[Tim Wilson]

I started this reply to Craig Seeman’s post last night and fell asleep before posting it. Oops. I’m going to go ahead and post it now, and reply to other stuff separately.

Not saying this will be the case but an “international” show in Las Vegas in April 2021 seems difficult.

Oh, I’m not surprised in the least that they’re calling off April 2021. That’s the least that they should do.

I’m just saying that October 2021 seems almost exactly as imprudent.

To me, the “B” in NAB might as well stand for “bug”, because evvvverybody comes back from that show with a bug. At least none of THOSE bugs carried lifelong consequences if you’re one of the ones “lucky” enough to get through it.

My cousin, just a few years older than me, was not. She died from COVID last Friday. I know that you’ve all got plenty of these stories, too. And NOW is the time that NAB has to announce this? NOW? Really?

Yes now, because the point was to mark their territory. And guess what, IBC, early autumn is now NAB’s territory.

It’s also not that I’m taking special umbrage on IBC’s behalf. Let these guys duke it out, what do I care? It’s that NAB is wrapping themselves in the mantle of, “We know how much everybody depends on us to drive this industry” that rankles me.

We already know how little energy an online version of NAB generates. They sent out a press release to announce that 40,000 people came by their site during “the show.” You can guess how many of those were the vendors checking to make sure that their stuff was playing correctly, so subtract that number from the total of “real” visitors. Not many.

One thing that people are learning is that, sure, NAB was fun when everything was easy. But necessary? No. They’re talking about themselves like they’re the engine driving the industry, but no. There will come a day when it’s worth taking advantage of the expo in some context or another in a way that benefits US, and they can take their slice for the service they provide, but they need to understand that WE are the engine that drives THEM.

Which I think they absolutely do understand. But I think we’ve learned a lot about them by how they’re going about making their case for continued relevance, and none of it looks good.

[Tim Wilson]

Hello Tamara and Gerardo,

Google Translate to the rescue!

“Hello, I have an Atem Mini Pro that I use with 3 canon vixia camcorders. When I connect the cameras to the Atem Mini Pro with 1 meter long hdmi cables, they work correctly, but when I connect them with 10 meter long hdmi cables only the first input works…. Anyone know what I can do with this … thanks for your help .. regards.”

This makes sense to me in English. Does it sound like what you are asking?

I am sorry not to have the answer!

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks Andy! We’re just getting started with the changes, and we’re very excited by what’s coming, especially for enhancing the community aspects of Creative COW (where the C does in fact stand for Community!).

Yes, the colored circle with a letter refers to the first letter of the first name of the person who is most recent on the thread. If they have a user photo, that would be there instead.

Richard, in the old forum, if somebody didn’t upload a new image, we supplied generic images of vintage ads for milk, baby cows, stuff like that. Here, we’re hoping that people will upload new user images. We’ve also built a social media integration such that if people log in with their social media IDs, and haven’t already uploaded a user image, we suck in whatever they’ve placed in their Gravatars, LinkedIn, etc.

We’re just on our second full day with the system up and running. Give it a little time to get the faces loaded up into the cache, and it will all make more sense.

Thanks,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Roger that to both of you. We need that. It might be as simple as rendering a visited link, right?

Good call! Keep ’em coming!

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Graham,

Two ways to add photos for now. One is to upload as an attachment, using the camera icon between the Style palette and the Smilies icon.

I’ll note that I’m not nuts about this method, but it is in fact the standard these days. Facebook does it like this, for example.

The other is to right click on an image on the web to copy, and paste into your post. I add images to almost all of my posts, and I tested the heck out of both of these.

The third common method, grabbing part of the screen with Windows Snipping Tool or Mac command shift 3 (or 4?) and pasting from your clipboard isn’t enabled yet, but coming soon!

My workaround for embedding screen snips for now is to save them, upload to the free hosting site imgur, then use the right click copy paste method to load it into the middle of a post, rather than leaving attached at the end. Not ideal, but definitely works.

Let me know when you try these, and let’s troubleshoot if something goes wrong. This is a feature set I care about a LOT.

Also, I’ll look into a way of making thread as read. I agree, very helpful!

Thanks,

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

The look that that screamed GameFaqs circa 2001 made me nostalgic, but I guess this is OK too.

?

[Tim Wilson]

The quote mechanism is one of my two least favorite things about the new site, and we’re definitely working on it. I’d hoped to have it make the launch, but it just missed the bus.

We do have a very cool tool, but it’s under that fly-out style menu. Copy the text you want to quote, paste it into your text. Then, with that text selected (or even just your cursor at the first line of the paragraph, hit that little quote button in the style bar. This is what you get.

How do I Quote what others are saying? The OLD way was straightforward if a little clunky.

It LOOKS cool, but it’s also not a proper quote. It’s just quote formatting. (Btw, standard keyboard shortcuts work for bold, italic, and underscore too.) It doesn’t actually link back to the person or post you’re quoting. THAT’s what I’m working on adding.

Probably a couple of days work is all that’s left but I don’t know what else we have to button up from the launch first. Fortunately, not a ton. I’ve been part of a lot of launches

Is there a Tutorial of the New Markups and so on?

I was going to wait a day or two to both see what is vexing people, and also, see what I could do about maybe fixing some of the worst stuff first and fast. So I might compromise and build something quick and dirty for now, and something more elaborate once the features gel a little more.

Lemme know what else you see that needs explaining, or add requests and suggestions. We don’t feel like we’re anywhere near done. We just needed to get something solid out the door and let real people working in the site help us fill in what they need. This is a great start!

