Challenge: With massive file counts, tight turnaround times, and a fully remote team spanning multiple time zones, Darkwater Productions needed a centralized system that could support fast-moving VFX projects working across tools like Houdini, Blender, After Effects, and more. At scale, legacy cloud platforms like Dropbox couldn’t keep up—frequent relinking issues, slow transfers, and poor organization made collaboration clunky and frustrating.

Why Suite? Suite’s cloud-native file system enables fast, seamless collaboration—whether rendering 40,000 falling suitcases or managing edits while on-site during tour rehearsals. With drag & drop uploads into the cloud, file streaming accessibility, and a unified file path for every asset stored in Suite, Darkwater can onboard collaborators easily and share files without the delays of zipping, downloading, or relinking. 

Key Insights:

• 30+ commercial & creative projects completed on Suite
• Collaborators located in Nashville, New York, Los Angeles, and worldwide
• Seamless integration with all major VFX applications
• Consistent file pathing ensures easy asset management
• Full bandwidth utilization & pre-caching enables instant accessibility
• Intuitive UI feels familiar to creatives, no learning curve

Creative Tools:

• Adobe Premiere Pro
• Adobe After Effects
• SideFX Houdini
• Blender
• Davinci Resolve

“Houdini and Blender put a stress test on whatever storage you're using, printing millions of files for a simulation. We use Suite and it’s flawless.”

— Dawson Waters, Founder/VFX Supervisor, Darkwater Productions

Introduction

Darkwater Productions, an indie VFX shop based in Nashville, Tennessee, crafts concert visuals for some of today’s most popular musical artists. Dawson Waters, founder and VFX supervisor, spearheads the crew and handles all of the team’s demanding media management tasks.

“You can't do these jobs without being well-organized,” he says. “You have to use a process that everybody can efficiently work within.”

Hopping between Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Blender, Davinci Resolve, SideFX Houdini, and a slew of other creative applications, Darkwater’s team handles millions of project files, video assets, LUTs, and more, often passing assets between creatives and clients all over the map. In scenarios when the clock is ticking before a show, every hold up can become significant.

“Timelines are crunched, and there’s so much content to be made,” says Waters. “I tried to use Dropbox, but it was a mess—I was using Dropbox with Parsec and files just started imploding.”

If you’re reading this, you already know that when the word “imploding” describes a team’s workflow, it’s time to reconsider the process. Waters knew Darkwater Productions had find a storage platform that could tie everything together. “That’s where Suite comes in,” he says.

Team structure: Tapping into the best talent

Since adopting Suite’s cloud storage with file streaming, the team has completed more than 30 projects on the platform, working with upwards of 30 different artists. Creating concert visuals for stars in indie and popular music, including Kane Brown, Kelsea Ballerini, and Foster the People, and Luke Bryan, the ability to centralize media, connect key collaborators, and get assets across the finish line faster has revitalized the workflow.

“There’s six or seven contractors in Nashville that get on every job that that comes through the door. Outside of that, we have people in California, New York, Ukraine… all over the world,” explains Waters. “Suite’s nice because you can just tag ‘em in.”

Nitty-gritty wins: File architecture & asset management

Since Suite mounts like a local drive for everyone connected to the cloud-native filesystem, it lets Waters apply permissions to collaborators at a moment’s notice, while also allowing team members to access content without re-linking file paths or confusion about versions.

“It takes intense file management.. but as long as we follow the same file structure, things stay clean. With Suite, video gets ingested into our file structure, just drag and drop,” says Waters. “For a recent commercial, we used Houdini and Blender—which put a stress test on whatever storage you're using, printing millions of files for a simulation. We used Suite and it was flawless.”

Down to the most granular folder/file levels, the ability to centralize assets and easily share working files for instant access impacts Darkwater Productions collaboration. “Admins have the ability to share files from any destination,” he notes. “It’s nice to have that seamless file path transfer—just copy and paste the link and someone can see the exact file you want to share.”

Crunch time: Accelerating work to meet deadlines

Apart from being a fully remote team, the biggest challenge for Darkwater Productions are the short lead-times & high expectations of the clients.

“Execution time is always a big one. Things move quickly in the music world—it’s almost impossible to get ahead of it,” says Waters. “Then, of course, when you have all the content done for a particular show, you still haven’t seen any of it on the big screens.”

As Waters notes, creating the assets and putting the finishing touches on them for final playback during a live show are two different tasks. Often times, it’s hard to know what’s working until it plays back on the massive LED screens at the concert venue during rehearsal.

“When we finally get to rehearsals, we might realize that an idea isn’t working, something needs to be changed, or we're gonna have to completely re-render a visual,” says Waters. “That can throw us into quite the spiral of work, which is another reason why it’s important that I don’t have to think about data transfers. Suite coupled with proper organization is the name of the game.”

Now playing: Live visuals for Kelsea Ballerini

Highlighting a recent project for the singer-songwriter, Kelsea Ballerini, proves the point. Darkwater Productions was tasked with creating visuals for her multi-stop US tour, crafting three-dimensional worlds and graphics to complement her lively stage performance.

Here, Waters explains the hands-on creative process in full detail:

“We worked with the director, Patrick Tracy, who runs creative for Kelsea and a few other acts. He knows how to edit, he knows After Effects, he’s a very hands-on guy with a specific vision. While he was on-set for rehearsals, I provided him permissions to access to our entire Suite drive, and as soon as I would upload files, he was implementing them on-site. Rending from Blender then using After Effects… there can be up to 4,000 frames for a single song. Since he had access to all the parameters, he was able to work with everything he needed while on-site.”

“If we were using Dropbox, all those files would have to be zipped, sent to Dropbox, downloaded, unzipped, and inserted into After Effects,” Waters continues. “On Suite, we can hop in and out of the same project file, keep going back and forth. We’d be on the phone—I’d hop in, do my work, press save; then he would hop back in to pull the updated files, and that was it. It’s nice to work with a director who wants creative control—and that we can provide real-time interaction.”

Designed to maximize bandwidth for the best possible performance, Suite’s cloud storage with file streaming makes easy work of the most complex workflows. Even when creating intricate sequences—like rendering 40,000 suitcases falling from the sky—team members could optimize the platform to work seamlessly, regardless of the editor’s network connection.

“Suite Uses the whole bandwidth. When you have a fiber connection, it's fantastic. You don't have to think about it,” he says. “For everyone else, pre-caching files works great.”

Why File Streaming works: A look ahead at cloud workflows

Adopting Suite puts Waters in a position to efficiently manage working files, team members, permissions, and more, empowering the fully remote team of creatives at Darkwater Productions to create without interruption or delays. Moreover, working between various video editing and visual effects applications means keeping thousands of assets organized at any given time. On Suite, Waters can work how he’d like, when and where he’d like, and with anyone he chooses, with the added peace of mind that files are always accessible at a moment’s notice.

“We use so many different applications, and you can’t just cut one out of the workflow because it doesn’t work with your data storage system,” explains Waters. “I’m stoked on how seamlessly Suite integrates with everything, even all of the weird, little softwares that we use.”

Building three-dimensional digital worlds from scratch takes a creative touch—and an extremely organized workflow. All the while, projects are only getting more complicated and timelines are only getting shorter. “There is an absolute need to have cloud storage,” says Waters. “The fact that I don’t notice Suite is great—you don’t have to think about it. It’s hard to introduce new workflows to people who are used to a certain thing… so it’s nice to have everybody meshing with the software and loving the process.”

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Tour photography courtesy of Catherine Powell/Darkwater Productions

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