Kandji vs Rippling IT for a Commercial Video Production Studio

A client handing over a feature-length raw footage drive wants to know who can access it and when it gets deleted. Device management doesn't solve the whole problem, but it solves the part that lives on company hardware: enforced disk encryption on every edit bay Mac, a record of which machine a project's media was copied to, and the ability to remote-wipe a machine if it's lost or stolen mid-project. What it can't do is track a freelancer's personal external drive once they walk out the door with it, which is a policy and contract problem, not a device management one.

For a studio where every edit bay is a Mac, Kandji's native controls fit the workflow directly: FileVault encryption enforced on every machine that touches client media, Blueprints that push the same color-management and storage-mount settings to a new edit bay without a manual setup pass, and zero-touch enrollment through Apple Business Manager so a freshly purchased Mac Studio is ready for the next hire before it's out of the box. None of that extends to a PC, so a studio that also runs Windows machines for finance or a few specialized plugins will need something else for those.

A studio with heavy freelance turnover has an onboarding and offboarding problem that repeats every few weeks, not every few years. Rippling IT's tie between HR records and device access means a freelancer added for a two-month project can be granted a company laptop and system access with a defined end date, and have both cut off automatically when the contract closes, rather than depending on a producer to remember at wrap. It also covers the Windows machines a lot of studios run for accounting, traffic, and delivery, which Kandji simply can't touch.

Say a six-week commercial project wraps on a Friday. The editor was a freelancer using a studio-owned MacBook Pro loaded with the client's raw footage and project files. With device management tied to their contract end date, the laptop's access can be revoked and the machine wiped and reimaged that same day, and the client can be told, accurately, that the footage no longer exists on studio hardware. Without it, that wipe depends on someone remembering to do it manually, which is exactly the kind of step that slips when the next project starts Monday.

To close out a project cleanly, work through these steps:

1. Tie the freelancer's device access to their contract end date from the start of the project.
2. On the day the project wraps, revoke the laptop's access so the freelancer can no longer open project files.
3. Wipe and reimage the studio-owned machine that same day, clearing the raw footage and project files.
4. Tell the client, accurately, that the footage no longer exists on company hardware.

Most studios keep raw footage on a shared server or cloud storage system rather than locally on an edit bay, in which case the device's job is mostly to hold cached proxies and project files temporarily. If that's your setup, device management matters most for the drive cache and any local exports, while access control on the storage system itself is doing the heavier lifting on who can see a client's raw footage in the first place. Don't expect Kandji or Rippling IT to replace a storage permissions review.

A studio big enough to be juggling several concurrent projects sometimes considers bringing on a dedicated technical operations hire instead of paying for Kandji or Rippling IT. It's worth pricing that out honestly first: national wage data puts the median salary for a software developer, admittedly a different role but a reasonable proxy for the technical hire many studios actually post for, at $135,980 a year¹, well above what either platform costs for a studio-sized fleet. That doesn't mean a technical hire is the wrong move for a growing studio, but it does mean the comparison should be against the real cost of a salary, not against doing nothing.