CHALLENGE: BLINK’s creative pipeline needed to handle massive file sizes, ultra-high resolution LED outputs, and enable remote video editing on tight timelines. Connecting remote artists and powerful render farms to power visuals at live events at Sphere in Las Vegas and dispersed editing for Shakira’s recent World Tour in South America, BLINK demanded a storage system that delivered speed, reliability, and seamless collaboration without compromise.

WHY SUITE? Performance & Reliability was absolutely critical, and after testing other solutions, Suite stood out in a league of it's own. Together, Suite, BLINK, and MDLR Technologies collaborated to develop a cloud-based workflow that unified real-time editing and rendering across all collaborators and locations. The result: instant file access for key collaborators, lightning-fast cache performance, and reliable playback powering live visuals on a massive scale.

Key Insights:

• Unified file system across a global team of collaborators
• 60x Nvidia RTX 4090 GPUs
• 100Gbe LAN / 10Gbe WAN Connections
• 12,000 x 12,000 resolution - with frames topping 933 MB each at 59.94 FPS
• Each song averaged 17 to 25TB of data
• Direct artist-to-render farm access with Suite CLI

“It’s about building one unified file system. Regardless of where people are, everyone is working from the same script, the same page.”

— Scott Millar, Chief Technology Officer, MDLR Technologies

Introduction

BLINK lets the work speak for itself. Crafting live performance visuals for music & entertainment’s biggest moments, BLINK represents digital artists and live show producers, a collective of designers, motion graphics artists, editors, and technical specialists that help artists and brands achieve their wildest creative visions.

Start by asking yourself if any of the following names ring a bell—Shakira, Taylor Swift, Lizzo, Lady Gaga, Eagles, J Balvin, Katy Perry, UFC, Alicia Keys, Mumford & Sons, The Killers, The Weekend, Tame Impala, The Emmy Awards—you get it. BLINK and its family of contributing freelance artists & technicians are the masterminds behind the scenes creating eye-popping visuals, editing concert footage, and more for these performers’ world-class shows.

Coordinating full production, post production, and screen visuals in today’s digital era not only means creating memorable artworks and concepts, it means building technical workflows that allow teams like BLINK to work collaboratively on complicated videos & animations designed for enormous LED screens of every size and shape.

Challenges

Richard Cullen is the Technical Director at BLINK, and in his 14+ years at the company has seen the industry, workflows, and the tools his team uses significantly evolve. “Everything is changing, shows are bigger, screens have better quality, files are bigger. Everything just keeps getting bigger and better,” he says. “We’re aiming to push the boundaries of what's possible and what audiences expect, and it feels like we’ve been able to grow with our artists.”

Based in Burbank, California, BLINK was recently brought on to handle production by producers & show designers Silent House Group for two high-profile projects, each with its own unique workflow demands. Namely, these projects were a one-night-only UFC event and Eagles’ 36-show residency, both at Sphere in Las Vegas, and multiple stops on Shakira’s World Tour. Tasked with mapping content for the world’s largest LED screen and collaborating on concert footage from various locations, BLINK needed a robust, reliable storage solution to centralize assets.

“For these projects, it was the number of files, and the sheer size of everything, that presented the biggest challenges,” says Cullen. “Timelines keep getting shorter, but the requests keep getting bigger. We’re always trying to be as efficient as possible, so we can put on a great show for everyone.”

Shakira World Tour - Remote Everything

To architect these technical workflows, Cullen tapped Scott Millar of MDLR Technologies, a live production house specializing in complex video production pipelines. Millar lives on the cutting-edge of digital media, seeking out solutions that streamline collaboration so teams like BLINK can build eye-popping on-stage visuals and edit footage as if everyone were in the same place.

With stops in Brazil, Mexico, and across Latin America, Shakira’s World Tour presented BLINK with its first unique challenge—enable a fully remote workflow that let the team ingest, share, and edit  video & VFX files in real-time. BLINK adopted Suite to be the backbone of the workflow, building a central source of truth that didn’t require syncing media or copying to local storage, designed to keep everyone involved up-to-date with the latest assets.

