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FCPX Dogs, New Names
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We’ve always tried to let the community drive the creation of forums. Every application starts with just one, and we let it evolve from there. Some examples:
— The Basics forums started because of new members who felt intimidated, partly because old members were being dicks. Both new members and old members made the request.
(By the way, we also added an option in your COW Profile to “Hide newbie posts.” This was added because of the geezers who, over a period of years, got tired of answering the same question, and couldn’t help themselves from being dicks about it. That option is ON by default.
I personally think that that’s the wrong default. I think most of the people who are still around in the COW are quite generous, and would happily answer the questions of each new generation of professionals, just as they themselves had been helped. But if not, they could choose to turn it off.
I do think that the right default is to assume that people are NOT dicks, and they DO want to help, so I may have to revisit that too. Opinions?)
— After Effects added a forum just for Expressions because, especially when that was a new feature, the traffic there really called for it. The forum remains there because the concerns of those folks are different. They’re often less concerned with DOING motion graphics than MANAGING motion graphics. The answers to their problems are mathematical, rather than, say, keying or compositing techniques or a menu setting.
Again, the request came from both the Expressive and non-Expressive.
— The separate forum for Resolve hardware configuration likewise came from the large number of posts asking ONLY about GPUs and computers. This became an issue after Resolve was released for Windows. Instead of a Mac and 2 graphics cards, the number of possibilities exploded, getting in the way of people needing to talk about how to USE Resolve.
This one actually might have been our most adamantly requested break-out.
The Final Cut Pro cluster combines dynamics related to all of these. The split between FCP and FCP Basics came naturally and organically. I think it was the first one we broke out after After Effects.
(Most of the dicks from the AE forum are gone, btw, but those guys could be vicious. If you’re one of the ones still here, please stay, but be less of a dick. LOL)
I wrote in my psychotically long overview at the top of this thread why we broke out FCPX or Not: The Debate. Nothing in that set of debates that started in April had anything to do with the USE of Final Cut Pro, which was of course what people could actually USE. Many of those folks won’t go FCPX before the sun goes nova.
I think you can see that virtually none of the day-to-day work problems of an FCP user and an FCPX user would have anything to do with an FCP user. Language is different, UI is different, some are old dogs, some are new tricks, etc etc etc.
But nobody could even start to do day to day work until FCPX was actually released in June. When it was, we started the Techniques forum, so named so that people could see in the names where they needed to be: ah yes, in this forum where we work, and this forum is the one where we avoid working. LOL And in fact, we get no more than 2-3 misplaced threads a month.
Over time, we have indeed merged some forums. This happened in storage in particular. We still have the front doors individually indexed, so that a customer of one particular brand will see that name and say “That’s me,” and head in that door. But what they’ll find will be storage experts from across the COW, who’ve come in their own front doors, because in fact, very few storage problems are brand-specific.
This was not at ALL the case back in the days when some storage companies had specific….issues. Now, there are pretty much only good products left, and only TERRIFIC ones working with the COW, and issues for all their customers are similar.
This does speak to an overall philosophy of ours, which is to break forums out very, very slowly. (FCPX or Not: The Debate being the exception.)
We only had one originally because in 1995, there was no NEED to separate things out. We organized around Media 100, everybody used After Effects, which at the time had TWO sets of plug-ins, and everybody had ’em. We all had the same storage nightmares. We were all, by and large, grownups who’d had to take out loans and second mortgages to get into the business. (I did both.)
That original community was among the first web forums of any kind. Netscape Navigator had just been released, and we were having to explain to people what the internet even WAS.
But we found that our community grew exponentially faster than other, more segmented forums that came later, because when you let people talk about a lot of stuff, they bond along a bunch of different lines that you could never have predicted. It’s easier to get answers because there are more people seeing each question.
That is, I might not have a burning need to answer a “Final Cut Pro Storage Issues” question, so I’d avoid a forum broken out that specifically….but if I saw a storage question in the Final Cut Forum that I could answer, I’d answer it.
This is obviously a very different approach than the PHP “forum in a box” forums. Those have a lot of advantages because they were able to build mechanisms in the abstract. Ours is admittedly awkward in places because we built it on the fly, based on practical experiences, in real time.
It might SEEM like a segmented forum is the way to go, and we understand why some people prefer them, but in real time, in the heat of many moments, we have seen that they just don’t work as well. Which is why none of them have grown the way that we have, despite many of them having far more money, much larger staffs, and so on.
I think it’s an astonishing accomplishment that one video producer, Ron Lindeboom, with ZERO programming experience, could envision a database structure that’s still working 20 years later, supporting 3 million sessions a month, many millions of posts, and up to 30 TB of data every day. Doing this while he was actually making a living as a full-time video producer.
None of this was intended to be a business, or started as a business opportunity, or anything like that. There was still no such thing as a web banner at the time. Nobody imagined that you could make money as a content provider, only as an ISP or AOL. Ending the video production company to focus full-time on the web didn’t actually happen until the COW in 2001, when it NEEDED to be a full-time business if it was going to happen at all.
