[Tim Wilson]

Thanks Eric! We’re definitely still seeing some wacky stuff as the DNS connections reset across the site. It’ll probably take another few hours, maybe the rest of the day for everything to catch up. We appreciate everyone’s patience while the crawlers crawl!

[Tim Wilson]

[Dirk de Jong] “Did you know that for awhile there was an Other Music location in Harvard Square (Cambridge MA) ?”

Yes! In fact, I found that location first! Visiting the store in New York after that, it was abundantly obvious which was the original, though. ☺

One thing I liked about the Harvard Square store is that it was less crowded, so you could take the time to read all the notes posted on the wall by employees. Both stores shared a complete lack of cynicism and arrogance stereotypical of hyper-intense shops — and these were both off-the-charts intense. I’ve never been around more passionate music lovers who were so excited to share, without belittling anyone who hadn’t heard every disk in the store’s intentionally offbeat inventory.

Interesting article about the closing in the Harvard student paper, The Crimson. Not shocking to discover that it had never been a profitable location, but it was the NY store closing for three weeks in September 2001 that was the last straw for the Cambridge store. Without NY to supply inventory and cash infusions, they had to fold in early 2002.

I do love this quote, though, which sums up a significant part of the experience: Alexis C. Madrigal ’04 said that although he would often walk into the store and not recognize a single song title or band name, he could always leave the store with a CD that he liked.

That’s the thing. I definitely remember when I’d hung out there long enough that I recognized most of the artists in the bins. LOL But my experience was just like Alexis — I never left empty handed, and the artists that I found there tended to become some all-time favorites.

Now that I think about it, Other Music is where I bought the DFA comp (“Compilation #1”) that had The Rapture before their album came out. I’d already bought the LCD Soundsystem record at Newbury Comics, but Other Music was the only place in town that had the comp.

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks for the tip on the Other Music doc! I had no idea! Other Music was one of my homes away from home when I visited New York! I grabbed a t shirt just before they closed, and you’ve inspired me to do something I rarely do — post a selfie! Here’s me wearing that shirt just now!

(Since this is public, I should note that Kylee Peña was kind enough to scoop this up for me when she visited at my recommendation. It was only luck that she landed there the week before they closed.)

If we’re talking about ducks in alternative dance music, then my mind races to MC Honky’s Like A Duck, which also came out when we were at Boris together, MC Honky being the alter ego of Mark Oliver Everett (Eels). Great song (and album), and pretty nifty video.

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[Tim Wilson]

You’re a funny man, Dirk!

It also happens that I LOVE The Rapture in general, and House of Jealous Lovers is my very favorite track of theirs! I was working at Boris when the single came out (March 2002), and I bought it on a DFA comp before it was available standalone. Did we talk about this at the time?

In any case, thanks for a much need bounce through the early aughts!

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Jenn,

I’m chiming in behind Mark to underscore: his is the only possible correct answer. If you want to make enough money to live, you have to do the math to find out how much that is.

Which is to say, all of us here have wanted that “just tell me” answer, and we have learned the hard way that you can’t skip the steps.

The one tweak that MIGHT work for you is to do the math on a monthly basis, rather than annualized. It’s the same math of course, but I can see months in my head more easily than the year.

That is, you know what your monthly rent is, what your monthly payments are (cell phone, Netflix, car, loans, etc). You can also easily estimate what you spend for things like groceries, clothes, and going out (presumably less than usual right now!) on a monthly basis, even if you’re not currently keeping the best records.

And yes, you have to count all the equipment that you’re using for these jobs.

Whatever that total is for your monthly expenses, that’s what it is. Make more than that, and you get ahead. Make less than that, and you fall behind.

That’s why, to ME, and the way I set up my business, the hours or days I was willing to work was the SECOND number. I was willing to push myself past my comfort level because I was young (THEN lol), and I could adjust my time on the clock. The one, immovable number is the monthly expenses. So I started there.

Looking at how many hours I was “willing” to work, I found as a freelancer that I was only able to work about half of the hours in a day. The rest was things like paying bills, cleaning the part of the house/office you’re working in, answering emails, and things that don’t make you money, but you can’t really get by without doing.

So once you find that immovable monthly load, and divide that by the number of days or hours that you’re willing to work, you come up with numbers for your day rate and your hourly rate.

Now double that.

Because, again, in my experience, I could only spend half of my time actually doing client work. Maybe you can do better than me….actually, I hope you can!….but the point is the same. Not every hour of every day is billable.

I don’t want throw another wall of text at you, so I’ll wrap it up here — but I was given this guidance when I set out in my own production business, and it made all the difference in the world.

And that’s why neither Mark, nor I, nor anybody here can tell you how much you can charge and actually make money for yourself. That’s the number you have to watch. Not how much you should charge the client. The number to watch is how much you need.

You can always tell the client, “This is what it costs” and make your case, but you can’t negotiate away your own expenses!

Let us know if we can do anything else to help you sort this out!

[Tim Wilson]

A great thread from Thomas Grove Carter over on the electric twitter machine. Here are some excerpts:

Audio cross fades shortcut!Very simple. Works exactly how it should. Overlapping, user defined, fade handles added to selected clips. Fine adjustments can be made to length and shape after. Obvs. If audio is collapsed they remain hidden. If expanded, you see them pop in. pic.twitter.com/zyT5GuBYoW

— Thomas Grove Carter ✂️ (@thomasgcarter) August 25, 2020

Much better support for other frame-sizes- Square and vertical presents- Duplicate Project As let’s you change sequence settings before it’s duplicates- Smart Conform uses machine learning to reframe shots- Smart Conform can also be triggered in the ‘Duplicate As’ screen pic.twitter.com/cc0DIsEtFb

— Thomas Grove Carter ✂️ (@thomasgcarter) August 25, 2020

For me, Smart Conform is a really good starting point when making an alternate frame-size version. It’s results can then be tweaked or changed in the with Transform tools. Pro tip.Doesn’t just work for Square/Vertical. Also works if you want to switch to 2.35 for example!

