Sanbila for motion designers

Source plates in the cloud, AE renders archived, Premiere edits responsive.

What slows down a motion design pipeline

Source plates from clients arrive in five different formats and codecs in the same week.
After Effects renders pile up at 100 GB per project, multiplied across iterations and client reviews.
Premiere edits reference the AE renders, so deleting old renders to free disk breaks the timeline.
A workstation SSD hits its cap after two months of project archives unless you ship everything to a slow NAS.

How Sanbila fits a motion design pipeline

Upload the client plates to Sanbila the moment they arrive. After Effects opens the plates from the virtual folder through symlinks, renders the intermediate ProRes locally, and Sanbila uploads the render back to the cloud automatically when you save the output to the project folder. The workstation SSD keeps only the current iteration. Premiere references the cloud render through the same virtual folder, so a final cut review opens any version of any render without hunting through old project archives. When a client circles back after three months, the source plates and every render iteration are still indexed, browsable and ready.

Recommended plan

Motion design studios usually need the Studio plan at 199 USD per month for the ten terabytes of storage and the three-user collaboration cap. A single project with twenty AE compositions and five render iterations can land at one terabyte alone, and Studio holds ten such projects in active rotation. Enterprise becomes relevant when the team grows past three motion designers or when the archive of past commercials passes ten terabytes.

Recommended workflows

ProRes 422 workflow in Premiere Pro

ProRes 422 is the codec broadcast and corporate teams pick when they need a clean intermediate without going RAW. A Sony FX6 in UHD at 25p writes around 250 GB per hour at ProRes 422 HQ. Premiere Pro reads ProRes natively on macOS and Windows, but the disk fills fast. Sanbila stores the originals on Cloudflare R2, generates a lighter proxy on your machine and lets Premiere stream the ProRes back for the final export.

H.264 workflow in Final Cut Pro

H.264 is the codec almost every prosumer camera writes by default. Sony A7S III, Canon R5, DJI Mavic, GoPro Hero, iPhone 17 Pro: they all ship H.264 or HEVC variants. Final Cut Pro reads H.264 natively on Apple Silicon, but a long-form documentary cut from 40 hours of source still puts pressure on the SSD. Sanbila stores the H.264 originals on Cloudflare R2 and uses Final Cut's optimized media or a Sanbila ProRes Proxy on the local SSD to keep the magnetic timeline responsive.

Sanbila by the numbers

Real specs from the live Sanbila product, not marketing claims.

NLEs supported (Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, Avid)

Proxy presets — from 540p H.264 to 1080p DNxHR LB

File formats supported (MP4, MOV, MXF, R3D, BRAW, WAV…)

85%

Average disk savings vs editing on 4K originals

Egress fees on Cloudflare R2 — stream originals at zero cost

Parallel R2 connections on macOS (4 on Windows / Linux), 4 MB block cache

Motion designer questions

Does After Effects work directly from the Sanbila virtual folder?

Yes. After Effects opens the source plates from the virtual folder through symlinks that look like local files. The proxies are not needed for AE compositions since AE works on the full-resolution source for accurate render output.

How do AE renders get back into Sanbila without manual upload?

The render output folder lives inside the project virtual folder. Save the AE render there and Sanbila picks up the new file and uploads it to R2 in the background. The render is immediately available to Premiere and to any other team member with access to the project.

Can two motion designers work in parallel on the same campaign?

Yes on Studio or Enterprise. Each designer opens the same virtual folder on their workstation, generates their proxies locally, and shares the source plates and final renders through Sanbila. After Effects projects stay per-designer because AE does not support concurrent writes, but the media is shared.