you're looking to buy a nas or you already have a nas or you are just looking for some tips and some ideas with working with remote video editors or a remote creative team of honestly any kind i think this is going to help you so it's going to be very like information dense no fancy b-roll [Music] hey i said no fancy b-roll okay so let's get into it let's get into the problem holy smokes g drive i have been using it um more than ever when it comes to working with a remote editor honestly it's been a big pain point that i really haven't figured out and to be honest with you i haven't successfully hired a video editor for this youtube channel in my entire career as a youtuber i am super controlling when it comes to the edit because that's my thing video editing hey if my youtube channel got wiped off the face of the earth tomorrow while i would just go back to yeah producing videos and editing videos telling a story i really enjoy it but there comes a time where hey i want to do more things i want to make more videos and so you need to get help and this has been my biggest pain point is finding an editor and finding a workflow and specifically if you can hire remote editors you have a bigger pool of talent to choose from this scenario i'm going to be saying my name sarah and the name of kyle a lot because kyle is the editor who i'm working with right now um probably have had the best of luck with him and i think half of it is because hey we're figuring out a workflow that doesn't have to do with these cloud providers that i've had issues with so here's my google drive problem and maybe you can relate to this so i'm gonna pull up g-drive okay so do you see this right here two terabytes of two terabytes used 99 full uh when it comes to editing videos my projects are on the small side from 30 gigs to on the bigger site 150 gigs i mean i just had one project that was 250 gigs so i need a lot of storage and because google drive a lot of the friction is with uh downloading i literally leave my projects up on google drive and then i just start going to my other uh my other google accounts and adding two terabytes for 9.99 because i don't want to take the actual jump and buy the 10 terabytes because that's 49 a month which is just so expensive okay so this is my second gmail as you can see uh 1.8 terabytes of two terabytes used all of the things and then my third gmail okay so this one i'm filling up right now 1.2 terabytes of two terabytes used so that is 30 a month and so the price just keeps going up and it's just super unorganized because my video projects end up living on google drive half the project will be here half will be strung out on different computers now you might say uh sarah this sounds like a personal problem but when you start working with remote editors you have to send footage back and forth it is really hard to keep a project just really in sync to make sure when i want to hop back into the edit that i have all of the songs all the assets that kyle added um to re-link those in premiere when downloading a ton of files via google drive it just zips all of the things so by the time you download 50 gigs of video footage you have seven zip folders you have to double click on and get organized again and a lot of the times it renames the actual files so say we have clip seven well it renames it to clip 7-0-1 so you have to go in there and rename them make sure it matches up with the google drive folder so when sarah over here downloads kyle's premiere file and the music that he uses and i try to reconnect everything it doesn't mess up with the reconnecting in premiere i'm like getting all hot and nervous just honestly thinking about it so as you can see as you add more terabytes and just the uploading and downloading of a ton of video footage is just a really honestly clunky experience and you're kind of burdened by the fact that it's up to google to keep this running or you just won't have access to all of your things okay so enter my synology nas this is actually their super cute and cool version that is really portable and small the actual synology nas that i use is in my other room next to my router and there's a switcher i actually use shr the synology hybrid raid system which gives you redundancy basically if one drive fails the remaining drives can build back your data um so you know you kind of have peace of mind with that that you're not going to lose your data if a drive fails and you know that does make a little bit of noise so um the fact that it's in another room and this room is where i film uh it's just another kind of like benefit of using ethernet and using a network attached storage um where it's just attached to your network okay so enough talking about that let's talk about the actual solution that replaced g drive for my remote editor workflow this folder here active projects underscore saradici this is a two-way sync folder that is using a synology app synology drive if you're not familiar how a synology nas works um you basically have the nas it has hard drives in there you can set them up as raid where i have a ton of 14 terabyte seagate drives in there as you can see here i have 48 terabytes of storage to work with which is just awesome i'm like halfway through that almost which is kind of crazy sarah slow down that nas is connected to your network via an ethernet port and then whatever laptops computers in your home are connected to your network any of those computers can access that 48 terabytes of storage and even if you're away and you're not on the local network you can use a thing called quick connect which is a synology service where you can access your nas from wherever you are in the