Rental Houses in Markets That Recovered Quickly Benefited
As the production industry continues to grow globally, markets outside of the US who recovered quickly from Covid saw work flock to their regions, allowing rental companies located in those markets to get back to work far quicker than their US competitors. The Canadian film market saw a large uptick in production much faster than the US production market did. Vancouver and Toronto soaked up work from Los Angeles and New York, who lagged behind as Covid’s constraint restricted early production in those markets. Once the US markets began opening back up, markets like New Orleans and Atlanta led the way as Covid restrictions lessened.
Big Budget Productions Lifted Larger Rental Companies in the Short Term
Productions that were well-financed ended up starting to shoot faster than smaller productions. With the stakes at all-time-highs, speed, security, and efficiency moved to the forefront of the production process. This meant that the larger rental companies who typically serviced features filled early demand and won jobs, while the smaller productions such as commercial and short-films, and therefore smaller rental companies, saw less demand earlier into the pandemic.
Rental companies refocused 2020’s CapEx budgets towards paying wages of key employees, fixed expenses that were difficult to re-negotiate (insurance, rent), and paying down vendor balances to keep accounts in good standing. These decisions were made all while customers stopped payments and new revenue was difficult to find. This burden has impacted 2021’s purchasing abilities and has opened the door to competition against smaller companies who were nimbler through the crisis.
2020’s Challenges Have Created Supply Issues for 2021
While the camera rental house community is particularly resilient, 2020’s challenges forced business owners and managers to make difficult decisions that may have lasting impacts on how they run their businesses. Rental houses are now facing a “bullwhip” return in demand but have found themselves unable to secure supply in the same capacity that they previously could. This is a direct result of 3 driving factors:
1. Manufacturers are forced to operate with reduced capacity, in turn producing fewer units, and are faced with shipping delays. This has caused production cycles and sales processes to slow down significantly.
2. Traditional resellers are stocking less equipment than they did pre-covid. Many manufacturers have clamped down on credit terms, creating back orders that are compounded with the delays in execution from their own challenges stated above.
3. Credit requirements have become tighter from traditional capital sources to rental companies (equipment finance companies, private capital sources) which took away their purchasing power.
Rental houses have looked towards alternative solutions to acquire equipment. DYNAMIC has taken steps to evolve its business to better help those clients, so that they always have affordable supply to meet demand.
Hunger for Content Leads to A Brighter Path Forward
After witnessing the resilience of the global market and demand for content pushing through from major TV streaming services, there is no doubt that the remainder of 2021 brings about hopefulness. In every economy throughout all of history, there is a bumpiness in progress rather than a steady climb. So often, the point of despair happens right before the upturn to the wave of success. As a tight-knit camera rental community, it’s our time to push ahead, together, and make it through to the next wave of evolution for film and television production.
Dynamic Discoveries is courtesy Dynamic Rentals, 4131 Vanowen Pl, Burbank Ca 91505, 818-636-1775, newsletter@dynamicrentals.com.
DYNAMIC continues to build our LTR (long-term rental), LTL (long-term leasing) and sub-rental business. Our strategic partnership with CODEX allows us to provide CODEX’s Emmy Award winning workflow solutions and MediaVault storage. Dynamically delivered - worldwide, on an on-demand basis.
Up until now, there hasn’t been a reliable channel to rent standardized production and post production storage. The result of this partnership means that we are now able to offer CODEX MediaVaults, providing networked attached storage (NAS) via long-term rentals or leasing options to our rental house clients, studios and post houses.
Multiple CODEX Media Docks and Media Stations have also been added to our inventory for rental, along with multiple 8TB Transfer Drives for high-speed back-up and cloning of the original camera data. This workflow equipment enables productions to not only take advantage of a complete solution from capture to delivery on an opex basis but also to leverage the 2:1 reduction in storage footprint that CODEX’s High Density Encoding (HDE) enables with ARRI ALEXA workflows. The CODEX workflow provides an end-to-end workflow solution that can be deployed on set, near set and into post.
Contact us at workflow@dynamicrentals.com or visit dynamicrentals.com/workflow to learn more.
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