A Look into Our Unique Approach to All Things Media
By Matt Townley, Founder and President of MST Productions.
Whenever someone asks me “What does MST Productions do?” I always try to think of the most condensed answer possible, which is often quite challenging. Like many of you, we offer a wide variety of products and services, many of which we don’t directly advertise.
Often, it’s these unadvertised services that add the most value for our clients. Below are brief overviews of three recent projects that illustrate how unique and diverse our aproach to media is.
1. Being available to respond.
2. Immediate response & action.
Contact us today to find out how we can help make your media project a success.
1. Being Available to Respond.
Last month I received a phone call from a company that needed 10,000 DVDs replicated. They needed us to encode the video assets for DVD, create graphics for the DVD menu, author the DVD, replicate and package the DVDs, and lastly, distribute them according to their distribution list, which included about two-dozen different locations. The catch was that they needed the 10,000 DVDs to ship on Monday afternoon and it was Friday afternoon when they called.
The first step to meeting this client’s needs was being available and ready to respond. When you call MST Productions, you can feel confident that we will be there for you. Our company is small enough that you don’t get lost in big-business voicemail or transferred to someone in a different time zone. We work with you to provide solutions without being a part of the problem.
Working carefully with the client (and the client’s video production company), we successfully met all of their needs and ultimately shipped 10,000 fully packaged DVDs on time the following Monday.
2. Immediate Response & Action.
Last week I got a call at 4:30pm on Tuesday from a company that needed a video re-edited and delivered on Blu-ray Disc. Seemed straight forward enough; until they clarified that they needed it delivered by 10am the next morning.
The client had hired an East Coast based company to produce a video for playback on a video-wall as part of a trade show exhibit. Upon seeing the video in the trade show environment, there were issues with visibility and critical content being lost or not displayed properly. Due to time constraints and the coastal difference in locations, there was not time to have the original company revise the video, so the client needed us to re-create the video, incorporating the changes from their notes on the trade show floor.
We quickly assessed their needs and determined that we felt confident we could meet their expectations and deliver a high qulaity finished product in their tight timeline. Working through the night, we created custom HD motion-graphics and animations that incorporated their original assets and reflected the unique challenges of the environment it was being played back in.
The next morning I was on the trade show floor with a Blu-ray Disc in hand (and a few backups, of course) that could be looped. We delivered electronic versions of the video later that afternoon for use on the company's web site and for other presentation needs.
3. Innovative Solutions
We are currently in the final stages of testing a new web-based video project. Let me clear the air: NO, we are not trying to compete with YouTube. In fact, we are almost doing the opposite. A growing Web Software company approached us with a unique need to produce daily backup DVDs of conferences recorded from live Internet streams from their 7 offices around the world. The video has to be pulled from the streaming server, encoded to MPEG2, burned to DVD and printed with corresponding title and content information, including a barcode, on the surface of each disc.
On average, there are four conferences (each about 30 minutes) that are streamed three days a week. Each DVD needs to include the video from each of the respective day's conferences. A copy of each DVD then needs to be sent out to each of the client's 7 offices for archival and ongoing training purposes. This system is in addition to their already established web-based archiving and on-demand system.
Videos are downloaded after each stream is completed and stored on our server where it is encoded to MPEG2. At the end of each day, all of the videos from that day are aggregated into a single DVD, and utilizing our networked and fully automated disc publishing system, 7 DVDs are burned, verified and printed, all without the need for human interaction. The next day, the barcodes are scanned and the necessary shipping labels and documentation are printed and the DVDs are sent out to the client.
