Over the years, Universal Pictures has tried several solutions from various vendors. Some of the digital delivery methods required several weeks of set-up time as well as extensive training for each new crew, and were not able to adapt to the different facilities’ bandwidth constraints or perform on commodity hardware.  

Universal Pictures adopted Aspera Faspex for their global post production process to meet their short deployment timelines, scalability, high security and ease-of-use standards. Production teams now use the email-style interface for distributing and exchanging massive files and directories, and integrated email notifications let team members know content was delivered successfully and is available. 

“Aspera is now our approved standard for transferring content around the world,” notes John Toal, director, post production content security at Universal Pictures. “Before Aspera, each time we started production on a new film, we had to spend a great deal of time setting up the system and training new crew members on the file transfer process. Because of Aspera’s intuitive interface and set-up, new users simply go to a web page, click, drag and drop. It couldn’t be easier. We can quickly configure the system, use it for the six-month production lifecycle, and then cycle it back into use as the next post production teams need it.”