Storage decisions in video production have always been critical. 

Get them wrong, and the symptoms are immediate: dropped frames mid-edit, transfers that take hours, a colourist waiting on an ingest that should have finished before lunch. As productions move toward cloud-based and hybrid workflows, those decisions have become more complex, and the cost of getting them wrong has grown considerably.

That’s why this article covers the technical fundamentals of storage for video production: what the different storage architectures actually mean in practice, how to think about storage tiers, what cloud platforms offer and where they fall short, and how to build a storage strategy that holds up at scale.

We’ll discuss:

• What are the different types of cloud storage, and what does each one mean for video production?
• What is the difference between hot, warm and cold storage, and which does your production need?
• How much bandwidth do you actually need to edit from cloud storage?
• NAS, SAN and cloud: which storage architecture is right for your facility?
• What cloud storage platforms should video productions consider?
• How do you manage media asset organisation and metadata at scale?
• What does cloud storage actually cost, and where do productions get it wrong?

What are the different types of cloud storage, and what does each one mean for video production?

Before evaluating platforms, it helps to understand the three fundamental storage categories around which every cloud provider structures their offering. These map directly onto how production workflows actually operate.

For a broader overview of the IT challenges facing production companies before diving into storage specifics, our article on the biggest IT challenges for TV, film, and video production businesses is a helpful place to start.

Object storage

Object storage is the foundation of most cloud storage platforms; AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob Storage all use this model. Files are stored as discrete objects with metadata, accessible via API. It's highly scalable and cost-effective for large volumes of data, but it isn't a filesystem. You can't mount it as a network drive and edit directly from it without additional tooling, a common misconception that causes frustration when productions assume cloud storage behaves like a NAS.

File storage

File storage (cloud NAS) presents storage as a conventional filesystem that can be mounted by multiple clients simultaneously. AWS EFS, Azure Files, and purpose-built media platforms like Hammerspace or Qumulo Cloud fall into this category. This is the model that works for active production workflows, because editors can access files the same way they would from a local server.

Block storage

Block storage presents storage as a raw disk, attached to a single compute instance. AWS EBS is a common example. It's fast and low-latency, but not designed for shared access across multiple workstations. Relevant for cloud rendering workloads where each node has its own attached disk, but not for shared editorial environments.

Understanding which model a platform uses is the first question to answer before evaluating it for any specific workflow.

What is the difference between hot, warm and cold storage, and which does your production need?

Storage tiers exist because not all data needs to be equally accessible, and the cost of storage scales directly with how quickly data can be retrieved. For production workflows, getting the tiering strategy right has significant budget implications.

Hot storage

Hot storage is your active working storage, fully online, low latency, high throughput. This is where media lives during active production and post-production. On-premise, this is your NAS or SAN. In the cloud, this means high-performance file storage or object storage with no retrieval delay. It's the most expensive tier and should contain only what the team is actively working on.

For 4K ProRes 4444 workflows, you're looking at approximately 1.2GB per second of sustained read throughput per edit suite at full quality. 

A facility running four simultaneous Avid or Premiere seats on the same project needs a storage system capable of delivering at least 4-5GB/s aggregate read throughput with consistent low latency, typically sub-2ms for spinning disk NAS, and well under 1ms for all-flash.

Warm storage

Warm storage is nearline, accessible within seconds or minutes, at a lower cost. In cloud environments, AWS S3 Standard-IA (Infrequent Access), Azure Cool Blob Storage, and Google Nearline fall into this category. In a production context, this is the right tier for completed sequences, project archives, mid-series, and camera originals that have been proxied and are no longer in active use. Retrieval costs apply, so it's important to model access patterns before moving material here.

Cold storage

Cold storage is deep archive, AWS Glacier, Azure Archive Storage, and Google Coldline. Retrieval times range from minutes to hours, and retrieval costs are meaningful. This is the right tier for long-term masters, deliverables, and production archives that need to be retained but are unlikely to be accessed. For broadcast and streaming content, compliance and contractual obligations often mandate a retention period of 7–10 years, making cold storage economics highly relevant. For a deeper look at how archive storage relates to data security, the most secure places to store your data covers the options in more detail.

How much bandwidth do you actually need to edit from cloud storage?

This is the question most firms get wrong, usually by underestimating what their codec and resolution demands actually require at the network layer.

