LucidLink vs. Strawberry Skies:
Better Together
Great storage meets smart control: the formula for scaling creative teams.
Post-production has gone cloud-first. Talent works remotely, teams span continents, and “follow the sun” workflows demand equal access from every timezone.
LucidLink solved one problem. It put high-performance cloud storage under your editing tools, anywhere in the world, behaving like a local volume. No latency, no dropped frames. Real-time collaboration. For distributed post-production, that’s a huge breakthrough.
But ask anyone running it at scale and you’ll hear similar concerns. “I couldn’t let 20 editors loose on a LucidLink volume. Projects and content still need management.”
This is where Strawberry Skies comes in.
Great storage isn’t a workflow
LucidLink gives you fast, shared access to files. What it doesn’t give you is a way to manage the people, projects, and metadata sitting on top of those files.
Without that layer, the cracks show fast:
- •Every handoff is a delay. Editors hunt for the right folder instead of cutting.
- •The archive becomes a black hole. If nobody can find old footage, it may as well not exist.
- •Duplication runs wild. Copies pile up, and every wasted gigabyte sits on a metered cloud volume. Every bit of waste is a tax you’re paying for every month.
- •Security gets fuzzy. You can’t protect content you can’t locate.
In the cloud context, storage is a running operational cost. Every duplicate file, every abandoned project, every unmanaged asset compounds on your monthly bill. Waste doesn’t just clutter your volume. It bills you for the privilege.
Where Strawberry Skies starts
Strawberry Skies provides an automated project framework and production asset management tools. Each project becomes a managed workspace: a defined folder structure, assigned assets, the right people, the right permissions. It mounts cleanly, so there’s no guessing where footage lives.
Strawberry complements LucidLink across four areas:
- •Security. Extended SSO through Okta, Azure AD, Google 2FA, LDAP and more. Project-based access control. Rotating LucidLink credentials your users never even see.
- •Control. Team-level storage quotas. Standardized workspace templates. Project archival that gets cold content off your expensive primary tier. Backup of your Filespaces and Archival of old projects.
- •Visibility. Visual search across active and archived material. Automatic proxy creation and metadata extraction. Built-in review and approval.
- •Usability. Adobe Premiere and After Effects panels. Media Composer bin-locking. Drag-and-drop upload. “Find Unmanaged Assets” to catch anything sitting outside a project.
LucidLink moves the bits. Strawberry Skies manages the work. Refer to the comparison table at the end of this article, for a summary of capabilities.
Strawberry Skies empowers LucidLink users to easily locate and use their stored content
Proof in practice
TELUS Studios ran two worlds: LucidLink for current projects, on-prem storage for the archive. Remote archive access meant workarounds and remote desktop gymnastics. Folder structures varied editor to editor. Duplicated footage pushed their cloud storage to 40TB at its peak.
After adopting Strawberry Skies in 2024, the picture changed:
- •A standardized workspace is created automatically for each of the nearly 2,000 projects they deliver every year.
- •Their Monday.com integration spins up a workspace the moment a project status changes — resource planning straight into post.
- •One interface unifies cloud and on-prem, so current and archived content live in one searchable view.
- • Smart tiering with Strawberry Multisite cut primary storage from 40TB to 15TB.
Less waste. Lower spend. No more black-hole archive.
TUI, the leading European travel agency, supports creative teams across multiple countries. They moved their datacenter to AWS to shed real estate, then ran all creative services (video, stills, review and approval…) on LucidLink filespaces managed by Strawberry Skies. The result: collaboration beyond borders, more speed, more resilience, and very happy users.
As Project Manager Süheyl Karakas at TUI put it: “We’re not an IT company, we want off-the-shelf solutions that work. Skies enables us to focus on our core mission: delivering unforgettable holidays.“
Collaborate anywhere
With Strawberry Skies on top of LucidLink, your team works in real time from anywhere : the facility, home, a location shoot, a café. Managed cloud storage handles the heavy lifting, so editors stay focused on the cut.
Review and approval is built in. Like the tool you already use? Keep it. Want to consolidate? Email review links and handle approvals directly inside Skies.
The bottom line
LucidLink provides excellent storage. But storage alone won’t scale your operation. As your team grows, the question stops being “where do we put the files?” and becomes “how do we keep control of them?”
Strawberry Skies answers that, turning a fast cloud volume into a secure, visible, governed production environment. The bits stay fast. The workflow stays sane. And your storage bill stops climbing for no reason.
Better storage, managed properly. That’s better together.
Ready to enhance your unmanaged LucidLink setup with intelligent project and user management?
Connect with us to see how Strawberry Skies in action.
Capability Area
LucidLink
Strawberry Skies
Core function
Cloud-native file streaming that mounts S3/object storage as a local drive, purpose-built for high-performance file access.
Production Asset Management (PAM) with automated project frameworks and workflow tools layered on top of storage.
Storage model
Streams files on-demand from S3-compatible backends (AWS, Azure, Wasabi, etc.) with local write-back caching.
Manages projects on top of LucidLink or other storage; adds smart tiering to move cold content off expensive primary tiers.
File access
Mounts cloud storage as a local volume—editors work in Premiere, Avid, and Resolve without syncing or downloads.
Standardized workspace templates with defined folder structures; drag-and-drop upload; “Find Unmanaged Assets” catches orphaned files.
Syncing & version control
Real-time syncing and file-level version control keep distributed teams working from the same source of truth.
Media Composer bin-locking and templated workspaces prevent version chaos and overwrites at scale.
Security & permissions
Encrypts data in transit and at rest; manages metadata coordination and snapshots with credential-based filespace access.
Extended SSO (Okta, Azure AD, Google 2FA, LDAP); project-based access control; rotating LucidLink credentials editors never see; team-level storage quotas.
Project management & structure
None—storage-only layer; project organization is left entirely to the user.
Automated project creation (e.g., 2,000 workspaces/year at TELUS); Monday.com integration spins up structured workspaces when project status changes.
Collaboration & review
Real-time shared file access from anywhere; bin-locking support for Media Composer.
Built-in review and approval with email review links; Adobe Pr/Ae panels handle approvals directly inside Skies—or swap in your existing tool.
Search & visibility
File-level access only; no metadata or visual search—discovery depends on manual folder navigation.
Visual search across active and archived material; automatic proxy creation and metadata extraction; unified view of cloud and on-prem content.
Archive management
No native archival tiering; all data sits on the same cloud volume at the same cost.
Project archival moves cold content off primary tier; integrates with Pixstor, Ngenea, P5, AWS, and Wasabi for deep archive.
Cost control
Per-member pricing plus storage overage charges; unmanaged duplication compounds monthly bills.
Storage quotas prevent runaway duplication; smart tiering cut TELUS Studios from 40TB to 15TB on primary storage—a 62% reduction.
Integration
Works with any S3-compatible storage backend; Frame.io integration in preview.
Connects to LucidLink, AWS, on-prem NAS, and archive systems; integrates with Monday.com, Adobe Creative Suite, and Avid.
Symbols & terms: SSO = single sign-on; NLE = non-linear editor; DR = disaster recovery; PAM = production asset management.
Published: 16 July 2026