Driving Plates Customer Story

“Our film and TV clients expect fast data transfer. We have tried almost all the alternatives over the years, and MASV has been the fastest and most reliable.”

Shawn Lawler, CEO, Driving Plates

Solutions (Via MASV)

Table of Contents

• Who is Driving Plates?
• The Challenge: A Need for Speed
• The Solution: MASV — From 0 to 60
• The Result: Smooth Sailing

Who is Driving Plates?

Driving Plates is a Los Angeles-based full-service production company and stock footage provider of driving-related scenes and plates for VFX teams.

The company hosts the world’s largest library of driving footage: More than 17,000 two-minute clips from 40-plus countries, equivalent to more than a petabyte of video. It provides driving scenes for the most recognizable names in media and entertainment, including Marvel, Universal, Disney, Warner Bros., Netflix, Sony, Apple, Hallmark, Paramount, and Amazon.

General Manager Steven Simpson has worked in the film and television industry for more than 30 years as an assistant director, accountant, and controller at various companies.

CEO M. Shawn Lawler started Driving Plates around a decade ago after noticing a need in the industry for road-safe driving shots. Prior to Driving Plates most driving shots involved camera people leaning from the windows of a moving vehicle…not exactly the safest process.

With the advent of smaller DSLR cameras easily mounted on vehicles in batches, however, Driving Plates created a safer and more efficient workflow for sourcing driving footage.

The Challenge: A Need for Speed

When asked about the biggest transfer challenge Driving Plates has to deal with, General Manager Steven Simpson said,

“Download and upload speeds.”

Lawler agrees, adding that given its client base, speed of delivery is crucial to the day-to-day operations of Driving Plates.

“What it comes down to is that it’s fast,” he says. “And our clients, even if they don’t say it, expect the file transfer process to be fast. Time is valuable.”

But the large file sizes that accompany high-resolution plate captures make this easier said than done – especially since Driving Plates now does a lot of work for the LED volumes that accompany virtual production stages. The average clip size Driving Plates works with has ballooned around 10X in size over the past few years thanks in large part to the use of GPU codecs in virtual production media servers.

“You can link up a handful of GPUs and start running streams, as long as you have enough slots for the cards,” he explains of the codecs. “But to make that stuff fly the file sizes are sometimes eight to ten times as big. And so we have to push eight to ten times more data than we’ve had to in the past.”

The Technology

Driving Plates produces high-quality 360-degree motion environments via a patented, adjustable camera array that can be affixed to automobiles and used as a moving background for car-related scenes.

The eight-camera rig features:

• Optical stabilization
• Eight overlapping angles
• Three upward-facing reflection angle cameras
• Front and rear stitching to produce a 360-degree 2D collage.

Each camera angle captures action simultaneously, and the company encourages its clients to utilize all camera angles to build the most depth and reflectiveness into each scene. The rig’s field of view provides a 30 percent overlap for easier stitching.

• Driving Plates provides log, linear, 1080p, and 4K footage formats but typically shoots in 10bit 4K at 23.98fps.
• Its clip sets are typically transferred as two-minute files.
• These clip sets can consist of just one angle but often include dozens of files from various angles and are sometimes used in LED projections, making for rather large file package sizes.

The company also often works with visual effects (VFX) houses on VFX pulls and pushes, a process known as the VFX roundtrip.

View a sample of Driving Plates stock footage, below. 👇

Unfortunately, the large file transfer solutions used by Driving Plates in the past didn’t provide fast enough download and upload speeds, nor the precision tracking required to confirm that files arrived on time. They were also very expensive.

“They didn’t meet the needs of our clients,” says Lawler. Driving Plates clients are located across the world, from the U.S., to the U.K., Ireland, and Bulgaria.

All of this was enough for the Driving Plates team to find a better, fast, and more affordable file transfer solution. Enter MASV.

💡 Related: Using MASV to Share 6K Footage for Immersive Productions

The Solution: MASV — From 0 to 60

Simpson says the company found MASV after researching for a better way to send large video files quickly, cost-effectively, and reliably. He says Driving Plates’ issues around cost, slow speeds, and opaque file tracking have been completely alleviated using MASV’s large file transfer service.

“What used to take us 20 minutes to upload a typical 4K clip set now takes us less than two minutes,” adds Lawler.

MASV — along with a combination of Adobe video products and Splashtop for remote desktop access — is now a permanent fixture in Driving Plate’s post-production workflow. MASV handles almost all Driving Plate’s large video file transfers — both internal and external.

MASV Desktop App

Driving Plate prefers the MASV Desktop App for its enhanced speed and performance. As well as its dashboard which provides a line-by-line view of each transfer in-progress.

Automations

Driving Plates also has the ability to create Watch Folder automations from the Desktop app, a feature they use often. With Watch Folders in place, Driving Plates can automatically send large files to an email recipient, upload them to a MASV Portal, or receive files from a MASV Portal.

Transfer History

As mentioned above, accurate file tracking is a must for Driving Plates. With Transfer History, the Driving Plates team can view a detailed ledger of their transfers, including sender information, cost, and status in one area — and export this information for billing and administration purposes.

Flexible Pricing

Thanks to MASV’s Pay-As-You-Go pricing plan, Driving Plate is able to budget accordingly and only pay for the data they use. This is in contrast to an expensive enterprise license that prices according to usage and seats.

The Result: Smooth Sailing

The result of using MASV has been an increase in productivity. Simpson says he’s seen a noticeable uptick in client satisfaction and an increase in the amount of data flowing.

“It’s super fast and very user friendly,” Simpson explains.

But most importantly, there’s been a decrease in stress among staff thanks to MASV’s speed and ease-of-use.

“We rely on it and don’t really worry about it,” says Lawler, “and that means we can pivot and concentrate on other important stuff we need to take care of. It’s kind of a set-and-forget type of deal, because there really aren’t many problems that come along with it.”

🚚 Driving Large Files: Why Somerville Media Stopped Shipping Hard Drives After MASV