Team Project Synchronization Failure

I expect we'll get a staffer to comment as they do frequent this forum. But one flag in your post for me is ... Google Drive as the working storage for media in a TP job.

My partner and I tried a number of such services, and well ... those are designed more with the understanding of transporting documents and spreadsheets & suchlike. They do not handle video files in the most effective method for using as actual storage.

As a way to 'warehouse' media that you each then download to your local storage, they can work. For direct-from working, they are problematic. I won't go into all the details but there are a number of issues. Including continuing linkage breaks to files. Over and over.

I teach on the MixingLight website, a pro colorist's subscription site. Colorists have typically worked in 'client-attended sessions', and the recent pandemic was a massive problem. Coupled with the way the folks working on any one project now tend to be all over the planet, they had to find ways to work 'remote' .. .that worked with major video files and workflows.

So I've been around a ton of discussions, read page after page ... and the main one that seems to work for actual working storage is a combination of LucidLink's magical 'delivery' service with high-speed internet and a decent online server.

My partner is in Cape Town, I'm in western Oregon. Our joint filespace is on an Amazon S3 server in London. LucidLink creates a 'virtual' drive on our computers that the operating system and all programs 'see' as a real drive. Note, I'm total PC, Mo is total Mac.

When an app goes to the drive for data, LL then parses the need, and passes the specific bits needed in order for video post work. It is ... nearly magical.

Mo calls me on Whatsapp. He's uploading a folder of media for me to edit. I go to my computer's Finder, and yep, the folder appears on my LucidLink "O" virtual drive shortly after he's started the upload. Within a few more seconds, I see files start appearing in that folder.

At that point, I can go to Premiere, and import the media for which files seem to appear. Even drag it to a sequence and start playback ... but ... the folder hasn't finished uploading from Cape Town to London yet!

Still ... LucidLink is 'smart' enough to know which bits to send first, and how. It's become quite heavily used in video post work around the world. There are some other services, but none that I know of that beat LL.

Neil