[Tim Wilson]

[Herb Sevush] “somehow the glory that was Mickey Mantle moved my allegiances further north.”

Yeah, Mickey was something special. Not enough to turn my mother to a Yankees fan by any means, but a grudging admiration. Willy Mays, though — we all turned into Giants fans for those moments we saw him batting or fielding. I was just a hair too young to remember Jackie Robinson’s prime, but, history aside, it sounds to me like anybody who laid eyes on him felt that way about him as a ballplayer.

There may only be a couple of players like that in a lifetime, where the love of the game transcends the most passionate fandoms. Rivera was that guy. Maybe Ripken before that — another guy whose final year was a victory lap in every stadium he visited.

I’m surely missing someone, but between Mickey and Cal, off the top of my head, it was Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron for me, and that may be it — not as the GREATEST players, but the guys that made you stop and say, wow, I’m not going to see somebody like that DO something like that for the whole rest of my life.

Still, though, I’ve been watching the Ken Burns series Baseball again in the past couple of weeks. I think the game today is better on the whole, but New York in the 50s, man, THAT’s something we’re never going to see again.

[Tim Wilson]

To delicately demur, in general, I wouldn’t worry about more RAM just yet. Of course, if you’re used to running 32, go for it. You can get another 16gb for $150 give or take, but in your situation, no need to spend a thing you don’t actually need to. If you decide to add more later, you can, and it’ll probably cost even less.

Until you get into a specific jam that people here tell you you can ONLY fix with more RAM, hold off. If you’ve been running 16 on your old iMac, you’re going to be so happy with the same amount of ram on this new one that you’d be better off paying the bills or having some extra holiday fun. The same amount of money would get you to the end of March 2015 on Netflix, or take a nice bite out of your imac bill.

[Tim Wilson]

Everybody here will give you better advice about the tech, but if I’m reading you right, no need to over think specs. Any 2-month old iMac is going to feel like greased lightning compared to any 6 year old iMac. The terms sound great. So here’s the lifestyle advice from your old uncle Timmy: relax, enjoy your new computer. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

I’m the product of a mixed marriage (dad: 4th generation of Yankees fans; mom: Brooklyn Dodgers 4ever, although as the NY NL team, the Mets’ll do), and grew up idolizing the whole 50s New York scene. All you need to know about my family dynamics, though, is that the Red Sox became my favorite team.

I still pay respectful attention to both New York teams, and I gotta say, nothing the Sox do this off season will help them win more games than the Yanks trading Cano.

re: Detroit, my first-ever baseball card: Mickey Lolich, 1966! His 1968 World Series is still one of the greatest.

I think we may need a baseball forum in the COW. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

So sorry I missed your note, Glenn.

[Glenn Grant] “[Tim Wilson] “(“Wholly troll-y” is almost as good as “echo chamber of bitterness,” right?)”

Isn’t that from a Neil Diamond song?”

I was actually thinking more David Bowie than Neil Diamond. Specifically, the 1971 non-album track, recorded when early attempts at making his 1970 (US)/1971 (UK) album The Man Who Sold The World take off fell flat. (It’s one of my favorite Bowie albums, and deserves your attention.)

The b-side was Black Country Rock, the nifty opening track of TMWSTW, which really should have been a hit. This single went nowhere.

He later recorded a more uptempo version of Holy Holy for The Return of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, but didn’t use it right away. Instead, this new version was used as the b-side to the Diamond Dogs single. That one obviously did just fine.

Even though the former should have been used, a mislabeled version of the latter wound up as a bonus track on one of the MWSTW reissues. That version has never since the light of day, even the new one is now out of print. You can find ’em on YouTube and…elsewhere…but I leave that to you.

[Tim Wilson]

You’ll also find transcribers that only work with audio files. MOV is fine for that of course, but they may prefer MP3, WAV, AIFF, WMV, or any number of other formats…and depending on the part of the world, may NOT be interested in taking Apple or iTunes specific formats.

That said, I hadn’t worked with Take1 before, because most of my stuff has been general purpose. Those guys look really hardcore. They also look like SOME video formats might be do-able, which may work better for you than an audio-only export. Working with somebody who understands technical language will also be a blessing, and save you enough time once you get the files back that the price will work itself out.