All of which is another psychotically long but contextually important overview of why we are very, very slow to open new forums. They get in the way of what we have proven is the right way to do communities — as few walls as possible. But when people tell us that THEY NEED a new forum, we open it as quickly as we can.
So I think the Final Cut cluster will look like this for a while. Lord knows what Apple might do that might necessitate a change later on, but for now, four forums seems like the right number.
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[Tim Wilson] “– The Basics forums started because of new members who felt intimidated, partly because old members were being dicks. Both new members and old members made the request.”
IMHO the fix for that was to ban the dicks. It’s your forum… don’t tolerate it! As you know I’m the forum moderator for the Sony Vegas forum and the questions in the Sony Vegas basics forum aren’t any more basic than the posts in the Sony Vegas forum. All it does is make me look in two places to help people when I could be looking in one. We treat everyone with equal respect in both forums.
[Tim Wilson] “I do think that the right default is to assume that people are NOT dicks, and they DO want to help, so I may have to revisit that too. Opinions?)”
My opinion is that “Hide newbie posts” should be OFF by default. If you didn’t hang out here to help people then don’t hang out here. We must all be mindful that we were all once newbies and in fact, I learn more from newbies than I do from old dogs because newbies do things that I would never think of doing, which leads me to try what they did just to see the result, and the figure a way out. I never get tired or answering “What’s the best way to render for DVD?” and telling someone to render their video as MPEG2 and their audio as AC3 because at the end of the day…. it’s not intuitively obvious to a newbie even though us old dogs can recite in in our sleep and searching doesn’t always return what you are looking for.
[Tim Wilson] “So I think the Final Cut cluster will look like this for a while. Lord knows what Apple might do that might necessitate a change later on, but for now, four forums seems like the right number.”
OK so which forum do I post FCP X questions to? Final Cut Pro or FCPX Techniques? because while I can appreciate the history of how the forum names came to be… that doesn’t make them any more obvious to those of us who just want to ask an FCP X question. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Tim Wilson] “supporting 3 million sessions a month, many millions of posts, and up to 30 TB of data every day.”
:O wow!
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[John Rofrano] “OK so which forum do I post FCP X questions to? Final Cut Pro or FCPX Techniques? because while I can appreciate the history of how the forum names came to be… that doesn’t make them any more obvious to those of us who just want to ask an FCP X question. ;-)”
Surely not that difficult to figure out?
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[Steve Connor] “Surely not that difficult to figure out?”
Hover your mouse over the FCPX Techniques form in the main forum list and it says “Discussion of techniques, tips and tricks using Apple FCP X”. Based on that, since my question is not a “technique, tip, or trick” I’d have to guess that the “Final Cut Pro” forum is the correct place to ask Final Cut Pro X questions. Unless of course was a very basic question in which case I should post my FCP X question to the “Final Cut Pro basics” forum.
Did I guess right?
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[John Rofrano] “Did I guess right?”
So, THIS forum has the right name. It’s the OTHER forum that needs a new name.
This one stays “FCPX or Not: The Debate” (or Debates).
Maybe call the other one, “FCPX: Get Back To Work You Lazy Bastards.” LOL
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[Michael Gissing] “Sometimes trimming the fat throws away flavor. Simplicity is not always clarity.”
Nice.
Like when you hear that if it doesn’t drive the story forward it should be cut. Not always. It might enhance the moment or the character or the relationship, or the space between. The story is the vessel that holds the moments, the characters, the beats, the drama. And they return the favor. Who serves who? It’s both and not either or.
Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV40, Sony Z7U/VX2000/PD170; FCP 6 certified; FCP X write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.
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[Tim Wilson] “Maybe call the other one, “FCPX: Get Back To Work You Lazy Bastards.” LOL”
Well if you called the other one “FCPX: I’m pulling my hair out!” I’d know that it was the correct forum to ask FCP X questions. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[John Rofrano] “Hover your mouse over the FCPX Techniques form in the main forum list and it says “Discussion of techniques, tips and tricks using Apple FCP X”. Based on that, since my question is not a “technique, tip, or trick” I’d have to guess that the “Final Cut Pro” forum is the correct place to ask Final Cut Pro X questions. Unless of course was a very basic question in which case I should post my FCP X question to the “Final Cut Pro basics” forum.”
I would imagine that you would read some of the questions already posted in the forum and get a good sense of what people are asking about. Basically, you will asses and gather the context because we are naturally inquisitive creatures.
If you do happen to post in the worng forum, the people that are in the same room with you will tell you that you may need to try the appropriate forum, and there are even methods to move posts to other forums by users, so it may just happen that your post may get moved to the appropriate forum without you having to do much of anything at all.
It’s really not hard, and I would image that yes, you would be able to guess correctly most of the time?
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Anyone still debating the validity of FCPX needs to do us all a favor and go crawl back under the rock they came from and get on with their miserable sad existence. The rest of us can bask in the glory of evolution and the excitement of progress. That’s actually me keeping it positive on the matter!
Director, Editor, Colorist
http://www.trsociety.com
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