Studio 51 is a Mumbai and Beijing-based visual effects production studio, dedicated to the film, entertainment, and advertising industries. Studio 51 offers professional services including VFX, concept design, pre-production, shoot supervision, and post-production. Studio Head, Mr. Varun Hadkar, graduated from Manchester Business School and The University of Kent, UK , and has 19 years of experience in film and TV VFX. He has worked in the production of many famous film and TV blockbusters. In this interview, Varun shares some of his unforgettable production experiences and future plans for Studio 51 with us. Varun’s love for the film industry started in the early 2000s. He believes that each project that he has worked on has had its own unforgettable moments and challenges during the initial stage, shooting, and also post-shooting. His current role as a supervisor requires team management as well as understanding the requirements of clients and directors. His team, based in China and India, often uploads and Sync’s large amounts of data. Hence a stable, fast, and long-distance transfer service is vital for his work. Check out the Full Interview with Varun Hadkar! Raysync: Hi Varun! Thank you for accepting our interview! Would you briefly introduce yourself? Varun: I studied commerce and finance during my undergrad years. I also had a keen interest in filmmaking and started in the film/ television industry back then, by doing small jobs in productions like MTV. After doing a few gigs, I landed a job in Rhythm and Hues, which was one of the most highly-reputed companies, over a decade ago. After gaining a great deal of valuable experience at RnH, I left India and went to the UK to pursue further studies and work. Its was here that I completed my Masters from the University of Kent and a few years later, my MBA, from the University of Manchester. I had the opportunity to learn from and work together with some fantastic people in world-class studios. From there, I travelled to Asia— worked with Double Negative, in Singapore then BASE, in China for a few years. I’ve worked on many aspects of film — including producing, partially directing, and supervising. With my combined experience in these areas, I was able to establish Studio 51. We started as a VFX company but have diversified into Film production, AI, virtual production, and film making too. Raysync: Could you share unforgettable production experiences with us? Varun: Back when I was working with DNEG on a movie called Bridge of Spies produced by Spielberg, there were about 60-70 shots of VFX which were managed by a small team. In production, we generally do these temp comps to show the director what the shot looks like. Everybody did a version for their own shot, every shot is different. My shot went to the Director, Producer, and Spielberg's comment came in, “this looks great, final”! This was a big highlight for me. First off, this never happens on a shot of that scale. And for me, I got a direct comment from him. This was a great moment. He is a personality a lot of fans, filmmakers, artists look up to. Raysync: As a visual effects supervisor for Avengers, Salvage Marines, and Wandering Earth, what's the most challenging part, and how did you make it? Varun: Every project is different. With Avengers I was with Base, working under ILM. The great thing was that ILM gave us creative freedom. However, that also made the task that much challenging— getting the creative process approved by the director, in our case director Usually, the process of approval goes through a number of steps until we reach the director's approval. With some luck and with the help of our talented artists, the work that we produced at Base was high quality and was approved by ILM. The director's approval too came fairly quickly. For Wandering Earth, I think one of my biggest challenges was the language barrier. The entire crew spoke Chinese. Being on the set, trying to get the ideas across in front of the director, ensuring the crew understood each aspect, basically taking massive chunks of work, breaking it down to parts and funnelling it to key people, so that we were all on the same page— that was one of the most challenging things for me. This was a large-scale sci-fi film, so it definitely came with its usual challenges. Creatively, most aspects progressed steadily since the director already had a great vision and we also already had a fabulous concept artist. We had an experienced, talented art director, so that made things smooth. The film did really well, turned out to be one of the biggest blockbusters in China. Salvage Marines, finished production in early April 2022. It hasn’t been released yet. Our teams in China and India have worked tirelessly on this. It's quite challenging to get the two teams in one pipeline, one workflow, and one structure. We are always keen to produce high-quality work, so we try our best to harness the strength of each artist and that, sometimes means bringing them together on a project, in spite of their physical location. Here it becomes extremely important to manage teams and workflow in an efficient and orderly manner. The pandemic period has especially been challenging for our industry too. While office premises were locked-down as per government mandates, projects rolled on as scheduled. In order to meet deadlines without outsourcing work, resources needed careful re-allocation and teams required restructuring. Raysync: Thanks for sharing. May we know your use case in data transfer? Varun: At times we face a problem of disk space in the company . In 2020, covid issues led us to try out cloud servers. We decided to move ahead with your services for a few reasons. One of them being agility — the speedy response and the pro-activeness displayed, while solving issues was a plus point for us. We felt that we were able to save significant amount of time. The other key aspect that drove our choice was the ability to control user accounts and permissions. Raysync is TPN certified, and you have a vast number of functionalities which is always great. We have a lot of data being transferred between our teams in India and China - for this, we needed a stable service that works seamlessly in both locations. When we tried Raysync, it just worked. The software is light and has all the features we need. We needed quick, efficient solutions and you guys checked all the boxes!

