still in beta, so let’s see where the Suite Studios team goes with it!
With all of that said, Suite is not without its “issues”. It works exactly the same on Mac and Windows, however keep in mind that Suite Studios on Windows opens via a drive letter (Z:\) and as a network drive on Mac, meaning that any footage location on Windows won’t translate to Mac. It’s not a big deal if you’re working in different applications, but if you have Windows and Mac users working in a shared DaVinci Resolve database environment, when you open a project edited in either a Mac or Windows environment, you’ll have to relink your media, as the system will be looking for it in either the Windows or Mac hierarchy.
I was impressed with Suite Studios when I saw them at NAB and, though a little skeptical, was completely blown away when I actually put it to the test in a production environment. Every aspect of it has exceed my expectations from the performance to the price to the external file upload and downloads. It’s cost, at $75/TB & performance makes it easily one of the best new products I’ve used in a LONG time. For more information, or to give Studio Studios a spin, check them out at here!