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

I haven’t been blogging. I haven’t felt right about it. I’ve been thinking a lot about this industry and how impossible it must be to get a foothold if you’re just starting out. When I got started in 1985 … things were still influenced by the studio system and apprenticeships were available. You trained. You trained under someone who had a responsibility to pass on knowledge gained from the previous generation. Or you got a job as an assistant, which meant you trained for another 5 to 10 years before becoming an editor. This real world training was great. It was like a secret club with it’s own language. I loved acquiring the vocabulary that would allow me to get on the phone and order a reprint from a lab. I loved putting my hands on a rewind and challenging myself to spin a reel it faster and faster until it produced an amazing breeze. You could make a decent wage while you learned. It was an incredible privilege.

When digital editing replaced analog editing—  apprentices and sound assistants eventually became obsolete.  With Pro Tools, an editor no longer needed that kind of support. But it also meant that this real world training ground for assistants was a thing of the past too. No longer could you learn your craft in an assured and studied manner.

Right now we’re faced with a tight tight economy (with regards to the TV post production community). And yet we still have recording schools all across the country spilling out graduates by the thousands. Equipment has become relatively affordable which means that it’s easier than ever to hang a shingle and and take on jobs from Craigslist. Jobs for no pay. Or jobs that don’t pay much. This ends up affecting everyone. It causes wages to come down for everyone.

Quality is affected too. People have become used to MP3 quality. Some television is sounding worse than ever. Shows are compressed to death in an attempt to make them appear louder and punchier, but the affect is quite the opposite. Everything sounds the same.

I hate to be discouraging to anyone that wants to forge a career in this field, but the climate seems just terrible for building a career right now. Budgets are getting smaller and smaller and companies both big and small are grappling for the same work. The market is over saturated with those that already offer post services and with those that want to be a part of the industry. Most importantly… structured, real world training opportunities have all but dried up.

Run the other way? Not necessarily. I still like to think that if someone is talented enough and patient enough, there are still roads in. The important question remains though. If you can find that “road in” and take it — will you like this terrain once you get here? Or are the golden days of sound editing and mixing a thing of the past?

Okay now you’re thinking – “What kind of a blog is this going be? – he’s cursing already!” I’ll get back to that in a moment.

A quick intro: I am the co-owner of Tree Falls Post/Clonetown. I’ve been in the post biz for over 22 years now, started as a post sound editor/mixer. Over the years, I’ve evolved into full video and audio post production entrepreneur along with my wife D.D. As an occasional guest of D.D.’s blog, I won’t have the poetic, artful approach that she does. I’m the pragmatic, tech minded part of this team.

Back to my topic: “Maybe I’m the A*s H*le!”  which I’ll abbreviate as “AH.”

Several years ago, a well-known voice over talent told me an anecdotal story: When he was a teen, he came home in a grumpy mood from a particularly rough day and complained to his father about his bad day. He explained that he had run into one person after another and for whatever reason everyone that day seemed to be an AH. His father listened patiently and then said “Son, if you go about your day and you run into an AH, then that person probably is an AH. But if you go about your day and everyone is an AH, then more than likely, YOU, son are the AH.”

How true that seems to rings with me in some experiences we’ve all had as  customers. How often do we run into some situation where we feel like we are being punished for being a customer?  Recently, I was dealing with some web hosting issues and had to move our domains to a new company. In the process, one of the domains didn’t transfer properly. In getting some tech support from the old company I was emailed a lengthy PDF troubleshooting  document. When that didn’t seem to help, I asked for more help and the response from their support department was that I hadn’t thoroughly read the information and that the answer was on page 6, paragraph 2 line 7. In fewer words they could have said what they knew but wouldn’t simply tell me: “It’s likely that your contact email isn’t up to date on that domain.”

What this said to me was “look AH, this is such an annoying question that we get hundreds of times of day, and if you weren’t such an AH you would have thoroughly read the 10 page PDF and your question would be answered. And I’m thinking, if this is such a re-occurring question that it has become an annoyance to you — then maybe you haven’t effectively presented the info or made it easy enough to your customers?