world as long as you have a wi-fi connection so it's super powerful and basically what you can see right now is i'm just on a web page and accessing dsm which is their disk station manager dsm and this is where um you access all of the permissions file station is where you can see just everything on your nas and if this looks familiar it's basically synology's own like operating system and then you can go up here and this is like all of the apps that i've installed and this helps you also interact with your nas okay that was a quick overview of the synology nas but now that you have that let's get back to what i was saying this uses a synology app called synology drive client as you can see here you basically set up a two-way sync connection between my computer and the nas and also between kyle's computer in the nas so um this is a team folder we go into active projects and as you can see it's everything that is here so i initially set up the shared folder here on my computer um just using the synology drive client and if we go in here um go into the sync rules um you will see in the sync mode i have two-way sync checked off this means that if i'm in here and i'm editing this live stream vlog you know i'm editing editing and say oh i just want to add let's see these awesome two songs that i just downloaded i'm going to drop them into the live stream vlog folder we can go down here and look okay the files were too small it transferred over too quickly but you can see recently changed it uploaded those two songs to my nas so those two songs are not only here on my local disc the ssd but they are also synced to the nas via the local area network which is you know quicker than my upload speed of 35 megabytes per second which is terrible um and they are uploaded here you have the two little check marks so they're uploaded um and they're also on ssd so i actually re-copied this live stream vlog over to the active projects folder so you can see how quickly it syncs to the nas you can see it's going about an average of 100 megabytes per second and once your file has a green check mark by it that means it is on the nas okay so this is the key part of everything if you're a video editor you know you need to actually edit off of a drive that is the fastest possible when you're dealing with like 4k a7s 3 footage you need a speed of an ssd to help you out so that is going to be my internal ssd in my puget pc which is the local disk d right here as you can see this two-way sync folder using synology drive client is located on that ssd so when i go in here and i find this is such an unorganized project sorry guys when i find this premiere file that kyle has been working on and syncing to the nas but also editing on his computer this premiere file is going to open up as if it's on just my ssd and that's the magic of this and see it's super speedy because it's playing off of my ssd um not you know from the cloud at 100 megabytes per second you're editing with the speed of the ssd while it's at the same time two-way syncing to your nas and why is this important this is so huge because there's no middle ground of me uploading footage kyle downloading that editing it locally via premiere and then keeping track of all of the music and footage and assets that he added making sure to upload all of those back to google drive and then me going through okay what was the new things that kyle added me downloading that along with the premiere project that he started and then reconnecting all of the footage back on my computer no there's no more of that now we just use the same exact folder here in this two-way sync synology drive folder open up premiere do our editing add the assets close it and then the next person can start where the other person finished off now this this is so huge for me because i like more of a collaborative process very rarely can i just hand off a video to an editor and they finish it from start to finish sometimes that happens and i love when that happens but it's so nice for me to really just go into this active projects folder double click on a premiere file open up the video where they did you know that principle edit and i can go in there and cut the parts that i don't think are important and then they can pick it back up and add the music and add any other flair needed for the video now you might be like okay well sarah your nas is located here but how is kyle accessing the footage well all he has to do is just download the synology drive client to his computer he doesn't even have a nas he just has an internet connection he logs into the editor profile that i specifically made for him in dsm he sees that there's a shared folder called active projects underscore saradicci and that's what i want to share with him checks it off and then make sure that enable on demand sync to save disk space is actually unchecked and that means that the moment the moment i transfer my footage over to another active projects folder that means that it's going to start downloading onto kyle's computer instantly and when he goes to edit the next video everything is there you don't have to rename files you don't have to go through the crazy zipping of g drive and why this is so clutch for our workflow is like i said he's located in the uk so i can be here filming my videos until 10 pm at night transfer over everything into a folder on my nas and it instantly starts downloading onto kyle's computer while he's asleep so when he wakes up he has a brand new video to start working on without having to worry about all of that just middle internet cloud storage nonsense isn't this so cool like this is this is so cool so you basically have one shared folder