Move Faster: Future-Proofing Post Production & VFX in the Age of Data Everywhere

"Better, faster, cheaper—pick all three." How forward-thinking studios defy impossible production demands by turning the technical challenge of data movement into a competitive advantage.

Studios face unprecedented challenges as content volume explodes and disperses across global creative teams. Forward-thinking studio owners are turning this "data everywhere" challenge into a strategic advantage through innovative infrastructure and workflow design approaches.

"The general joke has always been better, faster, cheaper, pick any two," said Tom Taylor, founder of Gunpowder Tech and former CTO for The Mill. "Nowadays, you absolutely have to account for all three. "What's driving this shift? According to the industry experts who gathered at NAB 2025, the landscape has been transformed by several key factors.

Industry Fragmentation and Consolidation

Tom Taylor, whose systems integration company specializes in cloud migrations, has observed a significant fragmentation of the traditional production model.

"We're seeing a lot of these larger organizations fragment and split up movies and shots all around the world," Tom explained. "We're servicing a movie at the moment with about 25 vendors. So we're having to figure out how to split data off between those vendors, send files back and forth with them in a realistic timeframe, and make sure they get back to the daily review that happens every single day."

Cost pressures and talent availability primarily drive this fragmentation. "People are constantly looking to be hyper-efficient because every percentage you save is a percentage in your pocket," Tom noted. "Without having big overheads at large studios, large offices, large departments, you can spin up a company with very capable creatives and do quality work at a fraction of the cost."

Content Expansion Across Platforms

Meanwhile, Tim Llewellyn, Head of CG at Atomic Cartoons, is experiencing what he describes as "consolidation and expansion at the same time."

"With the advent of streaming, a lot of what we end up getting from our clients is that they want things to look like Pixar, but cheaper, better, and faster," Tim explained. "And then, when you're working on kids' cartoons, you have the expansion that's going to end up coming from toys and games."



This multi-platform approach to content has fundamentally changed how media assets need to be managed. "We have to build for the show, but now we also have to worry about taking those assets and delivering them back and forth with partners so it eventually can get to the toy with the same geometry. From there, it goes to game development."

The Latency Challenge

For distributed teams working on media production, latency remains the most significant technical hurdle.

"Latency is always the worst part," said Robert Crowther, IT Manager at Atomic Cartoons. "Getting those assets where the artists are, so it's the least impactful for their remote workflow, is crucial, because it shouldn't matter where they are."

Tom Taylor elaborated on the challenge: "You get two choices. One, you can either bring the artists to the data and centralize them with virtual workstations, which works fine up to a point. Once somebody breaks the 80-100 milliseconds of distance, the artists start noticing it. The only other option then is to sync that data to remote sites."

The impact of latency on productivity can be substantial. Robert shared a concrete example: "For our own tests, we have 75 milliseconds of latency between Vancouver and Ottawa. If we open up a large Photoshop file, it would take five minutes in Ottawa. If you did it locally in Ottawa, it would take about 45 seconds."

"Traditionally, with an incumbent transfer system, we would've had to go out and spend millions of dollars on licensing and equipment. With Resilio, we've managed to drastically reduce the footprint of the hardware [our customer needs] to purchase. We're seeing 200 gigabits a second between regions. It's absolutely wild."Tom Taylor, Gunpowder Tech

Workflow Gains Through Hybrid Design

Both companies have discovered that combining on-premises systems with cloud services offers the most effective solution for today's production challenges:

• Artists can work across multiple locations while maintaining access to the same assets

• Teams can continue collaborating during internet outages by accessing local storage

• Projects can start faster by having assets pre-positioned where they're needed

• Production data remains accessible to both local and remote team members

"Atomic has three different locations at the moment. We're in Vancouver, Ottawa, and LA, and we're constantly syncing data back and forth," Robert explained. "If you wanted to move 150 terabytes of data, that would take a week, but if we can have them remote in or already have the data over there, that wouldn't even be a problem."

The Technical Edge

Rather than forcing all work through purely cloud-based or purely on-premises systems, Gunpowder and Atomic Cartoons are implementing hybrid storage approaches.

