MASV is a fast and reliable way for us to transfer huge amounts of data in a way that’s very simple and easy.
Kelly Neall
Managing Director, Canadian Film Institute
Challenges:
⭕️ Receiving DCPs at a speed that doesn’t force staff to wait dozens of hours, while keeping submissions organized.
⭕️ Dependable and reliable file transfer able to handle hundreds of submissions without technical problems.
⭕️ Receiving film festival submissions without having to coach or train contributors on the process.
⭕️ File transfer with a cost structure that accounts for the festival’s project-based, seasonal requirements.
MASV Solutions:
✅ An accelerated private network backed by AWS, for download speed improvements of around 90 percent in some cases.
✅ Dependable store-and-forward cloud transfer, relentless retries, and checkpoint restart.
✅ A powerful MASV Portal, with a drag-and-drop interface, that can be embedded in any webpage.
✅ Flexible pricing options for organizations with ebbs and flows in transfer volumes.
Who Is the Canadian Film Institute?
The Canadian Film Institute (CFI) is a not-for-profit organization incorporated in 1935 that organizes ongoing public film programming and film festivals in the Ottawa area. Its many events include the International Film Festival of Ottawa (IFFO), the European Union Film Festival, and the Oscar-accredited Ottawa International Animation Festival (founded in 1976). The organization receives hundreds of submissions each year, from independent filmmakers to large studios and distribution houses.
Managing Director Kelly Neall says plenty has changed for the CFI in recent years when it comes to handling and receiving large digital cinema packages (DCPs) for submission.
“It’s by far mostly digital submissions now,” she explains. “Six or seven years ago, it was normal to receive a physical drive as a submission – but not nearly as much anymore.”
🏆 CFI Highlights:
- One of the most well-established film institutes in the world.
- Receives around 2,000 entries from around the world each year.
- Ingests around 200 competition and non-competition films for screenings each year.
- Hold a series of special events each year, including the Ottawa International Animation Festival (September), the European Union Film Festival (November) and IFFO: the International Film Festival of Ottawa (March).
MASV for Film Festivals
Receive, track, manage, and distribute to multiple screening locations hundreds of large DCPs with MASV.
The Challenge: Receiving Hundreds of Film Submissions in a Short Time Period
The CFI receives thousands of entries from around the world each year, but its previous methods of receiving hundreds of film submissions from selected filmmakers were often slow and unreliable.
Challenge #1: Quickly receiving submissions and keeping them organized
The organization regularly ingests feature films weighing anywhere between 100 to 300 GBs per file, which can add up to delays and frustration for the CFI team.
“Downloading those files can be very, very time-consuming” during the run-up to an event when time is at a premium, Director of Film Operations Devin Hartley explains. “The longer the feature, the bigger the file. With more and more features moving into 4K, that just makes them even exponentially larger. And having to wait 36 hours for a single file to download is just untenable.”
Keeping hundreds of submissions organized by project or festival can also be extremely time-consuming if done manually by festival staff. The institute needed a fast transfer method that could keep film submissions organized per event or festival with minimum manual intervention.
Challenge #2: Reliably receiving content during high-volume periods
Hartley says the volume of files the CFI deals with every year makes reliability a key component.
“Anytime there’s a technical issue it just adds more work, which is time we don’t have” given the number of submissions every year, explains Hartley.
“That reliability is key. Pretty much every time we receive a file from some other platform, I know I’m going to have to make sure to check the file really carefully once it’s finished, to make sure something didn’t go wrong.”
Challenge #3: Offering an easy-to-use solution to contributors
The CFI works with filmmakers and others from around the world with varying degrees of tech literacy, and needed a file transfer solution easy for anyone to use with minimal tech support.
Similarly, the CFI runs a lean team that can’t spend days stuck in detailed tutorials or answering lengthy tech support questions.
The organization needed an easy way to embed a branded, web-based file uploader in its communications with selected filmmakers that was both easy for submitters to use to upload their content, and simple for festival staff to receive.
Challenge #4: Affordable, high-performance transfer
As a not-for-profit registered charity, the CFI always runs as lean as possible – and most enterprise-grade file transfer solutions aimed at the film industry are simply far too expensive.
