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old folks and young folks
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[Bob Zelin] “After this worked instantly, I thought about the 50+ year old producer at the TV station, and all the people that say “aah, those damn kids – they are just button pushers – what the hell do they know, they can’t do a job” – and wonder how long these 50+ year olds will remain employed.”
I guess us Near 60 Year Olds that are fearless about technology and run circles around most of the young people that we’ve worked with and know, don’t factor into the equation — eh, Bob?
;o)
Ron Lindeboom
(who is today setting up his new HP Z800 with DreamColor monitor and will be getting it live on its new VPN connection to use the new HP Skyroom for our morning meetings between Tim Wilson, me, and the rest of the crew.) -
15 Years ago in college I was taking a telecommunications class. The Professor there was teaching us about Dats and DVDs and anecdotally made comments about how he didn’t like digital, preferring a rotary telephone and vinyl records. He refused to get a touchtone telephone and was the primary person sending kids out into a digital broadcasting world that was in the process of being turned onto it’s head.
I wish that age was really the discriminating factor here – it would so much easier to differentiate between those who fear learning new things and those who don’t. I think it’s more of a frame of mind that occurs at any age. I have a 32 yr old producer friend who for the last 3 years has refused to back up her macbook with pictures of her kids on it. I’ve been trying and trying to get her to listen, to the point where she would pretend she didn’t get emails where I begged her to back up her system via time machine. Guess who I got a call from last week screaming about her blue folder with a question mark? Guess who lost the last 2 years of her kids pictures?
I had another guy tell me over the summer that he ‘knows’ final cut. I asked which version of final cut he had, and he told me he thinks it’s version 3, on his G3. I laughed at him and told him he needed to get a real mac and learn real Final Cut. His reply? “I don’t really want to learn anything new, I just wanna get a steady-paying 9-5 gig.” This man is not 50.
Meanwhile, for her birthday we gave my mom her first mac. She runs time machine, scans pics, plays with her iphone, and gets excited reading ‘macs for dummies’. My mom is 71.
The problem isn’t age related – it’s more about a persons frame of mind. If the concept of ‘new’ things, new features, new plugins, new software, and new ways to do things excites you, it won’t matter if you’re 100 years old, you’ll learn these new things and, even at it’s most frustrating, the process will bring joy to you.
If, like my friend who’s hard drive crashed, you cry about how you don’t have enough time to learn anything new (spending 10 minutes crying over something you could have learned in 1 minute), then any new concepts will blow you away, and one day you’ll be unemployed jealously wondering why everyone else is so happy and doing things you don’t understand.
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A friend on his 60s told me the difference for him was the “don’t touch that” culture in which he grew up.
He said it’s amazing how today children play with cell phones the same way they play with toys.
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I have several comments on the statements made
1) the “sneakernet” is happening for the same reason I just don’t run the mic from the VO booth into the FCP edit room. The client will simply not let me pop a hole in the wall, so I can get the mic from the VO booth, into the mixer of the edit suite. All this aggrivation, because the hole in the wall is the MOST IMPORTANT THING in this story (to the client). No ethernet cable, no audio cable, no nothing – DONT TOUCH MY WALL.
2) the Z800 is the sexiest computer to ever come out. I just installed two of them recently. Too expensive, but it is “THE” PC to get.
3) on the “over 50” or “over 60” crowd. Yes, it depends on the person. I was in a social situation, discussing music, discussing this gentleman’s favorite old band – “YES”. And I started to talk about all the new cool stuff that they do, that you can hear (never on the radio) on the internet, from these very artists of “yesteryear” that you love so much. And he said to me “you know Bob, I am just not that interested anymore”. And I knew that this person should be shot. He was done with learning anything – including things that he loved. He just wants to sit there and be left alone, remembering the past. Just shoot them, and get them out of the way.
Bob Zelin
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One has always neede the other. That guy needed people to bring him juice boxes years ago when he was very busy and quite important. Today, I’m sure he’s more than capable of fetching some juice boxes for people getting work done.
lol
I had a client ask me for an EDL just weeks ago. Now, I’m programmed, as many of us are, to just say yes sir and fill any request. As I was about to brain storm ways to provide multiple EDLs, I simply asked “Is the Avid project ok?” Dude looked puzzled then just said “as long as I can use it later.” IN the end, he just wanted to be able to revise later, should that need arise. Nobody has mentioned to him that EDLS have not been the way to do that in a dacade or so. Poor fella. These are the folks that still ask for a chyron when they want some text on the screen. It’s not doin’ em a favor to not correct em. Ions later, they are confised about VOs to Dbeta to the avid to FCP when all they need is a freakin microphone.juice box.
I’ll wait.
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The best way to decide who gets into heaven or hell should be if St. Peter asks “what’s the best way to archive a project?”. Anyone who answers “EDL?” will immediately be cast into the lake of fire.
I had a client demand EDL’s from me for years, refusing to hear me when I carefully explained how useless they were. Eventually all the vendors just started giving blank text files with ‘edl’ on them. Unfortunately, I have an allergy to stupidity, so I had to fire the client. Ended up getting an incredible client that paid more and demanded less. Ahhhhhh.
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I’m 59-1/2 and very tech savvy. Just one question, I hope you guys can help. I can’t figure out how they get all those vacuum tubes into my SD cards and USB drives, and how come they don’t have to warm up?
Joel Servetz
RGB Media Services, LLC
Sarasota, Fl
videobyjoel@aol.com -
with PC’s taking 120 seconds to just turn on, let me assure you, those HP Z800’s that Ron Lindeboom just got sure as hell have vacume tubes in them. And big ones – (EL34’s).
Bob Zelin
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Back when I was doing internships and applying for jobs out of college, folks were always impressed that I could setup a waveform and vectorscope and time decks. I had to explain that I had to seek out someone to teach me that.
Once I started my job, we at the time were doing a ton of 3D animation (Alias Wavefront, the precursor to Maya). Once all the frames were rendered, we hooked up the SGI computer to an MII record deck via component for video and a serial interface called a VLan which controlled the deck to record each frame to tape as an insert edit. We had to let that rip overnight and if we were lucky we had a 10 second animation in the morning without any head switches. We were unlucky often.
A few years later when we got our first NLE, In:Sync Speed Razor, running on a top of the line Pentium 1, we managed to network the PC to the SGI and use command line FTP to connect and transfer the image files, then play out the animation timeline to BetaSP, as we were still doing primary editing in the edit bay.
Sneakernet was also quite popular – shuttle SCSI drives from computer to computer. Once we got ZIP drives our problems were solved. Imagine saving 100 megabytes on a reusable disc, only costing about $15 a cartridge – amazing.
Yep, kids these days have it easy!
Mike Cohen
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“Uphill, both ways, in the snow”, is how we normally finish these:-)
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