‍Selective synchronization
‍"What you don't want to do is pick up your whole one petabyte of data and sync it to all your remote sites," Tom explained. "You want to narrow it down and have a pipeline that's aware of all the subtrees and assets used to build that scene and just sync that data as quickly as humanly possible."

‍Preemptive caching
‍"Because there's a good chance that within your Shotgun or job production system, you know which shots are going to be active that day," Tom noted. "You can preemptively sync those things the night before to make sure that when that artist comes and opens Photoshop, it's already there locally cached."

‍Peer-to-peer acceleration
‍"With Resilio and their new flexible file caching system, you basically insert a layer in front of a render node," Tom said. "If you spin up 200 render nodes, they're all going to request that same file 200 times, which is going to hammer your link. Resilio's scale-up NAS is a direct drop replacement that takes advantage of their accelerated peer-to-peer protocol in the background."

The results have been impressive. "We've done one-to-one shootouts between Knfsd and Resilio Active Everywhere for that specific reason, and we've seen the time to first pixel reduced by 20x, so we're getting our renders back much, much faster," Tom stated.

Cost Control Through Hybrid Management

The hybrid storage approach has helped studios manage costs more effectively than pure cloud solutions would allow. They leverage:

• Existing on-premises infrastructure for high-bandwidth tasks

• Cloud services for collaboration and remote access

• Strategic data synchronization that moves only the files that are needed

• Automated workflows to manage data movement between systems

"Being hypercritical on how much you're storing, on why you're storing it, and how many versions you're tracking" is essential, according to Tom. "How long your workstations are running, how many render nodes you're running, specifically if you're looking in the cloud, you can rack up a decent bill relatively quickly, so you just need controls and management."

Robert added: "We're definitely looking at ways we can help optimize our current storage usage, whether it's storing things in different locations, or determining what to archive into AWS on a per-episode basis."

Cloud Economics

The NAB 2025 session addressed the controversial question of whether the economics of cloud-based production have changed for the worse.

"I think for us, the hybrid is the reality now. I don't think we will go back towards being on-prem," Tim stated emphatically.

Robert agreed: "We have to stay at least hybrid for some workflows. There's definitely going to be some things where it's much better to be able to burst our resources when we need to. If a client comes back with a change we weren't expecting, we can get that out the door within time."

Tom offered a nuanced perspective: "I think it's important to pick who you're working with in terms of who's helping you do the integration. It took us a good three years to figure out how to get the finances to stack up for companies. Looking at a list price and comparing it to going out and buying a computer isn't apple for apples at all."

The Resilio Advantage

Both companies highlighted how Resilio Active Everywhere has transformed their approach to data management.

"We're working on a very large project at the moment with massive files. Seventeen minutes of footage is around 45 terabytes of data," Tom shared. "Traditionally, with their incumbent transfer system, we would've had to go out and spend millions of dollars on licensing and equipment. With Resilio, we've managed to drastically reduce the footprint of the hardware they need to purchase. We're seeing 200 gigabits a second between regions. It's absolutely wild."

Robert emphasized the support aspect: "Working with the Resilio support team and the developers has been refreshing. If you touch base with them, nothing's out of bounds. When we first joined on, there was a feature that wasn't there originally, and we said, 'That's pretty key for us.' Within two weeks, we had the first iteration of it. With the previous company we were using, we had feature requests in for three years, and none of them were addressed."

Tim added: "The fact that we've been able to have access to data and been able to give it to artists quicker has been mind-blowing as we've switched to Resilio Active Everywhere. That has allowed us to empower artists more, which is ultimately what we want to do."

Looking Forward

As these companies prepare for future projects, they expand their hybrid capabilities with new synchronization strategies and more intelligent data management. They see this approach as essential for balancing increasing demands with practical reliability.

"Production's going to go wherever it's cheapest and wherever it benefits the client the most," Tim reflected. "Being able to remain as dynamic as possible is crucial."

Tom concluded with an optimistic outlook: "I've seen the most unbelievable things achieved from companies who are based solely in the cloud. I've also seen the most unbelievable things achieved from companies who can burst into the cloud. I genuinely feel that one way or another, the cloud is here to stay. Whether it's burst or whether it's 100%, time will tell, but it's a fact at the moment."