It’s life experiences like this which make me strive in every way possible not to be on the AH side of the human dynamics of customer service.  We feel that we have been extremely thoughtful at Tree Falls about every aspect of our operation. Our team does a great job being as friendly and easy as possible to work with. From an operational point of view — we hope not bog you down with a lot of rules, policies, exceptions, punishment fees, or laborious reading, when a quick verbal answer might serve better.  We hope you find us great to work with and if you aren’t a customer yet, please give us a try and see how great our work and our customer service is.

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

DAT ( digital audio tape) was widely used in the professional audio recording industry in the 1990′s. Although it still has some die hard fans (especially in field recording) — it’s been dying a slow death for years. I got my first DAT recorder in 1996 — a DAT Walkman that I carried around on trips to record backgrounds, also using it as one would a camera, to record audio snapshots of random conversations and various sounds that struck me. In 1998, I bought my first Pro DAT deck because it was still a necessary evil in a well equipped sound editing room. I hated my DAT player. It was clunky with chunky buttons and you never felt like you really had control over it. Placing ID’s was a nightmare (at least for me) and just the way it spun around and clicked and clacked drove me crazy. Mike says he was always suspicious of DAT. I think we all were. But thankfully, within a few short years… DAT began being phased out and once Mike and I joined forces and to create Tree Falls in 2002, my DAT player was moved into the background. By then there were more stable ways of recording and archiving audio digitally.

Yesterday, while I was doing some paperwork at our front desk — a man walked in with a job for Clonetown. Clonetown is the other company that Mike and I own that’s dedicated to making dubs, HD transfers, clones, CDs etc. (www.clonetownHD.com) This particular client had a nearly 20 year old DAT tape containing archived blues numbers he’d performed in the 1960′s and 70′s and had remastered to DAT in the 90′s. He wanted it transfered to CD with the ultimate goal of getting about 100 CDs made. One of our dub guys, who took the order, explained that we needed to create a CD master from the DAT. From this the client’s 100 CDs would be struck. He was quoted a fee of $25 for creating a CD Dubbing Master. A reasonable sum, that is until you add in the dreaded “DAT Factor”. No one can ever really know what evil lives inside of a DAT. That is until you crack it open and play it. As it turns out our early suspicions about the stability of DAT weren’t unfounded. DAT has not proven to be a reliable digital format for audio.

Luke, our lead dub guy, started setting up the job. And since it included DAT, it peaked Mike’s attention enough to jumped in and help. Soon after… I heard wonderful blues music coming from Mike’s studio. At this point Mike had already done something called “packing” the tape. This meant doing a fast forward and rewind to acclimate the tape to the decks transports before digitizing the DAT into ProTools. Something you wouldn’t know unless you’d been around DAT in the 80′s and 90′s. The job was running smoothly until about 7 minutes into the digitizing, when both Mike and I heard a nasty bit of digital hashing (distortion). Mike wrote down the time code number and kept on recording the DAT into ProTools. By the time he got to the middle of the DAT, the digital hash was so badly interfering with one of the songs that it seemed utterly hopeless that he could ever get a clean transfer out of it. Once again he noted the time code numbers of all the distortion and kept rolling. Once he was finished recording the entire DAT into ProTools, he decided to give our second DAT player a try, to see if the DAT would be any happier in that machine. On the second pass some previously distorted areas were clean but others were now distorted but between the two passes he had most of the material — but it was in pieces. Then there were a few stubborn areas. He then forwarded to the same stubborn 7 minute mark and once again there was distortion. But what was so interesting, at least for me — was that the distortion didn’t hit in the same exact spots that it had on the previous run. It was now coming up at slightly different parts of the song. Mike then tried an old trick of doing a rapid start of the DAT just before the distorted area— in hopes of shocking the tape it into forgetting that it was having a problem. But that didn’t work either. At this point I moved to my office and Mike trudged forward.

It wasn’t until about an hour and a half later, when I saw Mike walking down the hallway, that I asked him if he’d had any success in getting that one troublesome song off of the DAT. When he told me that he’d successfully made the dubbing master and that the run of 100 CD’s was in the queue I was stunned. How had he accomplished it?