Thanks again!

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Graham,

Glad you’re digging the new look! There’s actually a lot more going on than just looks, as I’m sure you can imagine. We’ve redeveloped from the ground up. Apart from the forum data itself, not a single pixel or line of code is carried over. We’re not sure, but from everything we’ve seen, this may be the biggest forum-conversion task in recent history. Maybe ever. DEFINITELY by a team as small as ours.

I’m glad you found the fly-out style bar under the “Aa” symbol. Lots of cool stuff there.

And yes, video upload is definitely coming back. The original impetus behind turning it off was that we were being buried in copyright claims, many of which were flatout nonsense, but once we crossed 10,000 reels plus who knows how many forum post videos, we simply couldn’t keep up with the takedown notices.

The world has changed a lot since then, so along with allowing video upload, we’re going to fire the reels back up. I don’t have a timetable for you, because to support it, we’re going to have to also spin up some new servers. At our peak, we were pumping out between 17-30 TB of data every day, and it’ll take us a while to rebuild those kinds of pipes.

A longer answer than you were likely looking for, but we’ve been banging on this for a while, and haven’t really had time to talk about it. Not that we were secretive. The beta site was password protected for posting, but anyone could look at it. We just didn’t have the bandwidth to do the work and talk about it at the same time. The biggest part of the work is behind us, and we’re excited to talk!

And honestly, one huge priority in shifting to a more feed-based front page is to help bring the VEGAS community into the COW mainstream. WE know how many people visit and post here, so we’ve done things like include VEGAS on the list of most popular forums (which of course it absolutely is), and featuring it right alongside posts from folks using Adobe, Apple, Avid, Blackmagic, and even further back in the alphabet. 🙂

I don’t mind saying that we’re going to want some help from you folks to develop more Vegas and Vegas-adjacent content. That’s later, but be thinking about what we can do together.

Coming soon, I’ve got some other stuff to fill everyone in on about we’re going in the broader picture.

So thanks for your enthusiasm, Graham! We really do appreciate hearing it! Lots more coming soon!

Take care,

Tim

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

I’m also happy to speak to those two forums in particular, because they are companies that we are very friendly with, and have worked with for years. RED obviously had very strong forum support with REDuser.net, and when the founder of REDuser.net, Jarred Land, became the company president in 2013 when founder Jim Jannard retired, it made all the sense in the world for RED.com to become the online center of gravity. We actually haven’t had an active RED camera forum for years.

With again, no disrespect intended, and none taken, as you might have noticed some RED ads in the COW every now and again, and a bunch of genuinely fantastic customer and project profiles, 100% exclusive to Creative COW, and brought to us straight from RED’s PR team.

That’s actually pretty typical. People who are hardcore Apple or Adobe or Avid or Blackmagic folks can often find the help they need at the excellent forums on those sites, even as those companies also very strongly support our forums here.

Where we continue to have a unique play is that COWfolks tend to use multiple tools in complex workflows. So, for example, there’s still a lot of RED traffic in the COW forums — just not for the camera itself. It’s people who need to push RED files through grading, vfx, and distributed editing workflows.

Red Giant is part of a trend we’ve seen with many, many plugin developers, where the traffic has tended to congregate in the After Effects forum itself. This is very, very different than the early days, when the plug was THE story.

Back in 1994 when I first started using After Effects, before it was even an Adobe product (still at Aldus when I bought it at the beginning of that years), I knew a TON of people who wanted to run FINAL Effects, because that thing was INSANE. (It is now owned by my old friend, and former boss and mentor Boris, and still glorious.) But that was the plugin package FOR After Effects. And I remember people saying, “But I only want Final Effects. Why do I need After Effects?”

That’s because AE itself didn’t really do much. It was mostly a processing core (and a superlative one at that, bordering on the miraculous. That team winning a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy a couple of years ago was way overdue). But for visual sizzle, the good stuff was in plugins.

In fact, you could buy a version of AE that was JUST the core, with NO plugins, with the idea being that you’d buy your blurs and dve tools and filters from people like Final Effects, Boris FX, Trapcode (later bought by Red Giant), and many others. Adobe bought AE at the end of 1994, and released the first version under the Adobe flag in October 95 with a lot of those plugins hardwired in.

Not that there’s not a ton of fantastic AE plugins still available (starting with Boris and Red Giant, among others), but that was the beginning of a seismic shift. By the time I made my last visit to the NY After Effects User Group when I was working for Boris in late 2002, people were aggressively challenging me during my presentation, “Why would anybody need plugins when After Effects does it all?” Uhm, because you can always do more?

Anyway, a lot of ancient history to observe that people now tend to think of themselves in terms of After Effects first, plugins second. And yes, Red Giant makes a lot of great stuff for editing applications in addition to After Effects, but it’s even more true in the world of FCP that we’ve seen those folks gravitate toward FCP’s native effects architecture first.

I’ll end by echoing what Ron said, that we’re taking a page from Apple’s playbook to consolidate some features in order to prioritize moving to the modern platform that we need in order to build what we envision for our future. What you’re looking at is what we’ve been up to for the past 5 months. We think that that next 5 are going to be a pretty wild ride.

Thanks to you and everyone else being so understanding about the DNS registrations for a site our size needing a good day to sort themselves out, but when the dust settles on Tuesday, we’ll be getting to work on the next round of fun.

Best,

Tim

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Hey Jono,

I’m afraid that I can’t help with your question, but as one of the COW folks, I wanted to thank you for the kind words about the new look! We’ve got lots, lots more cool stuff coming soon!

Take care!

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW