Why Creative Firms Need File Sharing Solutions

The creative industries are among the most dynamic and exciting --- advertising, content creation, music, film and television, and more. Exciting as they are, they are still workplaces with many practical needs, too. It’s not all sparkle and sunshine in these places, real solid and practical solutions are needed to handle the physical and digital logistics of doing business.One such problem is file sharing. Let’s say a recording studio wants to send audio files without having to deal with file restrictions. They simply won’t find adequate solutions in everyday, free and open software. Most mass-market solutions are extremely limited and restricted when it comes to file size. In that case, they should turn to professional file sharing solutions, and here’s why:

Reason 1: Creative Files are Invariably Large

In much of the creative industry, files of content, draft content, raw content and more are usually huge in size, even over 100GB in some cases. Typical email providers restrict files to 10-20GB at the most, as do many instant message and chat platforms. It wouldn’t matter if Gmail expanded the limit to 100GB, because creative files, as we say, are more often over that limit, too!Such large files might be one-off cases for some businesses and users, and they become a problem solved by using file compression, or sharing the file to an external hard drive and physically moving it to another computer. Those solutions work fine in most cases, but for many creative industries, these enormous files are the norm.

Reason 2: Creative Industries Need Files Shared at Speed

When one is dealing with raw content that’s to be edited, reviewed or critiqued as part of a collaborative effort, files will be doing a very large and lasting back-and-forth kind of dance. Creative work is actually very rarely done by any single person, but by a huge list of people. You only have to watch the end credits of any movie to know that.Even within smaller teams, large files will be sent back and forth with revisions, comments and notes. What’s more, they need to be modified and finalised before whatever deadline is looming over them. To facilitate this, file sharing needs to be both fast and seamless, and a proper file-sharing service can ensure that. Many mass-market solutions not only don’t offer the file capacity, but also not the required speeds to handle those kinds of files in the dynamic way they need to be handled.

Reason 3: File Sharing Services Keep Things Consistent

Following on from the previous point, with files changing hands between different teams and parties within one organisation, it’s important to have a system that naturally helps to make things look and feel consistent throughout. A file-sharing service will offer that, with customised branded download pages and other features to help create consistency at all stages.What’s more, with the organisation using the same service, its use becomes part of the common language within the office.

Reason 4: Seamless Sharing Means Better Workflow

In the end, creative industries live or die on their ability to maintain a proper workflow. One big part of that workflow is being able to get those large files where they need to be at the right times in the process. It’s easy enough to talk a good flow, but you need the software solutions to back it up.File sharing can be a real crimp in the workflow for many companies. With team members using different formats and methods to move files around, the entire process can get messy quickly. That’s why professional file-sharing platforms can be a huge help.