Avid: Beyond Bin Locking - Why Creative Teams Need More Freedom

Discover how creative.space provides a more versatile and reliable storage solution than Avid NEXIS, supporting diverse editorial environments while eliminating the complexities of proprietary hardware.

By Nick Anderson, Product Manager for creative.space at DigitalGlue

When Brat TV, the digital powerhouse behind popular Gen-Z shows like Chicken Girls and Total Eclipse, faced explosive growth, their post-production team realized their workflow—based on managing countless external drives—was no longer sustainable. Initially, their path seemed clear: centralize storage using industry-standard solutions like Avid NEXIS, known for its robust bin-locking capabilities within Media Composer. However, Brat TV’s diverse editorial environment—encompassing Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Media Composer—meant that Avid’s specialized, single-ecosystem solution couldn’t adequately support their broader workflow.

The Hidden Complexity Behind Reliability

Avid NEXIS’s approach to collaborative editing relies on strategically duplicating media files across multiple spinning disks, ensuring quick access by routing users to different instances of the same content. While effective in purely Avid-centric workflows, this method carries inherent complexity. Users don’t just store their media—they must manage multiple copies, distributed strategically across the storage array. This complexity often remains unseen—until something goes wrong.

Consider the experience of a major broadcaster (whose name we’ll respectfully leave anonymous) managing television stations worldwide. Following a routine software update to their NEXIS head unit, they unexpectedly lost access to all their data. The centralized metadata database—a fundamental component of NEXIS’s architecture—had become compromised, rendering the data inaccessible despite it physically existing on the drives. This incident wasn’t due to hardware failure, but rather the structural vulnerability of the storage design itself.

Why ZFS is a Game Changer

Unlike NEXIS, creative.space relies on the powerful ZFS file system. ZFS stores essential metadata directly with the data on the drives themselves, significantly reducing the risk associated with centralized metadata management. With built-in snapshots and copy-on-write functionality, ZFS ensures that even if a software update goes wrong, your data remains accessible, protected, and instantly recoverable. The database is dynamically built in memory, providing a robust safeguard against scenarios that might disrupt other systems.

Breaking Free from Proprietary Lock-In

For years, bin locking was seen as a feature exclusive to Avid NEXIS, justifying its adoption despite other limitations. But today, thanks to our strategic partnership with Hedge and their Mimiq application, creative.space delivers robust bin locking functionality directly within Avid Media Composer workflows—without the overhead of complex, proprietary hardware and steep annual support contracts. Editors can now enjoy the collaborative benefits previously exclusive to NEXIS, alongside vastly simpler management and significantly lower total cost of ownership.
Why Brat TV Chose creative.space

Initially, Brat TV planned to move away from Avid completely, seeking a solution compatible with Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. Ironically, just as they adopted creative.space, their editorial team fully embraced Media Composer again. This flexibility—enabled by creative.space’s partnership with Hedge’s Mimiq, providing seamless bin-locking support—meant Brat TV could confidently support their diverse suite of editing applications without compromise.

creative.space brought transformative advantages:

• ZFS-Based Reliability: Unlike Avid’s external metadata dependency, creative.space leverages ZFS, embedding metadata directly onto the drives and building the database dynamically in memory. Coupled with snapshots and copy-on-write technology, creative.space virtually eliminates the risk of data loss due to software updates or system interruptions.

• Unmatched Performance with ARC: creative.space utilizes ZFS’s Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC), delivering SSD-level performance from cost-effective spinning drives without complex duplication of media files. This allowed Brat TV’s editors immediate and seamless access to media, significantly improving their productivity.

• Streamlined Workflows & Time Savings: Before creative.space, Brat TV’s four assistant editors spent up to 12 hours daily copying terabytes of RAW footage and editorial proxies. Centralizing storage with creative.space eliminated these tedious tasks, reclaiming over 10,000 hours in labor since adoption, while facilitating seamless collaboration across their team.

• Cost-Efficient Managed Service: creative.space’s subscription-based managed service model eliminated large upfront costs, instead spreading expenses predictably across the hardware’s lifespan. With proactive support included, Brat TV saved significantly on monthly operating expenses.

Flexibility for Modern Creative Teams

Today’s creative teams rarely work exclusively in a single software ecosystem. Brat TV’s editors regularly move between Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve, often within the same project. Creative.space embraces interoperability. Teams can effortlessly collaborate across diverse editing applications without specialized workflows, duplicated media, or extensive IT management.

The Creative Advantage: More Than Just Storage

Choosing creative.space provided Brat TV with more than just reliable, performant storage. It transformed their entire approach to collaboration. Previously siloed departments could now collaborate effortlessly, sharing sequences and bins between Media Composer, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve. These newfound efficiencies didn’t merely save time—they opened new revenue opportunities through increased productivity and capacity to pursue branded partnerships.

As Taylor Bynum, Director of Post Production Operations at Brat TV, put it: “creative.space has been a step toward what I call the ‘Holy Grail’ of post-production—integrating media asset management seamlessly into our workflows. It’s not just storage; it’s a platform that brings diverse creative tools together.”

Proactive Support vs. Costly Contracts

NEXIS’s complexity has driven an entire ecosystem of specialized integrators and extensive training programs—valuable, but expensive. Avid’s revenue model heavily depends on costly support contracts. At creative.space, our approach is radically different. Storage is proactively managed by our team of experts, eliminating the need for costly external support or training. We actively monitor thousands of metrics to predict and prevent issues before they occur, providing a seamless, worry-free experience.

A New Standard in Creative Storage

While Avid NEXIS remains a staple for teams exclusively within Avid’s ecosystem, its complexity, duplication-heavy approach, and external metadata dependency limit flexibility and increase hidden costs. creative.space offers a fundamentally different approach—simple, powerful, and versatile—allowing teams like Brat TV to effortlessly scale, collaborate, and innovate.

Brat TV’s successful transition to creative.space wasn’t merely about leaving behind a legacy system—it was about embracing a future where storage never becomes an obstacle to creativity.

With creative.space, your team doesn’t just manage media—they unlock their creative potential.

Stop managing storage. Start creating.