— Thomas Grove Carter ✂️ (@thomasgcarter) August 25, 2020

Transform Overscan shows you parts of your shot outside of the frame when scaling and adjusting. pic.twitter.com/7DeUsFytnR

— Thomas Grove Carter ✂️ (@thomasgcarter) August 25, 2020

More ProRes RAW controlsISO, color temperature, and exposure. Feels similar to the kind of stuff you can do with RED RAW

— Thomas Grove Carter ✂️ (@thomasgcarter) August 25, 2020

And frame.io is on the spot with their update too!

Looks like @Frame_io has updated their #Fcpx Workflow Extension. You can drag clips from the extension directly into Final Cut Pro, and it will download them in the background. https://t.co/2o4P1JcwSk

— Thomas Grove Carter ✂️ (@thomasgcarter) August 25, 2020

As frame says on their website,

In practice, this means we’re able to saturate all of your available bandwidth and make the very most of your internet connection. With Frame.io Transfer, you now have a robust way to move terabytes of data reliably. You could pay hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars a month for this acceleration technology in other products, but we believe that moving files quickly is table stakes, so we’ve made this feature available to everyone.

Also new to Frame.io Transfer are login-free downloads. If you’re working with vendors who need to download large batches of files from Frame.io (full-resolution visual effects plates, for example), you can now send them Review links, and they will have the option to download all files using Frame.io Transfer, no account or log-in required.

Nice!

There’s a bit more to Thomas’s thread if you care to explore, including some movie clips that I was too lazy embed here, but you get the idea. 🙂

Audio cross fades shortcut!

Very simple. Works exactly how it should. Overlapping, user defined, fade handles added to selected clips.

Fine adjustments can be made to length and shape after. Obvs.

If audio is collapsed they remain hidden. If expanded, you see them pop in. pic.twitter.com/zyT5GuBYoW

— Thomas Grove Carter (@thomasgcarter) August 25, 2020

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “I just watched Mark doing Boogie Nights by Heatwave”

You and Mark call it Boogie Nights? I call it Suszko Inferno!

[Bob Zelin] “AND if you are a MUSICIAN – well, I don’t care if you are from Mars – you are OK in my book”

No kidding, there is coming to the COW a handful non-production oriented forums, and one talking about our lives as people who play (around with) music is definitely on the list.

[Tim Wilson]

Mark is my Ukulele Fairy Godfather or some such — I’d been thinking that I might try learning the ukulele “someday”, like when I retired. My father recently turned 82 and is nowhere near retirings, I started rethinking that.

It turns out that old dudes like me starting to learn ukulele during the pandemic is an actual thing, and Mark kept encouraging me to take the plunge. Videos like these were definitely part of it. Then one of the manufacturers I had on my list had a pandemic sale, and made me an offer that Mark insisted I couldn’t refuse. LOL Hence the Godfather reference.

I’m only a few weeks in, and have toddler-level skills, which means that my video debut playing my uke is somewhere around the time that Mulan will hit theaters LOL but sometime before then, we are DEFINITELY going to open a forum for the musical instruments that we play for fun.

Thanks for posting these here, Mark and Bob!

Now Zelin, where’s YOUR videos?

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Leke,

Apologies for the delay, but your post is up now!

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Nina,

I found a post in the COW archive that might help. It was originally posted by Michael Lewis in 2014 here, but I think it’s still applicable.

He wrote:

You need to make a new sequence multi-channel settings. You cannot change a sequence to multichannel once there is any media in it.

1. Make new sequence
2. Set video settings.
3. Go to “Tracks” tab
4. Set “Master” to “Multi-channel” with number of channels at 5
5. Make all the channels Mono because unlike FCP, premiere will not give you a quicktime where the audio channels can contain both mono, and paired and panned stereo tracks. You’ll have to just export 5 mono tracks where your layout is something like this:

ch1. mono COMMS
ch2. FX L (will not come out panned in the quicktime, but will contain all the left audio)
ch3. FX R
ch4. soundtrack L
ch5. soundtrack R

your sequece settings should look something like this

note: Make sure you have the audio panned as seen in the image. This will become more clear later when you are definine output channels.

6. If you haven’t already exported your audio stems, go ahead and do that. You can solo the tracks you have designated to fx and export them to a stereo AIFF, then do the same for your soundtrack tracks. For your COMMS track, go ahead and export it to an mono AIFF.
7. Import your stems and interpret them all as mono by right clicking them in the project panel Modify>audio channels> preset> mono
6. Drop the stems into the appropriate tracks.
7. Open the audio track mixer window (not to be confused with the audio clip mixer)
8. You need the click the buttons where it says (1+2), so that the track destinations look like the image below. Notice how you can only select 1+2 and not just channel 1–this is why you are panning the tracks. Panning them Left will make them go to the odd track and panning them right will go to the even track.

Your final layout should look like this

9. Export your sequence. Under the audio tab, in “basic audio settings” change the number of thannels 5. If you do not have this option, make sure your video wrapper supports multi-channel audio. For example, quicktime will support multi channel audio and most likely the video compression that you need.

+++

Okay, so that’s Michael’s advice from a few years back. Any contemporary audio whizzes have anything to add?

Thanks,
Tim