As productions move toward higher resolutions and frame rates, the volume of data involved has grown considerably.

The practical implication for cloud workflows: most standard broadband connections, including 1 Gbps leased lines, cannot deliver these data rates reliably enough for native-resolution editing. This is why the dominant approach for cloud-based production is proxy-based remote editing: editors work from low-bitrate proxy files (typically H.264 or H.265 at 25–100 Mbps) stored in the cloud, with the full-resolution originals either on-premise or in cloud storage accessible for conform and grade.

Tools like Frame.io (now Adobe), Hedge and Cantemo facilitate this workflow by managing the relationship between proxies and originals. The proxy lives close to the editor; the original lives where the bandwidth is.

Where native-resolution cloud editing is genuinely needed, for example, a remote colourist accessing 4K RAW originals, the right solution is a dedicated high-bandwidth connection (typically a 10 Gbps leased line), or a cloud-based virtual workstation with the storage mounted locally within the same cloud region, eliminating the WAN bottleneck entirely.

NAS, SAN and cloud: which storage architecture is right for your facility?

These three architectures each suit different facility types and workflow demands. Many modern facilities use a combination, understanding the trade-offs makes those decisions clearer.

Below, we get into the technical details. (Prefer less tech-jargon? Get in touch today, and a member of our team can help you navigate your needs in plain English.)

NAS (Network Attached Storage)

NAS (Network Attached Storage) presents storage as a shared filesystem over standard Ethernet. Systems like QNAP, Synology, at the lower end, and Facilis, EditShare, or Studio Network Solutions (SNS) at the professional level are purpose-built for media workflows. 

NAS is the dominant architecture for small to mid-size post houses: it's relatively straightforward to configure, supports simultaneous access from multiple workstations, and integrates with Avid NEXIS, Premiere, and DaVinci Resolve without significant additional infrastructure.

The constraint is throughput. Ethernet-based NAS, even at 10GbE, has a practical ceiling of around 1.2 GB/s per port. For facilities running high-resolution, high-frame-rate formats across many simultaneous users, NAS can become a bottleneck. Link aggregation (LACP) and multiple 25GbE or 100GbE uplinks can extend this, but there are limits.

SAN (Storage Area Network)

SAN (Storage Area Network) presents storage at the block level over a dedicated Fibre Channel or iSCSI network, separate from the standard LAN. Each workstation sees the storage as a locally attached disk, with significantly lower latency and higher throughput than NAS. SAN is the architecture of choice for high-end VFX facilities, large broadcast operations, and post houses handling 8K or high-frame-rate RAW formats at scale.

The trade-off is complexity and cost. Fibre Channel SAN requires dedicated HBAs in each workstation, managed switches, and a specialist configuration. It's not an architecture that benefits from ad hoc setup; it requires proper planning and ongoing management. For facilities where raw throughput is genuinely the constraint, SAN is the right answer. For those where it isn't, NAS delivers better value.

Cloud storage

Cloud storage as the primary active storage is currently viable only for proxy-based workflows or facilities with access to very high-bandwidth dedicated connectivity. The economics are compelling for archive and warm storage, and the operational flexibility, particularly for distributed teams and productions with multiple locations, is real. The trajectory is toward hybrid: on-premise NAS or SAN for active production, cloud for everything else.

What cloud storage platforms should video productions consider?

There is no single right answer; the platforms worth your time depend on workflow, team size, and existing infrastructure. Let’s take a look at your main options.

AWS S3 with AWS Elemental

AWS S3 with AWS Elemental is the most comprehensive option for organisations with significant cloud infrastructure investment. S3's storage tiers (Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Glacier) map well onto production lifecycle needs, and the AWS media services ecosystem, transcoding, live streaming, and content delivery, integrates tightly. The downside here is complexity: S3 is not a managed media platform, and getting it to behave sensibly for production workflows requires meaningful engineering effort or a third-party management layer.

Backblaze B2

Backblaze B2 has become increasingly relevant for independent and mid-size productions. It is significantly cheaper than AWS or Azure object storage, roughly a quarter of the cost per GB, and integrates with tools like Hedge, Kyno, and CatDV for media management. For archive and backup, it is hard to beat the cost. For active production workflows, the same proxy-based constraints apply.

