Thunder4 Productions Customer Story
“We couldn’t keep sending files in their RAW state without MASV. Sometimes our post-production team in Argentina asked us to send a lower quality file, because of internet issues they were having there. But we always knew MASV could support us—and it did.”
– Damian De Luca, Production Executive and Co-Founder, Thunder4 Productions
Who Is Thunder4 Productions?
Thunder4 Productions is a Miami-based video production house and creative shop that works with a range of major brands and media companies, including Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, Marvel Studios, and Telemundo. Its custom content production includes English- and Spanish-language movie trailers and promotional videos for films such as Spider-Man: Far From Home, The Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, The Lion King, and Sicario: Day of the Soldado.
Damian De Luca, co-founder of the four-year-old company, says he’s been passionate about the power of film and television production since his youth. “Probably 10 to 12 years old,” he says. “I always saw entertainment as a language of its own. It doesn’t matter which country you’re from, which languages you speak, your religion, anything. Entertainment has the power to connect us.”
He’s been friends with co-founder Nicolas Alston for the past three decades. So when the chance came along four years ago for the two to work together—their first-ever job was producing a Spanish-language television spot to promote the 2018 film A Quiet Place—they jumped at the opportunity. “And we’ve been doing it ever since,” Alston says.
The Challenge
Having worked in various video and TV production roles since the early 2000s, De Luca says he’d already used virtually every large file transfer (LFT) service in existence—and so far, he hadn’t been impressed. After years of using software he “didn’t really like,” De Luca was sick of using outdated, clunky, non-user-friendly software for transferring large video files. So he and business partner Alston began searching for something new.
“I tried everything,” he explains. But he says some solutions weren’t user friendly. Others were very expensive and unreliable. Still others required complicated licensing agreements, limiting the number of team members or partners who could use the service. Or, super-fast internet connections, limiting the number of locations from where transfers could be sent.
And they all had file size limits, which is a make-or-break for Thunder4 as De Luca and his team need to be able to transfer 4K and 6K RAW files from Miami to their post-production and editing group in Argentina.
The nature of the business also means extremely fast turnaround times. “So speed is very important for us,” he says. “We really needed something fast that can be used from anywhere.”
The Solution
De Luca says that when Thunder4 began shopping around for a large file transfer solution a few years back, he wasn’t sure exactly what they wanted. He just couldn’t go back to expensive and awkward enterprise software. “I knew there must be something new at this point,” he says.
“And as soon as I saw MASV, I thought that it was something modern—something from this century, from this decade.”
Alston agrees, adding the team began using it out of the box right away with no tutorials, training, or even any instructions required—an especially important feature when the company’s entire post-production group in Argentina was forced to work remotely during the pandemic. “Even though we had everybody at home, in different locations, MASV just made it easier. I mean, honestly, it would have been a hell of a lot more difficult to do that without MASV.”
Thunder4 primarily uses MASV’s desktop app thanks to its resiliency, ability to send files quickly even in poor internet conditions, and its pause and resume functionality. “As soon as we finish shooting that night, one of our producers or assistants upload everything to MASV,” explains De Luca of Thunder4’s typical large file transfer workflow. “They send it to our post-production facilities in Argentina, who start downloading it that very night.”
Even though the team’s internet speeds in Argentina are less than ideal, De Luca says virtually every large RAW file transfer is finished and ready for work by the first thing the next morning.
The Results
De Luca and Alston both say Thunder4 would have needed to seriously adjust its post-production workflows during the pandemic without a resilient, reliable, and affordable fast file transfer service like MASV. “We couldn’t keep sending files in their RAW state without MASV,” explains De Luca.
“Sometimes our team in Argentina asked us to send a lower quality file, because of internet issues they were having there. But we always knew MASV would support us—and it did.”
With MASV, anyone on team Thunder4—not just technical experts, or those with a license and software installed on their machines—can send weighty RAW files from anywhere through MASV’s flexible, intuitive drag-and-drop user interface. That’s crucial, says De Luca, especially for a business that runs on tight deadlines.
He adds that, in a pinch, Thunder4 has even sent large file transfers through MASV using a cellular signal. And he and the rest of the team are able to do it all for the same flat rate ($0.25 per GB) as the day they first signed up, three years ago.
“The pricing is great,” he says. “And it’s easy. Anyone can do it. You don’t have to be a post producer or technical expert to use it.
“It’s a great product and a great service,” he says. “It’s really useful for us.”