erin white, director of content and data security at digitalfilm tree (dft), spoke recently about geopost, dft’s secure, cloud based infrastructure for storing camera masters and supporting post teams from dailies through final delivery.

since 2016 dft and its founder, ramy katrib have served as tip of the spear in leading the migration to cloud services. while other facilities have begun to capitalize on the term “camera-to-cloud,” dft has truly been equipped with six petabytes of storage to embolden storytellers around the world, with access to their media at any time with collaborators, anywhere.

“every second matters,” said katelyn hollenbeck, co-producer of ted lasso, in this season’s episode of the drop: camera raw in the cloud. with geopost giving shows the ability to access all of their masters from dailies to finishing, every department including promo and vfx can run at hyper speed, while being supported by dft’s entire team, including scott bradbury, cto, thomas gaylon, senior colorist, and our 24 hour, tpn certified team of creative technologists.

silvia spinelli, dft’s finishing producer, has also long evangelized its efficiency because she has been on the vendor side – she worked on multiple shows, including seasons one and two of ted lasso, at the now shuttered level 3 post and would receive material within a few hours. “it saved so much space and time for us,” shared spinelli. “it got to the point where even i didn’t have to navigate promo for the show because it was that much faster for geopost to get camera masters to them once katelyn gave the okay.”

in normal post timelines, processing camera raw for delivery to the client (be it editorial, color, promo or vfx) is anywhere from 24-72 business hours. that stems from most post houses storing dailies to lto and only lto, so those days are really to give their team time to unarchive the media from ltos, package it to your need and send. it can be a lot of unnecessary waiting for a deck to be free, locating the media (physically and digitally if not from a manifest), and then packaging to spec.

geopost’s affirmation of a 12-36 hour window (and often times less) is thanks to dft’s 6pb (six petabytes!) of storage. we truly store and process materials with completely unique workflows per show from dailies to finish leveraging a mix of human wisdom and proprietary automations to get editorial what they need on day one, through to your final day trimmed vam or promo delivery. it doesn’t matter the camera or the location, we’ve got you covered in the cloud.