that is both doing a two-way sync between my computer and also kyle's computer okay so as you can see these are all of the active projects we have going in and whenever i have you know new footage to add i just plop it in this folder it automatically syncs with kyle's computer and we're off to the races premiere it just works really nicely with this you don't have to do anything special resolve actually has a lot of cool extra software that it has when it comes to remote editing workflows and that requires setting up an sql database and you can set that up on a synology nas which is really cool um but it's just it's a little too complicated for me at the moment as i'm trying to also get a lot of youtube videos done i don't have time to really like learn resolve well and also worry about that right now but it actually works in the same way as premiere if you just go and resolve and press export project and that gives you an individual resolve project file just like premiere and the other person on the other end of your nas can then open up that and everything the footage the music will reconnect without having to finagle things so i wouldn't really recommend like putting your entire database on the nas because you know resolve uses the weird database thing which i still don't like but that's a way to do this with resolve um that's very similar to premiere so oh i've been talking for so long so a few more things that i want to hit uh smash that like button if this has been helpful or it gets your your juices flowing and in a way that you can improve your workflow okay so a few specifics when it comes to using shared folders there are so many security options which is great but you have to make sure that certain users have certain permissions to access those folders that you create so there are group permissions and then there's individual user permissions so for me complete admin permissions so i can access everything but my editor profile that i've made well i don't need him to access my entire nas so i just give him the permissions to access the synology drive folder the active projects folder and just an added benefit of having your own server and having everything attached to the internet um is say hey i took some fun mother's day photos this weekend and of course they are saved in my pictures folder which is on my nas that i can access via an app via my phone or i can just share the link and people can instantly go to that folder view the images or download them and i don't have to actually upload them to a separate google drive or dropbox that's just like cherry on the top added benefit you know when the storage that you're using has already attached the internet it's just really convenient when it comes to sharing files and you can edit the permissions and have a lot of control with that as well so you know at the center of all of this is just my one big synology nas but there's just so much i can do with it and honestly synology dsm is kind of taking over my life in a good way there's so many different apps you can use like hyper backup to back up your entire nas to another nas that's what i'm going to do with another synology nas at my parents house so hey if this building burns down we're all good we have my memories from the past 10 years of my life now dsm is about to get a major facelift it's basically the equivalent of doing like a complete overhaul um to a entire operating system and it looks really nice it looks really clean but with that you have these new updated apps which i'm so excited about and they're they're in dsm right now but there's just going to be some really cool updates coming soon so just want to flag that one app is their photos app which is kind of like the equivalent of google photos so again i'm getting out of the subscription model i don't want to be paying like 10 a month here 30 a month here just adding and adding and adding because i've used google photos in the past but it's no longer free and with every terabyte you're just going to be paying more and more and it's kind of like anxiety inducing to know that that's only going to increase i'm only going to be paying more because every year i take i swear like over 10 000 photos on my phone and so i want those backed up somewhere but i want them accessible to where i can scroll through the tens of thousands of photos whenever i want wherever i am so i'm moving that to my nas so not only can i trust that oh it's gonna have good security that i can control but it's a set price it's my nas and then i can expand the storage if i need but i don't have to worry about this monthly fee so the photos app is clutch it has taken working from home to the next level because now i can partition you know say 10 terabytes of my nas so john he can just plug his imac into ethernet yeah i gave john my imac it's like he's working on a desktop computer for the first time in his life and it's like his life has changed but he uses a ton of separate hard drives he has like 20 hard drives he goes in between and now he can access just a crazy amount of terabytes just over the network and so we can be on the same solution and i can be backing up all of his stuff at the same time if we need to share pictures or video it's just on that same nas oh it is so great you know that's when relationships are getting real yes of course we are planned to get married but now we're sharing a nas that that is the ultimate step okay um we've been talking for a minute here and this this stuff i could honestly talk about forever finding creative solutions to creative problems is kind of like a hobby at this point i'm glad it's also my job so let me know if you like this article.
