Media quality is crucial for all creatives. As a former social media manager, Air made the transferability of media a breeze without having to use something like Google Drive to store data.I’ll be using this to store my own video assets. Very easy to use. It’s great for creative entrepreneurs who work solo or with a team/freelancers.
Overall I think Air is doing great things by challenging the status quo for cloud storage services. Their focus on file management and powerful search features are welcomed for many types of creative work.
I feel the service has much more room for improvement, particularly with video. Videos take way too long to process, and in a fast-paced world where clients want review links ASAP, waiting additional time while a video is processing is not ideal.
Videos don't take any time to process on Dropbox, as once you've uploaded the video, it's ready to review. I would love to see that same speed brought over to Air.
Another minor issue I have is with the apps/extensions Air offers. Air Flow (an equivalent to Dropbox Sync) is good, but I cannot easily share links from within Finder. This can be done from Dropbox within Finder, whereas with Air Flow I have to go to the web app and then generate a link to share.
There's also an Air plugin for Premiere Pro, but it is very clunky and almost pointless. It feels like this was added so marketing has one more "feature," but I genuinely wonder if anyone from Air has tested it to see how it works. It lets you download assets within Premiere, but assets do not get imported into Premiere, nor can I upload assets from Premiere to it. I would much rather use the web app or Air Flow since they do the same thing but are more robust. I think that would be a huge selling point over Dropbox for a lot of video editors since the idea of being able to add and download files from the cloud to Premiere is something I would use daily.
Again, Air is a great product and seems to be heading in the right direction. If you are a creative not dealing primarily with video assets, Air is probably the best option for you. But for those of us who have video-heavy workflows, Dropbox still seems like the best option for now.
My contacts and I can testify for how useful this platform is. Sharing is easy and free, storage is ample especially since I don't have copies of things everywhere. Search is amazing and being able to search visually is a great feature. I can do everything with my team right in Air, and the new Slack notifications are awesome.
