Mike Klinger Guest Blogger / London Calling: A success story from the trenches

A couple of months ago we had a notable job worth sharing: On our Clonetown web site we advertise that we’ll help you with “clone emergencies” 24/7.  Being a smaller operation we aren’t staffed 24/7, but if you call with an emergency somebody will answer. If needed, we’ll send someone in to open up and we’ll really help you out!

Now as it turns out, clone emergencies aren’t as life threatening as one might think, so we don’t actually get that many middle-of-the-night emergency calls. When there is such a call, it usually comes to me (Mike) and I do indeed answer the call – even at 3am.

You have to keep in mind, that Los Angeles has the largest presence of post production facilities in the world, so it’s actually not that hard to get someone to answer their phone in the middle of the night (if you know who and where to call) — so that’s not so special. The difference in our case is that only the largest of the facilities have 24/7 staff. So, 24/7 service from a smaller facility like ours is pretty rare.

But, imagine that you work at an editorial company in London. You start your day at 10am (2 am Los Angeles time) by listening to a perturbed voice message: A client in Beverly Hills who has just sat down after a very long day to review some DVDs you sent. They aren’t playing and they need you (the person in London) to solve the problem by 9am when they wake up. Yikes! What do you do?

You realize that what probably happened is that you sent PAL DVDs and your client needs NTSC DVDs. So you do an online search and come up with a list of 150 facilities in Los Angeles. Everyone in your office starts frantically calling L.A. facilities hoping that someone who can help will answer in the middle of the night. To your relief, you get a few places answering, but no one can seem to get their head around how to help you without it costing thousands of dollars and as you have no history with them, they start talking about service and credit applications, and other red tape.

Good news for you that one of the calls you made was to Tree Falls Post and you don’t know it yet but I am monitoring the emergency line. Without hesitation I wake from a dead sleep at 3am, take the call from home. I quickly devised a plan, throw on some clothes, jump into the car and head to the office. Before leaving, I tell the London people to start loading their large PAL video files to the Tree Falls FTP. Once the files are downloaded I cut precious conversion and compression time by doing a real time NTSC conversion through a Teranex box, which I feed to a dvd recorder. Once done, I jump back in my car and hand deliver the dvds to Beverly Hills by 9am, crisis averted. Phew!

We didn’t hold things up while we processed an application. Didn’t even collect credit card information. We simply handled the emergency and opted to sort out the details later. When it came time to set a rate, we looked on our rate card for a price that matched and just couldn’t find the “frantic/London/needs to load large files to our ftp/ have then converted to NTSC DVDs and hand delivered to Beverly Hills by 9AM” rate. So instead we punted on a price called it even at about $200 including delivery of the DVDs.

After the dust has settled our new friends in London called to say they were very thankful and said that a great benefit to working (aside from answering the phone) with us was that we were willing to jump in solve the problem first and deal with the details later. They said none of the other night crawlers were willing to do business like that.

This story encapsulates the spirit in which we operate. If Tree Falls isn’t part of your team yet, hopefully this story demonstrates what a great resource Tree Falls can be for you . . . With or without a crisis!

Tree Falls Post is a full service audio and video post facility. Visit Tree Falls at: www.tfpost.com

Clonetown is a high definition dubbing and transfer facility. Visit Clonetown at: www.clonetownHD.com

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