How Post-Producer Cameron Angeli Cut Project Timelines By Up to 90% With MASV

Who is Cameron Angeli?

Cameron Angeli is a Los Angeles-based freelance post producer for high-end TV series and former head of post-production at Starz. He has worked on projects such as Poker Face, Black Sails, Power, and Cowboy Bebop, and is responsible for all aspects of post-production and production technology.

Angeli regularly consults with entertainment organizations to improve their media workflows and business processes. Oh, and he’s also a university physics major and has been an electronic music DJ for 20-plus years. 

“I treat everything I do as a way to try and learn something new,” he explains. “It all comes back to problem-solving: Can we come up with a cool way to make this fun, and then learn something in the process?”

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The Challenge: File Transfer That Kept Getting in the Way

Angeli has used a ton of different file transfer and sharing tools over the years, from Google Drive to Aspera. He needed a more reliable, flexible, and less expensive solution with easy API connectivity to tools he was already using, such as Frame.io and Google Drive.

“We just weren't happy with any of the products we were trying,” he explains, “and we were trying to find something that had more integration capabilities.” 

Angeli faced several file transfer challenges prior to using MASV:

• Firewall conflicts: “There are some facilities where I cannot get Aspera or other transfer systems to work, because their firewall is set a certain way. You might get it fixed, and then something changes. You're spending the entire season dealing with tech issues.” 
• Broken automation: “In general, Aspera apps and automation don't work great – we've had a lot of issues where it just sort of stops, or something gets updated and it doesn't work, or the plugin doesn't open properly.”  
• Failed transfers: Trying to move multi-layered EXR files of two to three TBs through tools like Google Drive resulted in corrupted files, failed uploads, and wasted time.
• Needless complexity: “I would say one of the biggest pain points is the functionality. Does it work when you click on the download button? How complicated is it to open the app? How complicated is it to get files out of it?”
• Inflexible pricing: Giving external access to a platform like Frame.io using other transfer options was expensive and time-consuming, especially when collaborators changed mid-project. Requirements for annual subscriptions made it hard to scale.

The Solution: Flexible, Reliable Transfer That Doesn’t Charge Per Seat

Angeli found MASV after searching for file transfer that wouldn’t create a ton of extra work (or cost extra) just so a one-off collaborator could upload footage to his team’s Frame.io. 

Transfer that works without firewall issues

Facility firewalls often block UDP-based tools like Aspera because these solutions require additional open ports, causing recurring disruptions that are difficult to diagnose and fix (including transfers failing overnight without warning).

MASV doesn’t require extra open ports and runs on port 443, which supports HTTPS and is the same secure port used for online banking. 

“We haven’t had any firewall problems with MASV,” he says. 

Simple and reliable automations and integrations

Angeli says issues with broken or deprecated automations – which made tools like Aspera impossible to trust for consistent, hands-off pipeline use – evaporated after implementing MASV.  

Integrating MASV with the tools he already uses, such as Frame.io and Google Drive, and setting up automations to get files from Portals to those destinations was easy and fast. 

Angeli says he hasn’t yet encountered a single issue in terms of MASV automations breaking or needing to be reconfigured.  

Relentlessly reliable transfers, even for massive files

Angeli solved issues around failed transfers with MASV, which utilizes a reliable global edge network of 750-plus servers, infinite auto-retries in case of interruption, checkpoint restart so retries never start from zero, and checksum verification to ensure data integrity. 

“We tried for two weeks to get things to work through Google Drive. It was taking forever to upload files, and random frames would be either corrupted or just never show up. Within a day and a half, we solved the problem with MASV.” 

Easy-to-use custom upload Portals for collaborators

Complexity issues for collaborators became a thing of the past after implementing MASV, making it easy for external parties to get up to speed quickly without technical support. 

“Portals are super self-explanatory. I don’t think we ever had an issue,” he says, adding that MASV Custom Forms allow uploaders to add metadata upon upload. “We just sent them a link. Because we made a custom upload portal, we were able to add specific information and instructions about our show and how we work.”

Portals are free to create, and Angeli spins up one for every external team he works with to keep incoming footage inherently organized. 

No per-seat fees and flexible pricing

MASV Portals instantly allowed Angeli to add collaborators without financial penalties. All he needed to do was send them a link to a MASV Portal, and they could start uploading files via drag-and-drop without a MASV login. “Portals really solved that problem for us,” he says. 

“We have folders in Frame.io that represent people or groups in the project, and having seats for all of them would be really expensive,” he adds. 

MASV’s flexible, usage-based pricing helps him scale up and down for new projects without overprovisioning resources.

“That’s very helpful when you're trying to ramp up a new show,” he says. “We don't know how many users we're going to have. We don't know how much data we're going to create. We need to test the waters, but most providers don't make it very easy to do that.”

The Result: Solving Transfer Problems and Accelerating Timelines With a Flexible, Cost-Effective Tool

Angeli says MASV solved most of his project-based transfer problems – from eliminating expensive subscriptions and per-seat fees, to needless complexity, to firewall problems, to failed transfers and broken automation. 

Saving weeks of time on transfer projects over other solutions, like Google Drive, certainly doesn’t hurt, either – along with saving money through usage-based pricing and no user fees. 

"One of the main things I look for in a transfer tool is: is it priced in a way that allows it to be flexible for us? Most of these tools are structured for enterprise companies,” he says. “I really appreciate the ability to find a tool or people that understand that, so that we can structure something in a way that actually benefits small business."