Interview with Mr Udhay, the Head of the Post-production from Rusk Media

For more than three years, Rusk Media has earned recognition from digitally native audiences around the world with a wealth of content on social channels. Entertainment content such as Playground and Alright! are viewed more than 500 million times a month.

In this interview, we are glad to invite Mr Udhay, the head of the post-production from Rusk Media, to discuss the technical development and file delivery in today’s media market.

Thank you very much for joining our interview. Could you please have a brief introduction of yourself first?

Hi Raysync! My name is Udhay. I'm from India. Now I'm working in Rusk Media. We have two offices in Mumbai and New Delhi. We are into content development like OTT (over-the-top) platform and UGC-gaming platform and creating content for other India's famous platforms.

All right, as head of the post production of Rusk Media, what is your department's Day to day workflow?

Now we are into digital media. We will produce a lot of content for the media platform every month, about 8 episodes per month, and 2-3 hours for various channels and platforms.

How long does post production usually take for an episode?

Usually, it takes three to five days. It depends on our target like the content delivery time. It also depends on the budget, the platform, and quality requirements.

What challenges have you and your team encountered during post production?

The media technology is going up within the last three years, now we can achieve 4k, 6k, and 8k. But technically in post-production, we are rely on HD proxy format. The reason is the bandwidth, whenever the technology improves, the bandwidth going to be increased. But the infrastructure that we have worldwide, we have a problem accommodating 4K or 6k workflow, because the data size is increased, too.

Those bring problems to post-production studio like us, our challenge is how we use the 4K data in post-production.

Okay, can you share the project with the largest amount of data transfer you encountered?

Yeah. Three months back we started a project called Playground. The basic concept of Playground is a reality show, and it has more than 40 episodes. Day by day we have to start shooting, which it's a different workflow from when we are making television. It's more challenging.

We released these episodes on Amazon every 24 hours. The problem we face is that we receive 3TB of live footage every day. Our post-production team and marketing team are sitting in different cities. Every day I have to transfer the episode particular footage to both servers. When we are using a normal cloud like AWS, I have to upload the files first, then they have to download it. The process takes so much time.

When doing reality shows, the timing is very important. We need a real-time file transfer solution. I once tried to search a lot of software, but I'm not satisfied with two problems, one is the cost, second is the workflow.

Finally I found Raysync for our Playground projects. I made a demo test with the Raysync agent, and I'm very happy with the test performance. We use Raysync for transferring more than 20 TB during 30 days.

So please talk about how Raysync help your team encounter this difficulty to achieve an efficient and standardized post production process?

Yeah, when we started using Raysync, it helps me a lot.

I have to upload TV data to both locations daily. If I use AWS, it will take so much time because every cloud service has a limitation for upload and download, it's not about my bandwidth, it's about the server’s bandwidth.

Now I have Raysync, the speed is good at all times. I can transfer the footage over the entire team works very quickly. I upload the data and they can automatically start working without any delay. During that 30 days moreover, I transferred more than 20dB of raw footage to both servers, it was a big challenge. And I did it with Raysync.

Great. You just mentioned that you use Raysync everyday. May I know that? Which features are you most satisfied with?

Point-to-point transfer, cause you don’t need another person to be there anymore. If you use a cloud file transfer solution, then someone has to download files manually. When I used the Raysync point-to-point function, I just need to enter the user ID, and then start transfer. It's like magic.

And you don't need to worry about the file because you will get an email confirmation, and you can see the real-time data transfer graph. You have confidence that we are sending the right footage to the right place, that is I'm very happy with that.

Thank you for the very good comment of Raysync. May I know that how did you know Raysync?

I’ve tried to find a point-to-point file transfer solution. About two years ago I had a chance to use Filecatalyst, but they have a lot of restrictions. So I try to find out an alternative.

So luckily I got Raysync, I immediately contacted Raysync, and the good part is, within 24 hours I got a reply and the Raysync demo account, for another 24 hours I checked the Raysync demo with Raysync team. All those made me more confident because when they started selling the product, I feel very comfortably with those talented people, these people is ready to support all the time.

I'm very impressed. At the initial stage, I have a few issues understanding how it works, but the Raysync team resolve all the issues. 30 days transfer 20TB to each location, which is impossible with any other software, Raysync helped me a lot.

Okay, the last question is what do you think of Raysync team support service?

Raysync team support service is like, even if I call at 10:00pm, then I'll get a response within 12 hours. Online support is very important because everything is all related to technical. Last three months I got more than seven technical support within 12 hours from Raysync.

So I'm very happy with that. They are ready to implement new concepts and new ideas.