Productions and Cloud Storage - Why is Google Drive not recommended by Adobe?

[mjshade]

I'm working on a long form project with several other editors working from different locations. Following the instructions in the Longform and Episodic Workflow Guide, I created a production/project files that are hosted in cloud storage, and each editor uses their own cloned local storage that they actually edit from.

When building the production, I noted this guidance from that workflow guide: 

While it is safe to store a production in a consumer file syncing service (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc), doing so is not recommended to simulate a shared storage system.

My project needs cloud storage because our editors are in different physical locations. Noting that the guide said it was "safe" to store the production on Google Drive, that's what I did.  So far, it's mostly been working flawlessly, though we did experience some crashes when we had a new AE working simultaneously in the production with us. Whether our use of Google Drive was responsible or not, I don't know. 

So I'm curious: why does Adobe recommend against Google Drive for productions? Is there a different cloud service that is suitable? My union is hosting a seminar on using productions with Lucid Link tomorrow, so clearly there's substantial adoption of cloud storage with productions, but I'm curious what differentiates Lucid (for example) from Google Drive and if there's one reason one works and the other doesn't. 

Thanks for any insights!

[Ann Bens]

@Bruce Bullis 

[chrisw44157881]

google drive has a lot of limitations on read/write counts, bandwidth, and total data per month and you can auto-lock your account if you're not careful. i did a lot of playing around by converting it into an OS network drive. What a lot of people don't realize is, at the api level, its very restricted.

Read requests	Per minute per project 3000 Per minute per user per project 300
Write requests	Per minute per project 600 Per minute per user per project 60

unless you only have a few files to work with and download each manually, its not very api friendly.

[mjshade]

Thanks for the reply. So the potential drawback is particular to Google drive as opposed to cloud storage in general?

[R Neil Haugen]

Drive is designed for 'general' data transfer, including setting cheksums & such to check for recent backup/movements, NOT for video file transfer or even project files. While it's doing it's checking-up thing, it can reset header data that screws up Premiere.

My partner and I were early adopters of LucidLink ... and that's been incredible.

Mo is on the phone with me and says he's uploading a file of media from Cape Town to our Amazon S3 servers in London. A couple seconds later, my LucidLink virtual drive is showing the folder ... and a couple more seconds, starts showing individual files.

I can go right to Premiere, start importing those files and even dropping them on a sequence ... and they haven't finished uploading from Cape Town to London yet!

We are rather goggled at it. Occasionally in the afternoon my ISP drops below 140Mbps, and latency can go up. At that point, my playback of files can depend on say if they're H.264, which at that point will have issues. So I can "pin" H.264 files to my local machine and it will actually download the file to a drive on my machine. I've only needed to do this a couple times though.

Neil