Delivering zero-latency creative workflows across continents without disrupting existing production pipelines
RASCAL is an artist-led creative studio specializing in high-end finishing services for advertising and branded content. Based in London and Stockholm, RASCAL provides color, VFX, sound design, and music services for global brands and agencies, delivering award-winning content under tight creative deadlines.
In branded content post-production, creative direction can change at any moment due to the addition of last-minute stakeholders or a sudden decision to shift in response to current events. Clients often expect immediate turnaround on revisions without impacting the schedule; a small editorial change can have significant ripple effects across downstream VFX, color, sound, and mastering work. For example, a single 30-second commercial may have over 40 deliverables if it’s dubbed into 10 languages and formatted for 4 different platforms. Maintaining speed, consistency, and creative precision under these conditions is essential to keeping production on schedule and the client satisfied, especially when the stakeholders are spread across multiple time zones.
The Challenge
RASCAL recently took on a production where the client, a New York-based agency, was working on a joint US + UK campaign and required the ability to attend the finishing session in person in NY, with the artist in the room, while most of the technical work was still being done in London.
RASCAL needed a solution that would allow artists in different regions to work against the same production environment without introducing additional operational overhead, workflow complexity, or delays between teams.
While remote collaboration has become increasingly common across the media industry, enabling high-performance finishing workflows across continents remains technically difficult.
Remote desktop workflows over high-latency connections often cause frame stuttering and image tearing, limiting artists’ ability to make precise creative decisions.
Cloud-based file synchronization platforms often require teams to introduce separate workflows and storage silos for distributed projects, adding protocol overhead and creating additional operational complexity.
Remote connectivity to conventional storage solutions can impose a major performance penalty, increasing latency and reducing application responsiveness when artists access media over long-distance connections, rather than local high-performance storage.
Furthermore, clients expect the same level of responsiveness and creative agility regardless of artists' location. With teams operating across five time zones, Post-Production Support personnel still need to prepare workstations, manage media availability, and coordinate production handoffs without introducing delays that could affect client review sessions or delivery schedules.
For this project, creative work was taking place across the UK and US time zones, requiring that changes made during the New York workday be seamlessly merged with changes in London. In RASCAL’s previous attempts to support similar cross-regional workflows, project handovers would add up to 4 hours of delay as teams manually exported, transferred, uploaded, and re-conformed media and project files between locations.
In addition to eliminating these operational delays, RASCAL needed to ensure that any collaboration solution could support the demanding performance requirements of modern finishing workflows. Flame artists regularly work with 8K and 16K media on high-performance workstations, where creative productivity depends on fast, consistent access to shared production assets. Extending that experience across regions is challenging, as latency and data movement can quickly degrade the creative flow when artists collaborate against the same media from different locations.
The Solution
RASCAL leveraged Qumulo’s Cloud Data Fabric (CDF) with NeuralCache, Run Anywhere deployment model, and Qumulo Edge Accelerator technologies to extend its London-based production environment to North America while maintaining a fully consistent workflow.
“It was perfect. It was functioning exactly as if we were in London!” — Andrew “Barnsley” Wood, Flame Artist & Executive Creative Director, RASCAL
Qumulo Cloud Data Fabric
Qumulo’s Cloud Data Fabric enabled high-throughput block-level streaming between Qumulo deployments. Instead of replicating entire media files between locations, only the data blocks required by the application were streamed in real time.
This allows the NY-based artist to immediately access and work with project files without waiting for datasets to synchronize or hydrate locally.
Qumulo NeuralCache
Qumulo NeuralCache uses predictive AI-driven algorithms to identify application access patterns and intelligently prefetch data blocks before they are requested.
This significantly reduces the impact of access and seek latency in cross-region workflows, thereby reducing perceived latency and enabling local storage-like playback performance.
Qumulo Edge Accelerator & Run Anywhere deployment model
Qumulo Edge Accelerator is a single node, ephemeral cache-only native extension of the Qumulo Core filesystem. Qumulo’s Run Anywhere deployment model enabled Edge to be deployed on any x86-compatible hardware capable of running Linux, including virtual machines.
The Deployment Journey
Working alongside ERA, a specialist provider of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for the media and entertainment industry, and Qumulo solution partner Soluble, RASCAL deployed a managed VMware host in ERA’s Montreal data center to support a New York-based Flame artist. By utilizing ERA’s established Montreal infrastructure, the team was able to accelerate deployment and minimize costs while still delivering the low-latency performance required for remote editing workflows. ERA provided the private networking, GPU-enabled infrastructure, and fully managed vSphere service required for the deployment, while Qumulo, in partnership with Soluble, helped validate and deploy Qumulo Edge on the vSphere platform.
The deployment was designed to minimize operational disruption while rapidly enabling production readiness.
The Qumulo installation and Cloud Data Fabric configuration required minimal setup and was operational within minutes.
Once connected, the Montreal deployment became a native extension of RASCAL’s London environment. Artists gained immediate access to the same project files and media while maintaining full data consistency and high-performance read/write access.
Most importantly, the solution required no workflow changes or additional training for the London Support team.
The deployment preserved:
Existing media and project management workflows
Existing project structures and filesystem ACLs
Consistent media access
Checksum-validated data integrity
Blazing fast filesystem performance
The result was a globally distributed creative environment across multiple physical data centers that operated as a single logical entity.
Business Impact
“Both teams were able to work live on the same job, and we were able to save 4 hours per day on file transfers.” — Tom Swetnam, Head of Technology, RASCAL
By combining Qumulo Cloud Data Fabric and Edge Accelerator technologies, RASCAL successfully achieved seamless cross-continental collaboration without sacrificing creative responsiveness or workflow efficiency. Artists were able to work on the same shared datasets with consistent performance, without synchronization delays. Enabling strategic business expansion, stronger creative partnership, and new opportunities for RASCAL.
The Support team avoided the operational burden often associated with remote collaboration solutions, allowing them to continue supporting creatives with familiar processes and tooling.
The deployment eliminated the need for:
Expensive third-party synchronization tools
Full dataset replication between locations
Workflow redesigns for remote artists
Additional media management overhead
Most importantly, the solution enabled RASCAL to maintain the high-touch, rapid-turnaround service model that clients expect in the high-end commercial finishing space while operating globally.