For indie filmmakers and small post teams
Supercharge video editing off your NAS.
The open-source alternative to LucidLink, Suite, Shade, and Iconik. $0 per seat, no storage contract.
Open source · macOS 14+ · runs on the NAS you already have (TrueNAS, Synology, QNAP, any Docker box)
blocks, not files
Your files become blocks. That's the magic.
Most tools treat a video file as one object: to touch any of it, you move all of it. JuiceMount stores every file on your NAS as 4 MB blocks (JuiceFS's open, documented format), and blocks travel independently.
One object: sync tools, downloads
Need three seconds from the middle? The whole 8 GB crosses first.
Blocks: JuiceMount
The same three seconds: three blocks, 12 MB. The rest never move.
the magic, part two
Drag the playhead. Watch what caches.
One hypothetical 100 GB clip, drawn twice: the strip your NLE shows you on your Mac, and the ~4 MB blocks it lives in on your NAS. Scrub the strip, and the blocks you touch page in over the dashed lines, land in the SSD cache row, and stay there. Then switch models and watch what a whole-file sync tool has to move instead.
A001_C002_0212RM.braw100 GB
Move the playhead; only the blocks under it page in.
instant search
Find any file in about 29 ms.
Press ⌘⇧F from any app. The search window answers from an index that lives on your Mac; it never has to ask the NAS. Spacebar gives you Quick Look, Enter reveals in Finder, and you can drag a result straight into a Premiere, Resolve, or Final Cut timeline.
JuiceMount
Filename search across ~131,000 entries answered in ~29 ms: the index is SQLite on your own SSD, so there's no round trip to wait for.
A plain SMB share
Finder has no index of the NAS, so it crawls the directory tree entry by entry over the network. On a project with 100,000+ items it's the spinner you know, and SMB on TrueNAS or Synology isn't tuned for fast metadata lookups, so even a quick LAN doesn't save you: the walk is the cost, not the bandwidth.
a real mount
It's a real mount.
Your NAS shows up in Finder the way a drive does, because to macOS, it is one. Watch it mount.
Favorites
- Recents
- Desktop
- Movies
Locations
- Mac Studio
- JuiceMount
- Network
It mounts at /Volumes/JuiceMount, a real path.
Premiere and Resolve link media by path.
Your teammate mounts the same volume: same paths. Nobody relinks.
the cockpit · how you drive it
You drive it from the menu bar.
The NAS-side stack does the heavy lifting; the menu bar is where you drive it: start or stop the server, pin a project for offline, run a sync, and flip offline mode when the network drops. One glance at the status dot says whether it's running, syncing, degraded, or disconnected. These are the controls the app actually ships.
Speed, resilience, and ownership, without picking two
A plain SMB share round-trips every read. Self-hosted sync owns the bytes but moves whole files. Storage SaaS streams blocks but bills forever. JuiceMount is the missing combination.
Fast because it's your LAN
Tested up to 10 GbE: roughly 7 Gbit/s in both directions, author-measured.
Built for the day the network is gone
Pin a project and the files fly with you: keep cutting on a plane. When the network is gone, the app says so instead of beachballing Finder.
Software is free; the hardware is yours
Open source, Apache-2.0: $0 per seat, $0 per TB, forever, on the NAS you already own (TrueNAS, Synology, QNAP).
All of it runs on the NAS you already have. TrueNAS SCALE is the production-tested path (paste-the-YAML install), and anything that runs Docker works: Synology DSM 7+, QNAP, Unraid, or a plain Linux box. The setup guide walks every step.
Performance figures are the author's measurements on his own Apple-Silicon Mac ↔ TrueNAS rig, not independent benchmarks. Methodology, workload scripts, and the regression harness are public.
And your footage stays safe and yours: writes ack locally and re-send after a crash, metadata is backed up hourly, and the on-disk format is open, so you can always read your own bytes. How your data stays safe · your bytes, your exit.