Grass Valley supports post production with FilmPro

London is one of the world’s leading centres for top end post production, with no fewer than 21 major facilities relying on Grass Valley systems: Spirit DataCines, Spirit 4K & 2K Scanners, Specter Virtual DataCines and the new Bones image processing platforms from Thomson.
Grass Valley has worked together with the Soho post community to create a rapid response service structure to meet their needs for continuing support with a new service called FilmPro.
With the rapid growth in digital intermediate post for movies adding to the already high levels of work in long-form television and commercials, film-originated post production in London is busier than ever. A Spirit film scanner is likely to be the largest single expenditure in a post house, so the facility needs very high availability to keep its customers satisfied and earn a good return on investment.
In discussion with all of London’s facilities, Grass Valley developed a service contract, with a team of engineers based in central London, within walking distance of virtually all sites. The service level agreement was tailored to deliver rapid response at an annual contract cost which was significantly less than the true cost of a single failure. At the request of the London community, a specialist in data networking was transferred from Grass Valley’s Weiterstadt R&D centre to join the London support team.
The result is that every one of the Spirit post-production facilities in London has now signed up to FilmPro. This is a clear demonstration that when manufacturers and users work together they can define a support structure which meets the immediate needs of high availability, and at the same time develops a close bond between the two sides, allowing practical information from users to be fed back into the development and manufacturing process.
“If something goes wrong with a Spirit, there is a knock-on effect through the whole facility,” said Steve Harman, Chief Engineer at The Mill. “If we have a problem, then the response from the support team is very good. And because they are based so close, they can come in at an hour or two’s notice for software upgrades. Although it is an additional cost for us, the service really is worth the money.”
“I would not risk running our two Spirits without a service contract,” said Dave Klafkowski, operations director at The Farm group. “As much as having the engineers on hand, what is really important to us is the knowledge that we have access to a large pool of spares just around the corner.”
“For post houses the business model depends not just on picking the right products but keeping them in revenue-earning service,” said Marc Valentin, president of the Grass Valley business within Thomson. “FilmPro is a fine example of the way we can create a support solution tailored to the specific needs of one part of the industry.”
(GB)