Re: Now 2 Degrees Frost

Walter,

You wrote:We work very hard to produce a great build-to-order solution to our customers for a very good reason - we believe a happy customer is a customer who may refer us to their friends/colleagues which could result in more sales. That's happening right now and is very important to our bottom line.

I welcome your questions and I won't talk down to you. My aim will be clarity.

Chris writes:

That was a much better explanation of what you guys offer. But even some of that explanation was a little over my head. I understand it, but it's still pretty technical. My point is that every facility ownwer I know is NOT a computer expert. They're most certainly not an expert on shared storage and the various architectures that make them work. When you guys start talking about "clusters" and "layers" and "software stacks," it doesn't mean anything to us.

It reminds me when we first opened our company 13 years ago. We'd bring ad agency producers and account executives in for meetings and we'd go on for 20 minutes about our great editing system and how it was capable of 2:1 video compression...the best in the world at the time, and how we were using cameras and formats that gave them the highest quality...etc. etc. The ad agency folks' eyes would start to glass over and they'd lose interest. What we learned is: "they didn't care about the hardware and compression and formats." They just wanted us to solve their problem. They didn't care how. As long as it communicated their message and looked good. We could've shot with a Fischer Price camera and if we made it look good and came in on budget...we were hired.

The lesson is that all the technical stuff ultimately doesn't matter. It just needs to work and solve the clients problem with the least amount of pain and suffering! I think the biggest point to remember is that a shared storage system never made a company money. It's the benefits of what the shared storage system is able to do that helps a company make money. So all these companies out there selling these systems tout the hardware and technical specs...when what facility owners want is solutions to their editing problems. Namely...having to constantly transfer footage; having to move project files from station to station; the complication of backups when files reside on multiple workstations and hard drive arrays; the issue of constant file duplication on those backups, which wastes hard drive space and further complicates administration of backups; the ability of multiple editors and effects artists to work on the same project from the same media pool simultaneously. I could go on for another paragraph.

Anyway...I would've loved to evaluate your products when we were doing our research and I can't explain why our emails didn't get through ...but they didn't. One was sent from my home computer and emailed directly from our web-server email page. The other was sent from my work computer via Outlook. Neither bounced back so I can only assume they went somewhere.

Several other emails sent during the same email sessions got to their destinations so it doesn't seem like there was a problem on our end. We've had a couple of experiences where our URL was mistakenly blacklisted by internet providers and all our email ended up in our spam folders, but it was pretty obvious because the entire office stopped receiving email and it only took a few hours to realize something wasn't working. One look in our spam folder on CleanMail.com and there were all our legitimate emails. We simply mark the legitimate ones and they all pass through to Outlook...and the blacklisting is fixed with one phone call.

Anyway...I appreciate your response and I appreciate the complexity of your industry. But as a 25 year production veteran and facility owner, what we all want when it comes to products and vendors is: clarity, simplicity, and products that solve our problems. All the other technical mumbo/jumbo is just hype. Maybe there are IT guys out there that like all the stuff, but there are thousands of production facilities worldwide that don't employ IT people. And many of those folks will be looking for shared storage solutions in the near future.





Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
www.videomi.com