Mike went on to tell me that he’d exploited the “randomness” of the DAT’s distortion  to get all of the clean pieces he needed. Whenever he’d get to a piece of distortion, he’d stop, re-cue the DAT tape and continue recording into Pro Tools until he hit the next bit of distortion. Then he’d back up the DAT and continue on until the next bad section. There was one section that was so laden with distortion that it took nearly 50 tries to get that one piece (lasting about one second of running time) into ProTools with out distortion. In keeping at this task of letting the DAT decide where to randomly distort or not, he was finally able to cull all the necessary clean pieces to  begin the painstaking process of editing the song back together.

Mike went on to say that he’d also filtered the songs to reduce the “snap, crackle and pop”(many of the songs originated from vinyl) and he that he had done far more editing than he’d imagined he’d have to do to piece the song back together. True tenacity. Plus two DAT players, one ProTools rig, lots of sourcing and editing, filtering and still more editing until finally Mike had a complete CD Dubbing Master with every single note intact.

I do think that most of the larger (and even smaller dubbing companies for that matter) would not have gone to such lengths to get every last bit of audio off of this DAT. I think most would have early on admitted defeat, calling the client to inform them that the DAT had a large section that was un-fixable. In the end, this $25 dubbing master was more of an archival restoration job worth at least $500, but we never considered asking the client for more money. It was ultimately our decision to do all that we could do.

Mike later told me that he saw this job as a challenge. A puzzle. And a way to use his experience with older technology gained in the 80′s and 90′s to meet the goal. Often it’s not so much about the bottom line as it’s about the satisfaction gained in knowing that we’ve utilized all of our experience to make a client happy. Plus… being owner operators helps too. We just do what needs to be done and we empower our employees to do the same. No need to ask for permission. Just get the job it done right. A lot of times it goes unnoticed because we don’t make a big point of calling attention to it. But it feels right to me and Mike. We really don’t know any other way to run our businesses.

We hope our new client uses his CD to jump start his career. And we’re quite happy to report that every last note of every last song will be on his CD.

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

Cost: around $179.95

The spot was for van de camp fish sticks. The point of the spot was that the fish sticks tasted so fresh that the boxes literally flipped around like fresh fish — or to my mind like a “just caught” fish flipping around as it gasped for it’s last breath. Anyway… StuartWax; the lead editor and owner of  the company sent me out to come up with just the right sound for the flipping fish boxes. The first thing I tried was the “actual” thing… a box being tossed on a table. Quickly, I learned that the actual sound of something is usually not the right sound when it comes to sound design. So I proceeded to the produce section of a local grocery store and loaded up on vegetables. I tried celery being wacked on a table, lettuce being tossed about. Nothing was right. Then, I had a wave of inspiration… to record my ballet slippers. They had just the right snap and spring to them that when layered up on track after track — they sounded exactly like a room full of flipping fish stick boxes. The agency and client loved the sound. Most importantly though I was beginning to get my first real lesson in creating sound for TV commercials, which is that  it requires a heightened reality and it demand that one think “outside the box”.

George Gershwin is said to have derived the inspiration for his American classic “Rhapsody in Blue” while riding a train from New York City to Boston..

“As the train made its way north, George listened to the wheels rocking against the tracks – rattlety, rattlety, bang, rattlety, rattlety, bang. Soon his hands and feet began to imitate the rhythm – clappety, clappety, tap, clappety, clappety, tap.

George looked out the window and his mind began to drift. At first the rhythm of the train reminded him of the klezmer band at Ira’s bar mitzvah years ago – clappety, clappety, tap. He could almost hear the wailing strains of the clarinet against the syncopated rhythm of the fiddle.

George’s thoughts drifted to the Palais Royale: dancing the foxtrot, cheek to cheek, with a beautiful girl. Clappety, clappety, tap – the foxtrot reminded him of ragtime. He remembered roller-skating to the Barron Wilkins Club in Harlem. Since he was just a kid then, he was never allowed inside, so he sat on the curb and listened to the intoxicating rhythms and harmonies – clappety, clappety, tap – ragtime and the blues.

Clappety, clappety, tap, clappety, clappety, tap. George listened to the rhythm of the train for a long time, and as he did, he got an idea about how he could write his concerto. “Instead of comping new melodies, I’ll use the music that’s already in my head,” he thought. “Klezmer, foxtrot, ragtime and blues. My concerto will be a tuneful kaleidoscope – a rhapody about the music that surrounds me!”

from: “Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue ” Anna Harwell Celenza