“For the Shakira project, we rendered directly off of Suite and skipped local storage,” says Millar. “Everything was done directly from Suite without actually copying files to our NAS. We switched to Suite [from a competitive solution] for the performance benefit and the ability to setup that local cache.”

Cullen continues, “We have a big team here in the office, a mix of animators, editors, production, and we have our extended family of freelancers and other collaborators. Out in the field,  when we suddenly needed a delivery file, or there was a new project, it was so easy for everyone. We spent less time pushing things around, uploading, and downloading. On Suite, it all happens in the background, so our team was able to work that much faster."

Sphere - Scaling Up for the World’s Largest LED

Home to the world’s largest and most immersive LED screen, Sphere in Las Vegas is redefining live performance. BLINK’s recent work for UFC 306 and Eagles came at staggering scale—involving 180° equirectangular projections formatted at 12,000 x 12,000 resolution, with frames topping 933 MB each at 59.94 frames per second. With roughly 20,000 frames per sequence, a single track could hit 17.8 TB of data—and that’s just one of 21 songs on the setlist.

To meet these massive demands, Millar designed an architecture that integrated Suite at its core, acting as the unified file system across artist machines and the powerful render farm. Renders read & written directly to Suite were managed through Deadline and custom scripting with Suite’s CLI.

“All the artists had Suite and we were using it to allow artists to submit files to the render farm,” explains Millar. “We created a single file system, where everything was constantly updated. Artists didn’t have to worry about clicking an FTP, setting stuff to upload, waiting for it to finish—when the render farm kicked off everything was available.”

By centralizing the creative pipeline on Suite, BLINK was able to maintain real-time access to critical assets across a vastly distributed team. Even at Sphere’s staggering scale, Suite provided artists, engineers, and machines a unified workspace to create groundbreaking visuals for one of the world’s most unique venues.

Other Wins on Suite

Suite provides the performance and reliability BLINK needs to craft visuals at the cutting-edge of entertainment, while making it possible for remote artists to easily adopt the platform. Using Suite as the central source of truth for working files, and local caching to empower remote players, BLINK’s extended team felt the impact immediately.

“The best thing about Suite is how it blends in as a drive in your computer,” notes Millar. “One of the best parts was how quickly it became just another hard drive on people's computers.”

“In the nicest way possible, it was very easy to forget you even have it,” adds Cullen.

While Suite Integrated into BLINK’s workflow seamlessly, even when nitty-gritty technical questions arose, Suite’s customer service was also a differentiator. Real-time answers helped BLINK optimize the platform for performance and keep each project moving. Combined with simple onboarding, these everyday wins added up to serious time savings and the ability for BLINK to run a fully remote workflow with confidence.

Final Thoughts

For Millar at MDLR Technologies, building high-performance workflows means keeping up with the latest technology and digital media solutions, which means looking to cloud-based solutions. Adopting cloud-native tools like Suite now means solving near-terms challenges while setting teams like BLINK up for future success.

“We’re working in this remote world now. It's incredible how Blink can function as a fully remote studio,” says Millar.

“There’s this expectation that when you walk into our office you’ll see 30 artists in the same place. But people end up asking, Where is everyone?,” adds Cullen. “They're in Mexico City, Thailand, London… they can be anywhere.”

Most importantly, BLINK’s remote efforts crafting and editing visuals for UFC 306 and Eagles concerts at Sphere, and shooting, editing, and shipping concert footage for Shakira’s World Tour felt natural for everyone involved. As live entertainment continues pushing technological limits, BLINK and MDLR Technologies are already looking ahead to bigger, bolder, and even more collaborative productions—with Suite helping power workflows behind the scenes.

“Tools like Suite allow remote work to happen. Our artists, our render farm, and our main office are in three different cities… if you want to make remote work possible, you have to embrace it,” says Millar. “It’s about building one unified file system. Regardless of where people are, everyone is working from the same script, the same page.”

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[Photography courtesy of BLINK]

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