Recently, Shade won a Product of the Year Award at NAB Show 2026. Since they offer services geared toward post-production, I interviewed their CEO, Brandon Fan, to learn more. (Website)
Larry: Brandon, what is Shade.inc?
Brandon Fan, CEO, Shade Inc.
Brandon: Shade is a cloud-based post-production platform that consolidates everything you need from storage, collaboration, and asset management all into one place. You are able to access your files from anywhere in the cloud, search for any clip, share and review securely, and search your entire archive. My co-founder and I built Shade so creative teams can stop juggling five different tools and actually focus on making great work.
Larry: What products or services do you provide?
Brandon: We provide cloud storage with native file access, real-time collaboration tools, and asset management all in one platform. Think LucidLink’s performance, Frame.io’s collaboration, and Iconik’s organization but unified instead of fragmented. We also recently launched Custom Workflows and Automations to help teams build repeatable processes without writing code.
Larry: Why did you start the company?
Brandon: My co-founder Emerson and I are creatives ourselves, and we’ve been video editing for years. We kept hitting the same wall: our tools were so fragmented that we spent more time managing them than actually creating. Our files were scattered across drives, comments were buried in email threads, and there was no clear source of truth for what was approved. We started Shade because we wanted one system that actually worked the way post teams work.
Larry: What problems are you trying to solve?
Brandon: Post-production teams are drowning in tool sprawl. The average team uses five different platforms—one for storage, one for review, one for asset management—and wastes 30+ hours per project just moving files between systems. Feedback gets scattered across review platforms, email, and Slack. Finding a specific clip in a multi-terabyte library means scrubbing through hours of footage. We’re solving the fragmentation problem so teams can stop managing tools and start creating.
Larry: It seems a new cloud-based editing service is being announced every week. Why should someone consider Shade?
Brandon: Most cloud editing tools are just fancy wrappers around basic cloud storage. Shade is different because we’ve built native file system access that actually feels local—sub-100ms latency, byte-range streaming, intelligent caching. You’re not fighting the cloud. And unlike point solutions, we’re giving you the full stack: search for any clip within your files, access from anywhere with the cloud, share and review securely, and search your entire archive all in one place.
Larry: What’s the advantage of an editor working with Shade, vs. LucidLink, Frame.io and Iconik individually?
Brandon: Speed and simplicity. With three separate tools, you’re constantly exporting, uploading, re-linking, and hoping everything syncs. With Shade, your storage *is* your collaboration layer *is* your asset library. No exporting proxies to Frame, no hunting through Iconik to find which LucidLink folder has the latest cut. Everything’s already connected. Plus, you’re paying one bill instead of three.
Larry: All three of your partners are owned by someone else. So does that make Shade a VAR? I’m confused about your relationship with these three companies.
Brandon: We’re not a VAR—we’re not reselling their products. We’re replacing them. We built our own tech stack from the ground up, but we designed it to match or exceed the best-in-class experience you’d get from those technologies if they actually worked together. We’re competitors, not partners.
Larry: While cloud-based editing has advantages in collaboration between team members, the cloud itself inserts lots of potential problems into the mix. Specifically: latency, security, renting storage vs. owning it, and unauthorized scraping to train LLMs. How are you addressing these?
Brandon: We’ve engineered real-time streaming with intelligent caching and prefetching — editors consistently tell us Shade feels faster than their local NAS. Security-wise, we’re SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, TPN, HIPAA, and GDPR certified. For productions that need extra peace of mind, we support private VPC deployments and BYOS (bring your own S3-compatible storage). You’re never locked in — export everything anytime in standard formats, you own your data, and it’s guaranteed in our Enterprise Terms. And we don’t train models on customer content, all customers are opted out by default, it’s explicit in our Data Usage Policy, and no third party can access your data without your knowledge.
Larry: Who do you see as a typical customer?
Brandon: If you’re coordinating more than three people across more than one location with tight deadlines, Shade makes sense.
It’s not limited to one vertical, we work with sports media teams, creative agencies, post-production houses, consumer brands, real estate and construction firms, and even churches. We’ve got customers ranging from sports broadcasters cutting highlight reels to agencies managing multi-location commercial campaigns.
Larry: What happens when production is complete? How easy is it to download all assets or does the production remain on your servers?
Brandon: You can download everything whenever you want—bulk export, selective download, whatever you need. A lot of teams keep finished projects archived in Shade for easy recall. If you want to pull everything down and archive locally, it’s a few clicks.
Larry: What is a typical “best use” case?
Brandon: A cinematographer in Tokyo wraps a shoot at midnight and uploads 500GB of raw footage to Shade. AI immediately starts tagging and transcribing during upload. An editor in London sees the footage already mounted and tagged in their Shade drive, drags clips into Premiere, and starts cutting immediately, scrubbing through 6K footage as if it were local. Meanwhile, a producer in New York searches “CEO discusses quarterly targets” and instantly finds the exact 18-second moment within hours of raw footage. No manual tagging, no file handoffs, no waiting for uploads. Just seamless collaboration across time zones.
Larry: How are your services priced?
Brandon: We charge based on storage and seats. It starts at pricing tier for small teams, scales up from there. No hidden fees, and no overages for collaboration features.
Larry: To wrap-up, write a one paragraph commercial for why someone should consider using Shade.inc?
Brandon: If you’re tired of juggling three tools to do one job, Shade’s for you. We built the platform we wished existed—fast enough to edit 6K footage like it’s on a local drive, smart enough to find any clip with a simple search, and collaborative enough that your team in three time zones stays in perfect sync. We’re also introducing automations that will completely transform media workflows—repetitive tasks that used to take hours now happen automatically in the background. Stop fighting your infrastructure and get back to being creative with Shade.
Larry: Brandon, thank you for your time. For folks that want to learn more, the Shade website is: https://shade.inc
