By Ashley Hall, Growth & Customer Success Partner, CREE8
I spend a lot of my time helping teams build cloud workflows, but supporting the Tiree Windsurfing Wave Classic was one of the most interesting live sports projects I have been involved in.
Tiree is a tiny island on the far edge of Scotland. Beautiful, wild, and known for windsurfing that attracts athletes from all over the world. It also happens to be one of the most remote inhabited places in the UK, with limited bandwidth and no post-production infrastructure. Not exactly the place you would expect to run a cloud based production.
Which is why Executive Producer Sam Usher called me.
He wanted to do something that had never been done there before; A fully cloud based camera to cloud workflow for the entire event. No drives. No couriers. No days of delay. Just capture, send, and start cutting.
The Problem: Too Much Risk and Too Much Waiting
Sam told me how previous years worked. Cameras would fill up with footage, drives would get labelled and packed, and someone would rush them to the ferry. After that, it became a waiting game. Sometimes the drives arrived late. Sometimes they got damaged. Sometimes the weather shut the island off completely.
“In the past, we relied on editors on site and then had to move media off the island, and it always felt like there was increasing cost and risk,” Sam said.
This year, he wanted a cleaner way to work. A way to keep his editors cutting while the event was still unfolding, even if those editors were hundreds or thousands of miles away.
That is where CREE8 came in.
The Solution: Stream Directly Into the Cloud
We planned a pipeline that would let Sam’s team send footage straight from the island into CREE8 as it was being captured. Here is how it worked.
Multiple cameras streamed directly into our ingest pipeline with CREE8’s custom Unsegmented Growing File Technology (UGFT) which meant the editors could open the timeline instantly and begin cutting while the recording was still in progress.
No ingest delay. No proxy workflow. No stitching clips into a timeline. Just immediate access to full quality growing media.
“What impressed me most was how quickly we were cutting in a totally different country,” Sam said. “My editors were working from England and Spain, but it felt like they were right there with the crew.”
The Creative Flow Stayed Unbroken
From my position supporting the team remotely, I could see the momentum building. Footage leaving the island within seconds and editors dropping markers the moment something interesting happened.
Sponsor edits delivered the same day and clips hitting social channels before the sun went down.
There were no delays. No “drive hasn’t arrived yet” panic. No lost media. Everything happened inside one environment, and everyone could see the same shots as they came in.
The Results: Faster, Cheaper, Safer
The numbers tell the story clearly.
- Daily content delivered within hours
- Social and sponsor clips delivered same day
- Zero drives shipped
- Zero data loss
- Post time reduced by more than 45 percent
- Environmental impact significantly reduced, with no physical media transport
But the real win was the creative flow.
The entire team stayed in sync because no-one waited for files and so we never lost momentum. Everyone worked as one connected unit.
Why This Matters
Tiree proved that cloud production is not just for studios with big budgets. It is for any team that wants to move faster and remove the old friction points that slow creativity down.
You do not need a full facility or OB truck, nor do you need lots of local storage. You just need a way to get from camera to editor without the delays.
From remote islands, to stadiums, to live events anywhere in the world, the same principle applies. The faster you can move your footage into a connected workspace, the faster your team can tell the story.
Tiree showed that creative workflows no longer have borders. They only have opportunities.
And any teams that embrace this will move faster than everyone else.