The organization required a high-performing yet cost-effective solution, preferably with flexible payment options to suit the festival’s up-and-down seasonality in terms of file transfer demands.
The Solution: ‘A Lot Faster Than the Other Transfer Options We’ve Used’
After researching the file transfer marketplace, the CFI reached out to MASV. Just a few weeks later, the CFI team was onboarded and up and running – and now uses MASV in a couple ways:
- When dealing with film distributors via email, CFI can send them a link to a MASV Portal; distributors click the link, taking them to a MASV Portal, where they can then drag-and-drop their files.
- For individual filmmakers selected to screen their films, the organization embeds the Portal right in the required entry/selection form.
“They can just fill out the form and upload their film directly” without festival staff needing to lift a finger, Hartley explains.
Fast file ingest with effortless organization
MASV’s global, accelerated private network backed by AWS enables fast file transfers from anywhere in the world – even large DCPs of several hundred GBs. Those 36-hour downloads we mentioned earlier now just take just a couple of hours, for a more than 90 percent improvement in download times.
“MASV is always very, very fast in terms of getting those files downloaded – a lot faster than some of the other transfer options we’ve used in the past, or that others have sent us,” Hartley says, adding that CFI takes advantage of the MASV Desktop App, which provides even better performance and granular control than our web app.
Using MASV has also removed several points of friction around content ingestion. “When you’re dealing with Dropbox or Google Drive, sometimes people will share a link but they don’t have the permission set correctly. So it doesn’t work, and you have to ask them to fix it.”
The CFI now fires up one MASV Portal – which are free to spin up – per project or film festival, which keeps submissions organized with practically no effort.
“MASV makes things a lot faster in terms of double-checking what files we’ve received, rather than having a spreadsheet with a bunch of links,” Hartley explains. “It makes it really easy for us to keep it organized. I know exactly where I need to look for a specific film, because I know exactly which Portal it went to.”
Ultra-reliable file ingest
Hartley says the reliability issues the CFI experienced previously are essentially a thing of the past, both for those sending and receiving files. MASV uses a store-and-forward (also known as relay) transfer technique that ensures that even if something goes wrong on the recipient side, the transfer doesn’t fail.
Automatic relentless retries, checkpoint restart, and checksum verification allow for set-your-watch reliability and file transfer integrity every time – even for files being sent from the other side of the world.
“With MASV, a failed download is never really the case,” Hartley says. “Once it’s downloaded I still test it, but it’s a lot easier knowing that there’s probably not going to be anything wrong.”
Simple, drag-and-drop ease of use
Hartley says onboarding to MASV was “easy and quick” and “extremely smooth,” adding that the organization rarely receives questions on how to submit content using a MASV Portal thanks to its simple, drag-and-drop user interface.
“The instructions are pretty basic, and most people seem to be able to follow them relatively easily.”
Portals are easily embedded into any webpage, and the CFI now embeds MASV Portals directly in the forms it sends to selected filmmakers, making for an easy and centralized upload experience. The institute’s MASV Portals are customized with the logos and branding of the appropriate film festival for a professional, polished look.
Flexible, affordable pricing
The institute says costs around MASV have always been “extremely reasonable for the amount of data that we’re transferring,” adding that the pay-as-you-go pricing option is perfectly suited to the CFI’s seasonal needs.
“We’re a not-for-profit and we don’t charge submission fees, so every dollar counts,” explains Neall.
The Result: Reliable, Fast File Transfer for the Canadian Film Institute
The transition to MASV for the CFI was smooth, and the institute now receives submissions faster, more reliability, at less cost, and with fewer headaches. “Once we started using MASV, we saw how well it worked and how easy it was to integrate into our workflow. And it just became a no-brainer,” says Hartley.
So what’s more to like? Turns out, there is something else: Submitters also don’t have to zip their files and folders anymore.
“That’s the biggest issue we ran into: Having to tell people that they didn’t need to send zipped folders. Most of them felt they had to, because that’s what they’ve been doing their whole career. But we could tell them they didn’t need to do that.”
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