Raysync is honored and proud to have participated in the Data Mover Challenge and have won the award, Best Virtualisation Support. About DMC2021 DMC2021, Data Mover Challenge 2021, is an international competition organized by the National Supercomputing Centre . SCA is an annual national conference organized by HPC centers in Australia, Singapore and Japan, and includes a series of prestigious supercomputing events whose main goal is to promote the vitality and relevance of the Asian HPC ecosystem. The competition focuses on optimizing point-to-point data transfers between sites. This requires participants from around the world to compete by deploying the best software tools on Data Transfer Nodes set up in existing international networks across the globe. DMC2021 Jury The DMC2021 jury consisted of experts and professionals in the field of networking and data transport, including: Andrew Howard, Cloud Systems Manager, National Computational Infrastructure , Australia Cees de Laat, Professor, Informatics Institute, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Eric Pouyoul, Network Engineer, Energy Science Network , USAFrancis Lee Bu Sung, Associate Professor, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University , SingaporeLawrence Wong, Emeritus Professor, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore , SingaporeTim Chown, Network Development Manager, Jisc, UK DMC2021 Winning Team Team MUSASHINO --- Most Innovative and Best IPv6 Performance Arcitecta --- Most Complete Solution and Best Software Architecture Fast Is Good – Raysync --- Best Virtualisation Support Globus --- Best Integrated Software Experience Ciena-iCair-UETN --- Best Long-Distance Performance AND Overall Winner Through fierce competition, Raysync Team, Fast is Good, was awarded Best Virtualisation Support. As Mr. Andrew Howard, Deputy Director of Cloud Services at National Computing Infrastructure Australia and Chief Judge of the DMC21 judging panel said, "The DMC judging committee was presented with an interesting range of participants who each had a unique approach to the challenge. The winning solutions covered the spectrum of network technology and the quality of the entries were highly regarded by the judging panel, with each presenting its own merits in various use cases." Each outstanding team has more strengths, and this is not only a competition, but also an opportunity for team to team communication and technology to technology to improve each other. What does Raysync do at DMC2021? In this competition, each top team was required to demonstrate the following capabilities: Ability to adapt to the system. Coordinate various data transfer protocols. Demonstrate data management entities. Provide security and identity management. Demonstrate real-time predictive analytics and system monitoring. Runs on a global R&E network infrastructure to produce real-world data transfer results. Team Fast is Good has been working together to break through the tough spots with a solution-focused on effectively delivering large data sets through firewalls and impaired networks. Our solutions including High Performance Computing cluster, AI storage and enterprise IT solutions, serving research institutes, manufacturing, engineering R&D, oil & gas and creative companies. We provide both cloud and on-premise solutions end-to-end system integration services. This solution cannot be achieved without our key partner, Robust HPC, a team from Malaysia that specializes in providing high performance solution. Based on the team's years of deep technology and experience in data transfer, the system is capable of initiating large, reliable bulk data transfers at 62.8 Gbps under 100 Gbps bandwidth. This award for the Best Virtualisation Support is the best affirmation of Raysync's continuous efforts and transmission solutions. In the future, Raysync will also continue to optimize and come up with better data transmission solutions. Committing to pushing the data transmission technology forward continuously. About Raysync Raysync, focusing on big file transmission acceleration and network optimization, uses UDP transfer technology, which is 100 times faster and more stable than traditional large file transfers. With AES-256 and SSL encryption to ensure data is secure and leak-free, Raysync seamlessly integrates with the SDK for ease of use and has established long-term relationships with Huawei, Vivo, Oppo and others, making it a widely recognized and trusted file transfer solution. Raysync will continue to improve our technology and try our best to promote the development of big data transmission!

