Setting Up Shared Storage for Your Editorial Suite in 2026

Why Editors Need Shared Storage

When multiple editors, colorists, and VFX artists work on the same project from separate workstations, shared storage is the foundation that makes collaboration possible. Without it, the workflow degrades to sneaker-net: copying drives physically between machines, maintaining multiple versions, and inevitably working from the wrong copy.

Shared storage creates a single source of truth: one place where all project media lives, where every workstation reads from and writes to. Changes made by the editor are immediately accessible to the colorist. An approved cut lives in one location, not replicated across five individual workstations.

Storage Architecture Options

NAS (Network Attached Storage) is the standard for small to mid-size editorial suites. A NAS connects to the studio network via Ethernet (10GbE or 25GbE) and appears to workstations as a network share. NAS is accessible by multiple clients simultaneously and uses standard networking infrastructure.

SAN (Storage Area Network) provides block-level storage access rather than file-level access, which delivers higher performance and lower latency for the most demanding workloads. SANs use Fibre Channel or iSCSI protocols and require dedicated infrastructure. SANs are appropriate for very large studios with 15+ editors or extremely high-bandwidth workflows. The infrastructure cost and complexity is substantially higher than NAS.

Cloud storage is not suitable as a primary editing storage for most workflows because network latency and download speeds make real-time playback of high-resolution media from cloud storage impractical. Cloud storage is appropriate for backup, archive, and proxy-based remote workflows.

Network Architecture for Editorial Suites

10GbE minimum: A single editor accessing a NAS over 10GbE has approximately 900-1,000 MB/s of available bandwidth. ProRes 4K (150-250 MB/s for ProRes HQ) leaves significant headroom. ProRes RAW or RED RAW workflows at high resolutions saturate 10GbE with even a single stream.

25GbE for demanding workloads: A suite running multiple simultaneous 4K+ streams, VFX renders, and shared access benefits from 25GbE to the NAS. The cost delta between 10GbE and 25GbE infrastructure has narrowed significantly. If building new infrastructure for a suite of 6+ editors, 25GbE is worth the incremental investment.

Managed switches are required. An unmanaged switch cannot support the VLAN segmentation and traffic priority settings that prevent editorial traffic from competing with other office network traffic.

LACP bonding on the NAS uplink: Aggregating multiple network ports from the NAS to the switch increases total throughput capacity. Two 10GbE ports bonded provides 2 Gbps aggregate throughput, allowing multiple simultaneous full-bandwidth client connections.

NAS Options for Editorial in 2026

QNAP TVS-h874 / TVS-h1688X: QNAP's ZFS-based units (running QuTS hero) provide strong throughput for multi-editor suites. The ZFS filesystem provides data integrity guarantees through end-to-end checksumming. Appropriate for studios of 4-10 editors.

Synology DS3622xs+: Synology's enterprise-grade unit offers strong NFS and SMB performance, polished management interface, and Active Directory integration for permission management.

Facilis HUB: Purpose-built for post-production, with a collaborative volume architecture specifically designed for editorial workflows. Better multi-protocol simultaneous access for mixed Mac/Windows environments than general-purpose NAS. Higher cost, but built for the specific workflow.

EditShare EVO: The highest-tier option, with media management, QoS for stream prioritization, and deep integration with Avid workflows. Appropriate for broadcast post facilities with 15+ seats.

Software Configuration by NLE

Avid Media Composer uses a specific shared storage architecture. Avid NEXIS is the purpose-built option, but many studios successfully run Avid on general NAS with proper SMB configuration. Key requirement: the Avid MediaFiles folder structure must be accessible at the correct network path from all Avid workstations.

Adobe Premiere Pro Productions allows multiple editors to work in separate sequences within the same project file. The project file and all media must live on shared storage accessible from all workstations.

DaVinci Resolve shared database setup: Resolve's collaboration mode requires a shared database server. For professional multi-editor suites, this is a PostgreSQL database running on a dedicated machine (or the NAS itself, if it supports it). Each workstation connects to the shared PostgreSQL database for project metadata while reading media from the shared NAS. This is significantly more robust than Resolve's default SQLite database, which is not designed for concurrent access.

Client and Review Access

Studios frequently need to give clients access to review edits in progress without exposing the NAS to the public internet.

Frame.io or equivalent is the standard for client review without NAS exposure. Editors upload proxy or H.264 review files to Frame.io; clients review and comment there; editors see timecoded comments in their NLE integration. No client ever touches your NAS.

Secure VPN access for clients who need direct NAS access should require MFA and should grant access only to the specific project folder, not to the full NAS.

Backup Strategy for Editorial Projects

A production NAS contains irreplaceable work-in-progress assets. It needs a backup strategy independent of the media archive.

Project files (Premiere sequences, Avid bins, Resolve projects) are small and should be backed up daily to an off-site destination. A 5GB project file backup that completes in seconds over cloud is insurance against a catastrophic hardware failure.

Camera originals should follow the 3-2-1 rule: primary NAS, local backup on a second device, and either cloud or physical off-site copy.