Post Office Films is a Budapest, Hungary-based post production and dailies company that specializes in supporting international film & television productions. Over time, Post Office Films has grown to become one of Hungary's largest dailies, grading and editorial companies, collaborating on a number of major projects, including the acclaimed historical drama The Brutalist.
For The Brutalist, one of the workflow challenges involved transferring more than 15 terabytes of dailies footage, as well as managing over 700 terabytes of total footage. There was also the need to support remote editing setups that spanned Budapest, New York, London and Sydney. The studio turned to Signiant (www.signiant.com) and its Media Shuttle, a tool that they've been using for over ten years, to tackle the demanding requirements of
The Brutalist. Using branded portals for submissions, sharing and sending, the setup enabled seamless collaboration across continents for editors, sound, music and VFX vendors. Media Shuttle’s ability to securely transfer sizable files quickly and reliably — regardless of location or bandwidth — ensured the team could stay on track despite tight deadlines and global complexities.
Post Office Films has developed a reputation for its ability to handle high volumes of data and complex workflows. Its team regularly collaborates with clients across continents, providing services from editorial to dailies to final delivery.
“I founded the company just trying to make a post production company that suits editors’ needs,” explains David Jancso, who’s the owner of Post Office Films, as well as an editor. “It started as a band of five editors. Today, [we’re] a hub for productions — American, Japanese, Australian — wherever.”
The studio's collaborative credits include Pieces of a Woman and
The Monkey Man. In fact, the studio acted as more than just a service provider - Jancso edited the films himself. In the case of
The Brutalist, which already has Golden Globe wins and Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Film Editing, Jancso believes the project may not have reached the finish line without the help of the Signiant platform.
The Brutalist was an ambitious project due in part to its runtime and sheer production scale. Shot on 35mm VistaVision, the film runs 215 minutes and generated more than 10 million files.
“It was shot on VistaVision, so it’s eight-perf 35mm — the equivalent of 70 millimeter — and scanned as 6K DPX files," Jansco shares. "We’re talking about 15 terabytes a day! The scans of the original footage were over 700 terabytes.”
As the project progressed, production began moving across the globe, requiring the editing media to be moved efficiently, securely and reliably. This is where Signiant provided support by ensuring smooth transfers and helping the production stay on track despite its global complexity.
“We started editing in Budapest, we moved to New York, then we moved to London. Then back to Budapest," Jansco recalls. "We had to upload the DPX files to the VFX vendors in London, but the material was in Budapest. Our sound team was all around the world — in Adelaide, in Sydney, in London.”
The sheer global scale of The Brutalist posed logistical challenges that could have been insurmountable without a robust file transfer solution. When Post Office Films first began operations in 2009, they relied on Aspera as their primary file transfer solution. However, this posed significant challenges for the team.
“It was pretty difficult with Aspera," Jansco recalls. "My team had to do a lot of juggling [with it]. We had editors around the world needing to download files into their own systems, and Aspera was not easy to use."
In 2013, they switched to Signiant Media Shuttle and have relied on it ever since, scaling as their projects and global production footprint expanded. Signiant Media Shuttle is widely used across the media & entertainment industry, particularly in production, post production and VFX. Its file acceleration technology overcomes latency challenges and optimizes bandwidth use, enabling fast, secure transfers regardless of location or network conditions. For Post Office Films, Media Shuttle’s flexibility and speed — up to 100 times faster than traditional methods — have been invaluable for handling the fast-paced demands of global collaborations. Moving physical media, such as LTO tapes via FedEx, just wasn't practical and could have interfered with critical deadlines. It also wouldn't allow for last-minute changes.
“As an artist, that type of freedom kills me,” Jancso relates, “because the directors can make a last-minute change. As a business owner, it’s so much less of a headache...It’s great that there's so much time to fiddle till the last moment.”
Getting the film premiere done was daunting, but when it came to versioning, that’s where the complexity of a global workflow raised the stakes.
“For The Brutalist, it was triple times as crazy as normal,” Jancso recalls. “One lab was creating 35mm, another was making 70mm. And of course, there were digital copies that went around. It was a very international film, so the constant DCPs going back and forth for reviews - that was quite intense. We had to make versions for each distributor: A24, Focus Features and Elevation in Canada. There's SDR and HDR, and different aspect ratios — 1.66:1 for the film; there’s a different version for TV. I can’t even tell you how many versions there are. The delivery is still going on....Because of the global partnership, there was no other solution than Signiant to have this film be done in the way it has been done. Every other platform is just not adequate enough for this.”