A video production studio eliminated $13,200 a year in cloud render costs and cut composition render time by 85%
Eliminated $1,100/month in cloud rendering costs and cut render times from 2.5 hours to 22 minutes with a local compute node
The challenge
Cloud rendering had become the studio's second-largest monthly expense after payroll. During busy quarters it hit $1,200. During slow ones it was still $600. The bill moved with project load, which meant it was unpredictable — exactly the wrong quality for a six-person shop managing tight project budgets.
The collaboration problem was quieter but constant. Every project file lived in cloud storage. To start editing, someone downloaded it. When two editors needed the same project, one waited. A 200GB ProRes timeline took three to four hours to pull down over their office connection. Editors worked around it by keeping local copies on personal drives, which meant version control was whoever remembered to upload last.
Renders were the most visible bottleneck. Complex After Effects compositions took two to three hours in the cloud queue — plus upload time before and download time after. A revision that should take 20 minutes of tweaking cost half a day of waiting.
The solution
PocketRack's scoping call focused on one question: how many editors are touching the same projects simultaneously, and how large are the files? The answers — six editors, ProRes 4K averaging 180GB per project — pointed directly at local 10-gigabit storage as the single highest-leverage fix.
The build was a PocketBundle with two components beyond the standard configuration. The PocketNAS was sized at 8 bays with NVMe caching, giving all six editing bays shared access to project files at speeds their cloud storage couldn't touch. The second component was a PocketCompute render node — an Intel Core Ultra system with 64GB RAM and a workstation GPU — configured as a dedicated DaVinci Resolve and After Effects render target.
PocketNet tied the studio together: all six editing bays on a dedicated high-priority VLAN, the render node on its own segment with direct NAS access, and guest WiFi for client review sessions kept off the production network entirely.
Setup took two days. PocketRack benchmarked the render node against three of the studio's recent projects before leaving. All three came in faster than the cloud had managed on its best run.
The results
Before
Cloud rendering: $600–$1,200/month depending on project load. Large project file access: 3–4 hour download before editing could start. Render time on complex compositions: 2.5 hours average in cloud queue. Version control: informal, editor-managed, frequently wrong.
After
Cloud rendering spend: $0/month. Project files accessible to all six editors simultaneously over 10GbE in under 8 minutes. Render time on the same compositions: 22 minutes on the local node. All project files on shared NAS with a single source of truth.
In the first year the studio took on three additional clients. The render node and NAS handled the volume without adding hardware. Nine months after install, when the studio hired two more editors, they added a second PocketCompute node. The NAS and network needed no changes.