Perry grew up in Vermont, skiing all winter and playing video games on an Atari 2600.
He attended the Massachusetts College of Art, where he worked in the film department equipment cage, and helped to get the school's aging Zei-Mark film chain out of the dust and back up and running for student use (3/4" U-Matic!). He graduated in 1994 with a BFA in Filmmaking, and went on to work for Data Translation, Inc, the maker of one of the early desktop video editing systems, Media 100. After working for a few tech companies in the 1990s, Perry founded a small company called "No Frills DVD" to offer DVD authoring services to independent filmmakers and distributors.
Over time, the company morphed into Gamma Ray Digital, and added services such as film restoration, color correction, and film scanning.