Last month, we shut down PostLab Classic's servers. Time to look back and reflect on why we needed a new PostLab.

Since 2019, Postlab Classic brought the industry streamlined remote workflows, and defined a new way of working together that will never go away. We fondly remember when people emailed us about how PostLab made their projects possible.

But PostLab Classic also had shortcomings, things we couldn't work around without entirely new foundations.

Humble Beginnings

Invented by Jasper Siegers while working at a Dutch broadcaster, PostLab was born to make Final Cut Pro collaboration a reality. When Jasper joined us in 2019, feeling he needed help for the next phase of PostLab, we moved PostLab from NAS to the cloud, added support for Premiere Pro, and grew it into a trusted partner for thousands of editors, filmmakers, and creative teams worldwide.

However, over the years, it became clear we had to rethink PostLab to ensure it could be ready for the next decade.

First of all, PostLab Classic was not fast enough. It was being held back by what made it possible: the cloud.

Speed

For collaboration to work, you need a director to orchestrate all the musicians. PostLab's director lived in the cloud in the form of GitLab. When you collaborate through version control, many immediate changes happen all the time, resulting in a lot of data moving back and forth. All of that takes time—the closer you are to the servers, the faster, but it all adds up.

With a centralized director, there's always the matter of finding the optimum location for your team's servers. If your team is in Australia, the USA, or Europe, someone will constantly be experiencing less-than-optimal speed. Sure, you can throw money at the problem, but it's far from affordable. What if we could build a new PostLab that lives on top of affordable yet globally available storage like Dropbox or Storj?

The overhead of using the cloud for collaboration was illustrated by PostLab Local, our on-prem solution that used a self-hosted GitLab instance. The difference was night and day; running PostLab in-house was lightning-fast, removing all the refreshing and loading times. However, maintaining and securing a GitLab instance is not for the faint-hearted.

PostLab 2.0 lets you use the cloud only when it's needed. If used in-house, it shouldn't need to go online, and it doesn't require setting up and maintaining a server application; the clients should all talk to each other instead.

While this decentralized approach is still groundbreaking for software, we're pretty sure we'll see other apps follow suit as the world looks for ways to become less dependent on cloud services. With PostLab 2.0, it's become very simple to move in and out of the cloud without a vendor lock-in.

Binary Data

With PostLab Classic being built on top of GitLab, we were tied to the Git version control system. Git is built for programmers and, thus, for text. However, creatives don't work with text much; most files contain binary data.

Storing binary data in Git requires a lot of effort and storage space —you can't version it, so you just need to save all changes as is. We needed a version control system that works with binary data just as well as with text. This resulted in the invention of Turf, PostLab 2.0's shiny and new version control system.

While Turf has been rock-solid from the get-go, we did learn across 2024 that cloud storage isn't great at propagating heaps of file changes. Many cloud providers are built to sync large files and not change those files too often, let alone incrementally. With version control, that's the opposite; changes are continuous, and files are tiny.

While we knew this would be challenging, making Turf work with any cloud provider was a massive undertaking. It took us over a year to get it right, but we're finally there.

Sharing Media

2020 was a turning point for PostLab Classic. Pre-COVID, remote collaboration was a luxury. After January 2020, it was a necessity.

Within months, PostLab Classic managed the libraries for hundreds of teams, but what stood out during that first Summer Of COVID was that all of you also needed a way to share your media. Our collaboration with LucidLink made that possible: Drive was introduced in August and took off immediately.

Drive made cloud storage accessible to small teams that needed an easy way to share files without friction and without needing terabytes of data online. Many teams that were introduced to LucidLink via PostLab quickly found their way to their own filespace, exactly as we envisioned it.

However, Drive caused a duality; many new teams starting out with PostLab didn't understand that while the media had to live on Drive, the FCP libraries and Premiere Pro projects should not. For versioning to work correctly, there was a different mechanism in use. That wasn't only slightly confusing to some customers and even some people at LucidLink. Some started considering PostLab as a competitor instead of a partner, ultimately leading to LucidLink pulling the plug. It was not our choice, as Drive was a beloved platform, but also not our decision to make.

For the next PostLab, we didn't want to be tied to a single storage provider. We set out to make PostLab 2.0 work on all types of storage and cloud providers, with the versioning relying on the same storage as the media. Today, LucidLink, Dropbox, and Box have all been certified, and certification for Amove and Google Drive is underway.

Dropping the 2.0

Last week, we released PostLab 25.1 — the first release after a year filled to the brim with 18 updates. All improvements were built through feedback from all the teams that moved from PostLab Classic to PostLab 2.0.

It was a steep learning curve, with the most friction caused by our wish to be storage agnostic. Little did we know that cloud providers were so different from each other and that all needed a lot of hand-holding and safety nets when you started to put the pedal to the medal.

Postlab Classic may be gone, but its spirit lives on in everything we have learned and achieved. Postlab Classic hasn’t died; it fulfilled its purpose and made space for what has come next: PostLab 2.0.

Thank you for the ride 🙏