LucidLink

LucidLink deserves serious consideration for distributed production teams. It presents cloud object storage (typically B2 or S3) as a POSIX filesystem that can be mounted by any workstation over the internet, with intelligent local caching that makes it behave much more like a local NAS than a conventional cloud storage mount. For remote editorial workflows where editors are accessing shared project files from different locations, LucidLink is one of the most practically effective solutions currently available.

EditShare and Facilis Shared Storage

Editshare and Facilis Shared Storage offer managed on-premise NAS specifically designed for media workflows, with cloud extension capabilities for remote access and archive. For facilities that want the familiarity of on-premise infrastructure with a controlled path toward cloud workflows, these are worth evaluating.

LTO tape

LTO tape remains highly relevant for long-term archive despite being a 30-year-old technology. LTO-9, the current generation, offers 18TB native capacity per cartridge, transfer speeds of up to 400 MB/s, and a media lifespan of 30 years under proper storage conditions. Per-GB cost is significantly lower than any cloud archive tier at scale. The limitation is that tape requires physical management, a library, a robot or manual loading, and a software layer (typically LTFS or a MAM). For facilities archiving more than 1PB per year, LTO economics often beat cloud archive convincingly. For smaller operations, the cloud is usually simpler.

How do you manage media asset organisation and metadata at scale?

Storage infrastructure is only as useful as the system built on top of it. As production volumes grow, the ability to find, move, and manage media assets efficiently becomes as important as raw throughput.

Media Asset Management (MAM) systems, Cantemo, Iconik, CatDV, and Levels Beyond, sit above the storage layer and provide metadata tagging, search, workflow automation, and lifecycle management. They are the mechanism through which lifecycle policies get implemented in practice: a MAM can automatically move camera originals from hot to warm storage after a defined period, trigger transcode jobs, manage proxy generation, and control which teams have access to which assets.

In the event of storage failure or data loss, having the right backup strategy in place is as important as the storage architecture itself. Airgapped vs Immutable Backups covers the options worth considering for production environments.

Without a MAM layer, large productions tend to accumulate storage debt: drives full of material with inconsistent naming, no metadata, and no clear record of what has been delivered, archived, or deleted. This is not just operationally painful; for broadcast and streaming content, the inability to locate or produce a deliverable on request can have contractual and legal consequences.

For facilities handling multiple concurrent productions, the combination of structured on-premise or cloud storage with a MAM providing the logical layer above it is the architecture that scales.

What does cloud storage actually cost, and where do productions get it wrong?

Cloud storage pricing is structured to look inexpensive until you start using it more closely, at which point the egress charges, the cost of getting data out, can significantly exceed the storage costs themselves.

AWS S3 Standard costs approximately $0.023 per GB per month for storage. Retrieving that data, transferring it out to the internet, costs $0.09 per GB. For a 100TB production archive, the monthly storage cost is roughly $2,300. Restoring the full archive once costs approximately $9,200 in egress alone.

The practical implications for productions:

Model your access patterns before choosing a tier. Cold storage is only cheap if you rarely retrieve from it. If a delivery requirement or compliance audit means you need to retrieve regularly, the retrieval costs can dwarf the storage savings. For a broader set of storage best practices, our article on the 10 essential data storage tips is worth a read alongside this article.

Egress costs accumulate invisibly. Proxy generation, transcoding pipelines, and remote access workflows all generate egress. Productions that don't account for this in their cloud budget regularly receive unexpected invoices.

Same-region storage eliminates most egress costs. If cloud rendering, cloud editing workstations, and cloud storage are all within the same AWS region or Azure region, data transfer between services is either free or very cheap. The expensive egress is data leaving the cloud to the internet. Designing workflows to keep data within a single region where possible is one of the most effective ways to manage cloud costs in production.

Reserved capacity commitments reduce costs significantly. If a facility has predictable ongoing storage needs, committing to reserved capacity, typically 1 or 3-year terms, can reduce S3 or Azure costs by 30–40% compared to on-demand pricing.

Getting storage right in video production isn't about picking the most expensive system or the one with the biggest marketing presence. It's about understanding what your workflows actually demand, in throughput, latency, access patterns, and team distribution, and building an architecture that serves those demands efficiently.

Lyon Tech works with film, TV and post-production facilities across London on exactly this kind of infrastructure planning, from shared storage design to hybrid cloud workflows. If you'd like to talk through what the right setup looks like for your facility, get in touch with the team.