Hasan Köroğlu is the founder of Kadraj Group. His knowledge and experience on the Internet and audio visual technologies as a producer for many years had Kadraj growing fast. Kadraj is the leading company on QC, localization, and delivery services in Turkey, which was established by Hasan in February 2019. It has been 12 years and 8 months until now. It was just a decade ago when Turkish dramas became popular all over the world, just after two years later Kadraj was established. It was perfect timing for their services, and they are working together with the major market actor including producers, distributors, and broadcasters over these years. Today they are the pioneer in this market, in their domain. Here’s the interview between Hasan Köroğlu and Raysync, in which Hasan shared his use case in data delivery and the difficulties his team met in the daily workflow. Raysync: Hi Hasan! Could you please describe your use case in worldwide content delivery? Hasan: Kadraj is the biggest digital delivery hub for Turkish dramas and Turkish series. Keeping in mind the demand for Turkish dramas on the world market that makes our position unique. After the latest progress on internet technologies and almost 95% of the deliveries are completed via internet, just make it clear, we are talking about deliveries of thousands of hours of content every month to over 40 countries and around 150 clients/broadcasters all over the world. This is why we need alternatives all the time and we are pushing the boundaries all the time. Raysync: What difficulties have your team met in the workflow? And how does Raysync helps to solve? Hasan: Especially creating new accounts and user permissions, user management - they are major problems. And there were some issues with the stability of the platforms we were using back then, also bandwidth management was another big problem for us. Raysync solved almost all of them, especially the bandwidth management is really important for us and Raysync did it. We are glad. Raysync: What projects did Raysync handle the data transfer for? Hasan: Hundreds of Turkey series and we have sent over 200 thousands of unique commercial hours of TV content. For the last 10 years, the TV content that has been exported to other countries from Turkey, has been prepared and delivered by Kadraj, by us. Projects Kadraj Participated Raysync: How big the file is for each transfer? Hasan: Let's say it's between 20 gigabytes to one terabytes for each file. May because let’s say a 45 minutes episode is around 20 gigabytes in MXF format, and Turkey series are around two hours long and two hours long 4k raw content is more than a terabyte, those are single files. We have over six petabytes data at the office right now. But keep in mind this is not a big data, this is a volumetric data. We do not have that much files, but the files are really big. Raysync: How do you like Raysync’s data transfer and acceleration services? Hasan: Actually, this is something we really haven't thought about it, because just after implementing the software, the platform into our workflow, we got used it very quickly and feel like we haven't migrated but we were using it from the very beginning. It's really easy, we did like it very much. Because it's easy and it's obviously planned and developed with really experienced people, they know what they're doing. Raysync: What's next plan with Kadraj? Hasan: There are lots of plans. For the last couple of months we are working on ISO 27001 certification and we are in the process of TPN assessment. And this is why we are updating our structure, everything at the office, so there will be lots of changes in the coming a few months, maybe before the new year and a lot will change at Kadraj. Special thanks to Hasan Köroğlu from Kadraj Group.

O2 Pós has 30 years in the audiovisual market, delivering projects using high scalability and quality, utilizing the latest resources in post-production. They delivered for some of the largest companies in the industry, such as Netflix, Warner, Amazon, Rede Globo, Fox, Turner, and HBO. O2 Pós counts on its massive infrastructure to handle the entire process of post-production, from lab to delivery. With more than 30 editing stations connected between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, O2 Pós works as an editing house, where it is possible to rent the station on demand, in both cities, and access the projects in a shared way. The director can be in Rio while the editor works in São Paulo. The Lab of O2 Pós The Work Environment of O2 Pós Check out the Full Interview with Mario De Oliveira: Raysync: Hi Mario! Thank you for accepting our interview! Would you briefly introduce yourself? Mario: My name is Mario, I’m a chief IT manager of O2 Pós in Brazil. And we have finding over internet some software to improve our FTP client to send you some data for our client, and we tested Raysync and it was very good. Raysync: Could you share with us your use case in data transfer? Mario: We have a small client that we need to send the data, the videos to them and we were using another large file transfer solution. We have a playback video that’s okay but the speed of the transmission is not so good. And Raysync it's very fast and best than the other large file transfer solutions. In a little over four months of Raysync usage, O2 has already transferred about 26 advertisement and entertainment projects. The transfer time had a considerable improvement. Uploading files that used to take 2h to 3h, now take between 20 to 40 minutes with Raysync, greatly improving our workflow with major players such as Netflix, Amazon, and HBO. Raysync: May us know currently how big is the transfer volume in your post-production project? Mario: About five terabytes. Raysync: The collaboration between and across the teams is important in post-production, could you please elaborate on how your team achieves high-efficient collaboration? Mario: Basically communication. On a weekly basis, we send for O2 Play, our film distribution division, Masters, Trailers, Artwork and Extras. The content we send is usually heavier and the migration to Raysync was essential in terms of file transfer speed. Another entertainment project that was one of the first featuring Raysync was the Gramado Film Festival, and the experience with receiving and uploading movies files was great in terms of organization, user creation, and speed as well. Some works of O2 Pós Some Has to Die Invisible City Raysync: Is it possible to know which projects are use Raysync for data transfer? Mario: Projects that used Raysync includes Sustagen, Renner, Kinder and Huggies. We love Raysync, it’s so good, and it's so fast. RENNER © O2 Pós Agency: Paim comunicação Direction: Fred Luz Production Company: O2 Filmes Post: O2 Pós Sustagen Kids © O2 Pós Raysync: How do you like Raysync services? Mario: Raysync did well in time optimization, besides, it also makes it easier to upload raw materials and dailies that we need to share with the editors of entertainment projects. In advertisement, our other work front, we noticed that receiving materials became faster and safer with Raysync. We use this service when we shoot outside of São Paulo, where our office is located.

