Motion Picture Enterprises Customer Story

Table of Contents

• Who is Motion Picture Enterprises?
• The Challenge: Moving In-Person Production Services to a Hybrid Approach
• The Solution: Reinvention and Rapid Delivery of Finished Files
• The Result: Speed, Reliability, and Unlimited Storage

Who is Motion Picture Enterprises?

Motion Picture Enterprises (also known as MPE) in New York City has experienced a great deal since its founding in 1948, back when its main business was renting film reels and cans to production companies and other aspiring filmmakers.

Today, MPE has now evolved into New York’s largest supplier of post production rental equipment and film supplies.

MPE offers: hi-def and standard-def, offline and online Avid rentals, deck rentals, remote cloud and shared storage solutions. In addition to delivering, installing, and supporting film and video rental equipment on location and remotely, MPE has three buildings and over 60,000 square feet of edit suites and production space in midtown Manhattan.

Julia Pilzer, Account Executive, is the great-granddaughter of the company’s founder and is well-acquainted with MPE’s history. Andrew Schenk, Senior Account Executive, has worked with the company in various capacities for 20-plus years.

We spoke with Julia and Andrew about their experience with MASV and how it helps provide excellent customer service for MPE.

Moving In-Person Production Services to a Hybrid Approach

Like any business dependent on in-person services, MPE found itself at an inflection point when the pandemic hit in early 2020.

Initially set up “more like a traditional post facility” with 120 editing bays, event space, and an equipment rental division capable of outfitting large productions, Schenk says the company needed to reinvent itself quickly to respond to pandemic restrictions.

“While MPE has been offering remote solutions since 2011, we quickly realized that we needed to grow this type of cloud based business when the pandemic hit.” Andrew explains. “MPE had to adapt to the new remote world and provide more clients with this type of online and offline editorial workflow – whether it be remote transcoding workstations to making sure our colorists and audio team have the resources they need at home.”

Reinvention and Rapid Delivery of Finished Files

MPE needed to quickly reinvent itself as a post-production facility offering advanced digital and remote options. And that’s exactly what it did – with the help of powerful tools like MASV.

MPE worked quickly to establish its remote capabilities by increasing bandwidth (from 3GB pre-Covid to 85GB currently) and repurposing huge chunks of its 60,000 sq. ft. facility into a series of networked data centers.

“We went from having 120 edit bays plus bullpens supporting a total of 180 stations to using the vacated floors for our private cloud. This allows us to host over 450 stations and growing” Andrew says. “So that was an easy way for us to transition.”

Part of that included offering various digital and remote tools to give clients greater flexibility. To tailor its products and services to individual client needs, Julia says the company tried to be as product-agnostic as possible – and still does. “We use quite a few different products,” she says, “across all of our client engagements.”

“When we start our conversations, we ask things like: Do you want Avid or DaVinci Resolve? Do you want to be on StorNext or Avid NEXIS?”

“Where MASV has added the most value,” Andrew says, “is around the extremely rapid delivery of finished files for review and approval.”

That means MPE’s finishing and colorist teams use MASV “very heavily,” he adds.

Speed, Reliability, and Unlimited Storage

MASV is now a critical tool for MPE to keep costs down when sending footage.

Faster Transfers

As a recent example, Andrew says MPE needed to deliver a five-pack of files three times over.

It was a 60-minute HD show; 45 GBs or so, not a big deal. But when you start doing that 15 times over — and you’ve got a very talented and very expensive colorist waiting around, all of a sudden, you start looking at the time that’s involved.

And our colorist said to us, ‘If you let us use the MASV Portal, which is performing about six times faster than the Signiant portal, then we can avoid all these overages.’”

Storage Flexibility

MASV’s Unlimited Storage allows the company to make space on its on-prem networked attached storage (NAS) servers faster and more efficiently – allowing MPE to book more business faster.

“We recently delivered about 75 terabytes of GPX material to a broadcaster. We knew MASV would host that in the cloud as a failsafe and we knew we could pull from there if we needed to go back and revisit something.

That allowed us to take the NAS holding all that media, blow it away, and flip it over to the next project – which was great for one of our clients and us, because these servers are on backorder across the world right now. We were able to satisfy another client, and it was a huge win.”

Client Satisfaction

Julia agrees, adding that MASV’s speed, ease of use, and reliability have already wowed several MPE clients.

“When clients ask us to have backups of certain files,” she says, “they typically think it’ll be done in maybe a day or two. But with MASV, we can get it done in just a couple of hours.

With such a quick and high quality outcome, MASV makes it easy for MPE to look good in the eyes of our clients.”

She adds that “MPE’s remote tools, including MASV, now allow its clients to utilize talent from all over the world.”

Cost-Savings

And while both agree that speed, reliability, and flexibility are three of MASV’s most compelling selling points, Andrew says cost is another crucial factor.

“I started dealing with accelerated deliverables more than 15 years ago. At that point, you were looking at a hardware-based product that cost around $200,000.”

“But with MASV, there was no initial investment and no server to procure, which was very appealing to us. ” Andrew explains. “This was something that we were able to dip our toe in the water and eventually dive in.”