GtP Media's Hybrid Infrastructure Approach Makes Remote Collaboration Work for Political Advertising

When David Hamilton, production manager at GtP Media, faced the 2020 presidential campaign season, one challenge stood out—managing hundreds of terabytes of footage with a newly distributed workforce.

GtP Media is a full-service creative studio and media production house based in Arlington, VA. It typically handles over 500 video spots and hundreds of radio ads during election cycles.

When a major presidential campaign needed to process 30 terabytes of footage weekly during the 2020 election cycle amidst the pandemic, GtP Media faced a critical decision: fully embrace cloud services or develop a hybrid approach. The decision would impact not just their technology stack but their entire production workflow.

"We had editors who needed to work from home, clients who wanted to sit in edit suites, and footage that needed to be accessible 24/7," said David Hamilton, GtP Media's production manager. "The solution wasn't going to be one-size-fits-all."

GtP’s approach to this IT modernization challenge highlights the delicate balance media production companies must face between cloud services and on-premises infrastructure.

Workflow Gains Through Hybrid Design

The political media production house, which handles hundreds of spots per election cycle, discovered that combining on-premises systems with cloud services offered unexpected advantages:

• Editors could work from home while maintaining the same file structure they used in the office

• Teams could continue working during internet outages by accessing local storage

• The company could maintain its traditional client review sessions in-house while supporting remote collaboration

• Archive footage spanning decades remained accessible to both local and remote team members

"Our editors are putting in 12 to 14-hour days," David said. "Being with their family while maintaining full productivity has been transformative."David Hamilton, Production Manager at GtP Media

The Technical Edge

Rather than forcing editors to adapt to new cloud-based interfaces, GtP Media deployed network attached storage (NAS) devices to each editor's home. This approach eliminated performance bottlenecks and preserved existing workflows. When internet connectivity fails—a common occurrence with residential services—editors can continue working with local copies of their projects.

Adding Resilio’s peer-to-peer approach to file synchronization provided another unexpected benefit—editors with faster internet connections help distribute content to those with slower connections, reducing the load on the company's central servers.

“We have outfitted our editors with a tremendous amount of storage on their end,” David noted. “So we aren't shy about sending them high res material, terabytes of it, if they need it. Our main project directory is shared [using Resilio Active Everywhere] with all of our staff editors at all times. So if they have to move from one thing to another, there's no lag to download assets or anything like that or pull anything off the cloud. It's all right there.”

Cost Control Through Hybrid Management

The hybrid approach has helped GtP Media manage costs more effectively than a pure cloud solution would allow. The company leverages:

• Existing on-premises infrastructure for high-bandwidth tasks

• Cloud services for client review and archive access

• Tiered storage strategies that keep frequently used content readily available

• Automated synchronization to manage data movement between systems

"Usage-based cloud services sound predictable, but they're not. Our hybrid approach lets us leverage capital investments we've already made while still offering cloud capabilities to clients."David Hamilton, Production Manager at GtP Media

Client Benefits

The infrastructure transformation has enabled GtP Media to offer new services to political campaigns:

• Immediate access to historical footage spanning multiple election cycles

• Faster turnaround on breaking news responses

• Flexible review options, both in-person and remote

• More reliable delivery of time-sensitive content

"When you're cutting material from a speech that needs to go out immediately, it's not acceptable to have technical delays," David said. "Our hybrid system ensures we meet those demanding timelines."

Looking Forward

As GtP prepares for future election cycles, it's expanding its hybrid capabilities with new synchronization strategies and more intelligent data management. The company sees this approach as essential for balancing the increasing demands of political media production with practical reliability.

“We've sort of reached the inflection point for that, said David. “It's like cloud adoption, now moving away from tape-based, hard drive-based stuff. A lot of our clients realize how easy and cool it is to access their media at any time on the cloud. So that's the other thing, too, which Resilio conveniently helps us with as well—connecting our cloud resources to our servers on-site.”

“We've learned that the best technical solutions don't disrupt existing creative workflows," David concluded. "They enhance them in ways that feel natural to the team while opening new possibilities for our clients."