In this holiday season of 2021, to benefit more businesses who have needs for large file transfer, Raysync will offer a big sale for Raysync SMB from November 15, 2021 to December 31, 2021 . Purchase Raysync SMB annual license during this period of time, you will earn an extra two-month free subscription. Rules: 1.Purchase Date: November 15th - December 31st, 2021 . 2.Purchase Raysync SMB and you will get an extra 2-month for free at $599 ONLY. 3.Raysync SMB license validity time: one year+2 months, from the date of purchase. How to purchase? 1.Fill in your relevant information on the purchase page of Raysync SMB; 2.After the payment is completed, our support will send an email attached with the software download link and valid license. What’s Raysync SMB? Raysync SMB is an affordable annual package of Raysync high-speed file transfer solutions for small to medium-sized businesses, speeding up large file transfer in a cost-effective, secure and reliable way, making team collaboration more productive. Why Choose SMB? ● Unlimited Transfer Volume You can download data without the size limitation under 1GB bandwidth. ● Faster Transfer With the patented file acceleration technology, Raysync sends files of any size or format at the highest speed, hundreds of times faster than FTP. ● Stability & Reliability Adopt checkpoint resume, retransfer, intelligent sync, and other mechanisms to ensure the reliability and stability of file transfer. ● Secure Encrypted AES-256+SSL encryption, enterprise-level security to protect your files during transfer. ● Multiple Transfer Methods Support massive small files transfer and transfer of millions of files in a folder at high speed, regardless of packet loss. ● File Collaboration File sharing, sending and receiving large files through a link with your organization and partners. Don’t miss out on this limited-time offer! Enjoy the high-speed file transfer solution as low as $9.98 per year per account! Grab it Now!

According to the data collected by Box Office Mojo, film industry are facing enormous crisis in front of COVID-19, not just because of the nearly empty cinemas, but also the way the whole industry works. When the crisis hit, they have to learn to attend events virtually and cooperate remotely, resulting in many new problems in team collaboration and data exchange, etc. On BaM live which was held by IABM on 22nd September, 2021, Raysync was excited to have Ben Cheung, VP of Raysync, led a discussion on how to speed up the global transfer for film productions, uncovering the impact COVID-19 has on the film industry and the importance of fast and cost-effective file transfer and its future development. In this live event, following topics are discussed: Current situation of film production What can be done to solve those problems Case studies The future of file transfer Q&A: How do you see the future of file transfer services? At the beginning of the event, Ben analyzed the current situation of film production with some infographics showing the drastic drop-down of film box office and its revenues. Besides, massive changes were made in film production environment in order to keep the staff safe. Millions went home to work and used digital technologies to continue to execute their daily tasks. That's why a fast and cost-effective data transfer solution has become more and more important in long-distance team collaboration. What can be done to solve those problems? The data volumes that need to be shared and transferred in our daily work has soared, but the traditional TCP-based transfer solution can’t help to achieve high-efficient delivery. The best alternative UDP-based file transfer solution - Raysync Among the alternative solutions to FTP, most of them are either expensive or complicated to use. Based upon Raysync UDP high-speed transfer protocol, Raysync breaks through the bottleneck of large file transfer which satisfy enterprises’ file tranfer needs by building an intelligent transfer platform that processes and moves massive data at an unprecedented speed. Raysync’s intelligent data compression technology can also effectively reduce the network loads, providing breakpoint resume and data verification to ensure stable and reliable data transfer. The intelligent management system is able to meet the business requirements of enterprises such as data sync and backup. Best of all, Raysync provides an SMB version that starts from $599/year! Actually, it does help a myriad of enterprises in accelerating data transfer, Ben also shared two successful cases in film post-production and render farm, respectively. Case 1 – Film Post-production Challenges: Most film and television productions are edited and created by people scattered among different firms and overseas institutions, in which a large amount of audio, video, images, and other content has to be uploaded and downloaded. This mass amount of data flow has led to low efficiency of file interactions, and the delay of the production cycle may seriously affect the production efficiency. Solutions: Raysync provides the specific audio-visual content transfer solution for the film post-production industry to accelerate the transfer