Case Study: How Zaki Rose Rebuilt Its Production Infrastructure, and What It Means for Sports Content Creators

The creative studio behind campaigns for the NBA, Fanatics Sportsbook & Casino, and State Farm shares what it took to ditch physical drives and build a workflow that matches the pace of live sports.

When your 36-terabyte storage system gets hit with ransomware and every file locks behind an encrypted wall, you don't just rethink your backup strategy. You rethink everything.

That's the inflection point Zaki Rose reached a few years ago. The full-service creative studio, known for brand campaigns with the NBA, Fanatics Sportsbook, State Farm, Caesars Entertainment, and Pepsi, had built a production operation capable of handling major shoots, live event capture, and performance-driven content at scale. But underneath the polished output was a workflow that hadn't kept pace with the studio's growth.

It got hacked, said Samer Abou-Zaki, Senior Director of Production and Lead Editor at the studio. They left a note asking for half a Bitcoin. Everything was locked.

The incident forced a reset. But it also clarified something the team had been quietly grappling with for a while: the physical storage model - hard drives per shoot, Dropbox transfers, editors waiting on downloads before they could even open a project - wasn't built for the speed that sports and live event content now demands.

The Drive Problem Nobody Talks About

Before the ransomware incident, Zaki Rose was running what many mid-sized production companies still run today: a patchwork of physical storage and cloud transfer tools that technically works, right up until it doesn't.

At any given time, the studio had 30 to 40 external hard drives in circulation. Every new shoot meant a new drive. Editors who picked up a project mid-stream had to relink assets before they could start. Handing off to another editor meant exporting, transferring, waiting, then rebuilding the project architecture on the receiving end.

Turnarounds just started getting really tight, Samer said. If I have to pass over a project to another editor, they have to take all those assets and work on them right away where I left off. It just started to become unmanageable.

For sports content, which often lives and dies by how fast it can move from shoot to social, from event to edit bay, that model creates real competitive disadvantages. Clients working with leagues, betting platforms, and major sports brands don't want to hear that the content is still transferring.

Working From the Cloud, Not Through It

After the ransomware incident made local network storage feel untenable, Zaki Rose evaluated options and landed on LucidLink, a file-streaming platform that lets teams work directly from cloud storage as if it were a local drive, without downloading files first.

The distinction matters. Most cloud solutions require a full download before work begins. LucidLink's streaming approach means editors can start while uploads are still running, pre-cache projects to reduce lag, and access the same source files as every other team member simultaneously.

The shift started with a change in mindset, Samer explained. From downloading files to work, to working directly from shared storage.

For a studio that frequently juggles editing, design, animation, VFX, and social publishing across overlapping deadlines, that shift had compounding effects. Work that used to move in sequence -- from edit, then hand to social, then review, then post -- could now happen in parallel.

Live Events as the Proof Point

The clearest demonstration of what that architecture enables came during live event work, which is a production context where speed is absolute.

We had editors and a social team working side by side, Samer said. As soon as we exported content, it was instantly available to the social team. They could review, approve and post within minutes, and sometimes under ten minutes.

For anyone who has worked live sports content, that number lands differently. Ten minutes from export to post, with review and approval in between, is a workflow that used to require proximity, specialized hardware, or significant pre-event infrastructure setup. Here it was happening through a shared cloud environment accessed by people potentially in different locations.

That's not just an efficiency story. It's a capability story. Studios that can reliably hit that kind of turnaround can take on work, and clients that demand it.

What the Infrastructure Shift Unlocks

Wael Abou-Zaki, President and Head of Creative at the studio, frames the LucidLink implementation less as a storage fix and more as a collaboration upgrade.

We've seen increased efficiency and more refined collaboration, he said. We don't have to go back and forth anymore.

When editors, designers, motion artists, and social teams are all working from the same files in real time, with no version confusion, no duplicate assets, no chasing the latest , the creative process itself changes. Iteration gets faster. Feedback loops tighten. And the ability to take on larger, more complex productions doesn't require proportionally more coordination overhead.

For the sports production industry specifically, this architecture has direct implications. The live event cycle is getting faster. The window between capture and publish is compressing with athlete content, in-game social and real-time campaign reactions. Studios and production teams that want to compete at that level need infrastructure that doesn't create drag.

Looking Forward

Zaki Rose's next phase involves pushing further into VFX-heavy work and larger multi-team productions domestically and internationally working in parallel, which are the kind of projects that traditionally require extensive pre-production coordination just to align on file structure and asset access.

With a centralized, streaming-ba

LINK:	https://www.sportsvideo.org/2026/05/05/case-study-how-zaki-rose-rebuil...
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