The Wrecking Crew

From the production’s point of view, The Wrecking Crew presented several overlapping pressures.

Principal photography was split across New Zealand and Hawaii, while post‑production, VFX and Editorial were split between Auckland and Los Angeles. Editorial needed dailies delivered overnight. VFX needed accurate, timely information to track shots and costs. Content Security required that camera originals were archived, verified and protected to studio standards.

Traditionally, dailies are delivered overnight, but camera originals often follow much more slowly, arriving days later via long‑distance transfers or physical shipment of drives., With production spanning Auckland and Honolulu and post based in Los Angeles, the potential for delays was high, and the operational risk and limited visibility for downstream teams was a further concern. Any alternative approach needed to accelerate access to camera originals, reduce manual handling of metadata across camera, script and on‑set VFX, and still match - or exceed - the quality and reliability of established on‑premises workflows.

“This was going to be a first for us. The benefits seemed obvious — I was just curious to see how they were going to pull it off.”

Micah Sampson, Post Production Manager, Amazon MGM Studios

The solution for The Wrecking Crew needed to address two things at once: how dailies were processed and delivered, and how production metadata was captured and distributed. Rather than treating these as separate problems, The Rebel Fleet designed a workflow where cloud‑based dailies and metadata flowed together as part of a single system.

The Rebel Fleet’s approach was guided by a simple principle: media and metadata must travel together.

A cloud‑first dailies workflow was designed so camera originals were archived directly into AWS in the US West region, regardless of where capture occurred. This allowed The Rebel Fleet to run dailies processing entirely in the cloud, removing the need for geographically fixed on‑premises labs.

Crucially, this meant the same dailies team could support the production across both New Zealand and Hawaii, maintaining consistency in look, process and communication as the show moved between locations. Rather than splitting work between regional facilities, operators worked within a shared cloud environment, using identical tools and configurations. This removed delays caused by physical shipments or slow international transfers and ensured post‑production teams could work from a consistent, local source of truth.

At the same time, Konsol was deployed on set to solve a different but equally critical problem: metadata fragmentation.

Konsol gathered metadata from camera reports, DIT systems, script notes, lens, on‑set VFX and more, normalising and linking that information directly to the corresponding media. It was also integrated with the VFX team’s Flow Production Tracker (ShotGrid), allowing on‑set VFX data to flow directly into the system already used for shot tracking and cost management.

This eliminated the need for manual re‑entry and gave production visibility into VFX scope and costs as the shoot progressed, not weeks later.

“Konsol was invaluable on our complex, multi‑unit, multi‑country production. It seamlessly brought together metadata from on‑set VFX notes, camera sheets, DIT, and script notes, integrating directly into our VFX team’s Flow Production Tracker. This eliminated manual data entry, allowing us to track shot costs in real time and provide faster feedback to production.”

Will Reece, VFX Producer

 

Additional engineering decisions meant no performance impact to operators and quality was never compromised.

“The first challenge was making sure we could work with camera original media directly in the cloud, with enough performance and low enough latency for our operators to do their jobs properly,” says Michael Parente, Workflow Architect at The Rebel Fleet. “That meant sufficient storage throughput to read the files, enough compute to decode and process them, and a setup where the experience felt no different to working on‑prem.”

 

Camera originals were read directly from object storage for processing, avoiding intermediary transcodes or storage bottlenecks. Network acceleration was used to make long‑distance transfers behave more like local operations. On set, data management teams were able to clear camera media faster by verifying cloud‑based archives instead of waiting on LTO writes.

Some decisions were intentional from the outset; others evolved as the production tested assumptions in real conditions. The Rebel Fleet team was able to easily adapt and enhance the workflow as the production progressed without slowing the show down.

Over the course of The Wrecking Crew, The Rebel Fleet processed and delivered over 160TB of camera media using the cloud dailies platform, with metadata consistently flowing alongside it.

Editorial teams began their day with dailies ready to go. Camera originals were already archived and verified in‑region. VFX had immediate access to structured, reliable data, enabling faster bidding, clearer cost tracking and smoother vendor handovers.

From the studio’s perspective, success wasn’t measured by novelty, but by reliability.

“The simple fact that a shoot day would happen in Auckland, and by the time LA woke up we’d have editorial media and camera originals archived in our local cloud region, I’ve never had a process as quick and painless as this.”

Micah Sampson, Post Production Manager, Amazon MGM Studios

 

The approach was repeatable, scalable, and — most importantly — trusted by the teams using it.

The Wrecking Crew wasn’t looking for ways to innovate, they were focused on removing friction from a process that increasingly defines the success of modern productions.

By treating metadata as first‑class infrastructure, and by decoupling dailies from geography, The Rebel Fleet and Konsol enabled teams to focus less on moving data and more on using it to make creative decisions with confidence.