of a massive amount of content through Raysync’s ultra-high-speed transfer protocol. Intelligently optimize the network bandwidth and effectively reduce the network latency and packet loss caused by transnational and ultra-long distance transfer. Eventually, the final result is beyond clients' expectations. Case 2 – Render Farm Challenges: In Render farm, the daily transfer volume is around 30TB every day, the maximum number of files for dingle transfer is around 2 million. In this sense, there needs a fast and secure transfer solution integrated to Render farm. Solutions: For Render farm, Cluster storage is an important solution to large-scale data storage systems. There are hundreds of transfer nodes established to take care 200K users around the world, with the help of Raysync, the Internet bandwidth goes for 50Gbps, and the peak bandwidth utilization is up to 90%. Raysync also supports all needs for integration, like SDL, GUI, CMD, and etc. In the end, Ben shared his insight on the future of file transfer, he thinks the future of file transfer would related to the following factors, deduplication, compression, 400Gbps super-bandwidth, and machine learning. For more details and opinions, please check here to see the full story.

New features in recent Raysync updates will help you customize your Web, increase security, and get more facilitate. Ready to start? See Get the Raysync 6.0.0.8 September 2021 Updates. 1. You can create new folders, rename, move, copy, delete files, view file properties, upload files and resume them at breakpoints without launching the client. 2. Delete the source file after the sync task is done. The source file will be deleted after your sync task is finished, so as to protect the data from leakage. 3. Add a new synchronization frequency that synchronizes only once to the sync schedule option. 4. Allow centralized management of synchronous transfer tasks. 5. Make backdrop color, button color, and login box position customization available. 6. Optimization on point-to-point transfer. 7. Allow sending link-sharing and password-sharing emails separately. 8.The command-line program supports the unified management of the app nodes. 9. Support preview of office and cad files.

File transfers within and without an organization are key to business operations. However, large file transfers can be quite challenging. Some of the common problems associated with large file transfer include the following: 1. Time Restrictions: While executing a digital file transfer, there is a need to do so within a specified amount of time. Failure to do this leads to the loss of the files transferred. 2. Lack of Visibility: When users find it difficult to view their files, the error rate will increase. These inefficiencies and delays are more costly than simple errors, because they may hinder business development and undermine key business achievement. Both of these situations are not conducive to income generation and enterprise development. 3. Restricted File Types: Lots of enterprises use software that is peculiar to their industry. Sadly, this peculiarity puts them in a restricted class that prevents file transfers. 4. System Compatibility: Whether the large file transfer software can support a large number of devices from different partners and customers with different functions is burdensome and complicated. Generally speaking, most companies are unable to effectively support such large-scale file transfer. Dissatisfaction, poor user experience and data loss are just some of the problems. 5.Data Security and Regulatory Compliance: Whether the large file transfer software can support a large number of devices from different partners and customers with different functions is burdensome and complicated. Generally speaking, most companies are unable to effectively support such large-scale file transfer. Dissatisfaction, poor user experience and data loss are just some of the problems. 6. Size Restrictions: One of the challenges of file transfer is the size limit, because some software uploads or shares files with a size limit. Even after compression, many large files can't meet this limit. 7. Integrating with Existing Solutions: Infrastructure components are the key to some enterprises' management of file transfer integration. The problem of adapting to new protocols, technologies and business processes may hinder this integration. Even make the file transfer less secure, the operation is not compliant and the file is out of control. 8. High Costs: The cost of a large file transfer platform can be high. E-mail is the preferred medium for many marketers, but it is difficult to find an e-mail program that can accommodate large file transfer. This is why reputable large file transfer software is an inevitable choice for many enterprises to develop. Finally, to curb these problems, the Raysync solution was created. Rasysync can help enterprises to efficiently send and easily manage large files. The platform is simple and easy to use, and can be directly integrated with the existing system of the enterprise. All users only need to create an account, and they can upload, download and share large files synchronously.