bblackwood wrote on Fri, 04 December 2009 19:14 |
Had a client need a master delivered earlier this week, so I called, and while they didn't tell me they wouldn't accept DDP, they stressed over and over that they 'prefer' hard copies.
I have to tell you, for a company of this size to even give the slightest grief over accepting DDP masters is stunning. If this were 1999 I might understand it, but come on!
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Our size
is the reason for the delay in taking DDP uploads.
I know it's hard to understand, but our procedures have been in place for years, long before it was feasible to deliver masters electronically, and so we have a system based around physical masters that come in and are labeled and able to be tracked in an 80,000 sq. ft. facilty with hundreds of employees.
We're getting there, but we have to make sure we do it right. We booked almost 200 jobs in a single day recently, all of those masters need to be accounted for.
The overwhelming number of masters we receive are still plain Jane audio discs, so while there is certainly demand for uploading masters from the more professional mastering houses like yourself the truth is we're putting a system in place that will only be used by a small percentage of clients for the foreseeable future.
We deal with some pretty large outside replication companies like Sony, and pretty much across the board they won't accept DDPs via FTP, so I think industry wide the mentality is that the current system works fine and therefore why change it.
I'm definitely an advocate for this happening because I know many of you would find it convenient and you send a lot of work to us. The Soundlab haven't delivered physical discs to our plant in about a year, we're all DDP across the network internally, so I know the benefits of that method of delivery and you can trust that I do want to see a safe, reliable method for our clients to upload masters to us.