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July/August 2019

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www.postmagazine.com 38 POST JULY/AUG 2019 CASE STUDY few years ago, when Nathan Ross decided to start his own post production company, the most valuable thing he had was insight. After graduat- ing film school in Australia, he'd spent 10 years working for production and distri- bution companies in LA, during one of the most disruptive decades the industry had seen. Advances in image resolution, IP and cloud technologies have all transformed the content production and distribution process, as well as the way media com- panies work together. Today, large and mid-size companies regularly outsource post to smaller studios that can keep their costs down. And thanks to modern technology, it doesn't really matter where those smaller companies are located. What does matter is their expertise. So, when Ross founded Blackwater Digital Services just outside of Atlanta, GA, to specialize in post production, encoding and worldwide delivery, one of the first things he spent money on was Signiant's Media Shuttle, which allowed him to be able to work more easily with clients who were located all over the world. FILE SHARING Media Shuttle is Signiant's SaaS solution for secure, high-speed file movement between people around the world. After only a few years in business, Blackwater is thriving, with clients on both US coasts, the Midwest and overseas. "When I started my own company, Media Shuttle was definitely one of the first things I spent money on," explains Ross, who is both founder & CEO of Blackwater. Ross had prior experience with Media Shuttle. He'd used it with various companies, but really got to know the solution at Vision Films, where he was responsible for deploying and adminis- tering Shuttle. However, he still did his due diligence before acquiring a sub- scription for his new company. Ross explains that other systems he had looked at weren't able to offer the same benefits as Media Shuttle. They were "extremely expensive and not as user friendly on the back end as Media Shuttle. That led me back to Media Shuttle. It was kind of a no brainer to stick with Shuttle for lots of reasons." FTP WAS A NOT AN OPTION FTP-based solutions are still remark- ably common in early-stage media startups, but Ross realized that having a secure solution that can handle large files quickly and reliably was a first-or- der business need. Most modern media workflows have files well over 1GB in size, and if you're working with HD films and episodic series, files are generally in the hundred-Gig range and larger. Without acceleration technology, FTP- based solutions are impractically slow when moving anything over 500MB. FTP is also prone to data loss and corrup- tion, not to mention well-known security holes. That's why many larger companies have effectively banned FTP, requiring post studios they work with to use solu- tions like Media Shuttle. Blackwater regularly works with clients across the Atlantic, over notori- ously shaky Internet connections. Like other solutions in its class, Media Shuttle has the ability to automatically resume file transfers if an Internet connection is disrupted without any corruption or loss of data. But a poor connection still slows THE KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL MEDIA STARTUP LAUNCH A SIGNIANT'S MEDIA SHUTTLE HELPS POWER TRANSATLANTIC CLIENT WORKFLOWS FOR BLACKWATER DIGITAL SERVICES Signiant's Media Shuttle is a SaaS solution that's designed for secure, high-speed file movement.

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