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Lola VFX: Safeguarding High-Profile IP While Slashing Offload Times

October 30, 2023

In high-volume, high-stakes visual effects workflows, Lola Visual Effects found a way to dramatically reduce data wrangling hours while ensuring their sensitive footage stays safe from ingest to vfx. With iodyne Pro Data, they’ve cut offload times by a third, secured all assets with hardware encryption, and left the stacks of old hard drives behind—finally getting peace of mind and a few more hours of sleep.

Pioneers in On-Screen Transformation

Lola Visual Effects is no stranger to Hollywood magic. Known for seamlessly altering the on-screen appearance of actors, they’ve been the go-to team for groundbreaking de-aging work and facial performance projection. Their patented system, nicknamed “the Egg,” lets them map hero performances onto body doubles, with precision that holds up on the biggest screens. If you’ve seen a Marvel movie in the past decade, chances are you’ve seen Lola’s work.

The Challenge: Massive Data and Tight Turnarounds

On a typical shoot day, Lola operates a fleet of eight RED cameras capturing 6K footageand six Sony cameras shooting in 4K—all at 48 frames per second. That’s twice the standard frame rate, and a mountain of uncompressed high-res footage. A single day can easily generate 14 to 18 terabytesof raw data.

The Solution: Speed + Form Factor + Security in One Sleek Device

With iodyne Pro Data, the team now completes offloads in 1–2 hours—a 3x speed improvement, thanks to sustained 5GB/s throughput. 
Three times faster, third of the footprint.

And size matters. Instead of hauling around bulky Pelican cases packed with spinning drives, the team can rely on compact, silent, encrypted Pro Data units that look more like laptops than servers.

It’s small. It’s sleek. It’s encrypted. As soon as we’re done shooting and I put the data on here, no one else is going to get to it,” says Lola VFX’s Edson Williams.

That peace of mind didn’t exist with legacy systems. A “stack of hard drives” offers no security—and plenty of stress. With Pro Data, Lola knows their work is protected by end-to-end hardware encryption, without adding complexity or slowing down transfer speeds.

The Result: Less Time Wrangling, More Time Creating

Since switching to iodyne, Lola’s data pipeline is faster, simpler, and more secure. Long offload nights are now handled in a fraction of the time, reducing post-shoot downtime.
 
In an industry where lost footage or delays can cost studios millions, iodyne Pro Data gives Lola the performance edge and reliability they need—without compromise.
“We save time, we get sleep, and it goes into an encrypted system that we trust.”

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