Let us know what you find!

PS. The Bunim/Murray Productions logo on the front of the site pointing you to their take1 customer profile should be taken as a very good sign indeed. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “I saw this and thought it was a timely example of how Fair Use puts the burden of proof on the person being accused…”

Some of this has to do with a swinging of a pendulum between the original intent behind copyrights expiring — ideas belong to “we the people” — and the rights of creators to keep making money off their creations. I’m not blaming anyone (for once LOL), just making the observation that once MP3s and Napster came along, rights holders became rabid about asserting those rights, even outside of music, and the pendulum has swung all the way in the direction of rights holders.

As a result, in PRACTICE, there is very nearly no such thing as Fair Use anymore. A MUST READ:

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind uses a range war metaphor to illustrate the ways that rights holders are building barbed-wire fences around material that used to be understood as in the public domain. Some of it might have been legal for you to use a few years ago, but not now.

Fair Use : The Story of the Letter U & the Numeral 2 is an extended example of this. U2 had been sampling TV and music on stage during their extended Achtung Baby tour, but when Negativeland sampled U2’s sampling, they were sued into oblivion — unable to even talk about the case, because U2 asserted the rights to the letter U and the numeral 2 in this context — AND WON. The book is out of print, but worth hunting down.

I haven’t read this next one, but it looks worth a read: Reclaiming Fair Use: Putting The Balance Back in Copyright. The title itself observes that, right now, there’s no balance.

That principle is illustrated by Free Ride: How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. Make no mistake: Fair Use is going to be harder and harder to establish in the near future.

In the meantime, I also can’t underscore Andrew’s point enough: Fair Use is NOT a law or set of laws. It is a PRINCIPLE, and by its definition, can ONLY be applied on a case by case basis. Some other guy’s use of material may be okay, but YOUR use of the exact material could be infringing. It’s case by case, and as Andrew observes, you ARE ASSUMED GUILTY. This is civil law, and the rules are different.

Needless to say, people are successfully working with material under Fair Use every day. It’s not that it can’t be done. It’s that it can’t be ASSUMED, not even based on non-infringing uses of the exact same material by somebody else.

As Mark notes, “Do ya feel lucky?” — because your E&O insurance (you DO have E&O insurance, right?) may not cover you, and if you lose, the rights holders may own you forever.

[Ned Miller] “produce the footage in-house.”

Great advice from your spam-ttorney, Ned. If you don’t have the budget to secure the rights, or to hire a lawyer to with you, I’m a big fan of faking it. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “There’s out-of-touch marketing, too. I got an email last week that said, “Go Pro with Media Composer for $999.””

That’s not out of touch. Well, maybe the “go pro” language, but that’s a response to the “FCPX not professional” meme, which a couple of years down the road, still hasn’t entirely gone away.

(With me, again, in the camp saying it may not be professional in the way you need it to be…but it IS professional.)

Keep in mind that Avid’s other campaign is “OWN it for $999” — in response to a subscription-only Adobe.

So we can debate the slogan, but not the price. The PRICE is laser focused. The price IS the marketing message. That’s why it’s in every ad. If $999 is too much for you to profit on in a job or three, then you’re not Avid’s target.

Chasing customers who aren’t Avid’s target, that Avid is unable to service, for the sole sake of more customers — that’s how to kill a business in no time.

The trick isn’t to have all the customers. Apple knows that better than anyone.

The trick is to make more than you spend. Apple’s doing that. Avid’s not…which Avid knows of course, and their current path as a business is to fix THAT, not to chase customers they can’t service, at prices that won’t allow them to survive.

[Walter Soyka] “they have got to commit fewer unforced errors like no 4K.”

I’m going to keep contending that by the time they HAVE to have 4K for the MAJORITY of their customers, they will. It’s not like they’re not working on it, just that their customers don’t feel the same urgency that YOU do.

My other point wasn’t that MC is offline-only anymore. It’s plenty online for the overwhelming majority of what’s being produced today and in the near future — but even so, Media Composer is built to be the hub of products that include Resolve, Pro Tools, After Effects, Flame, SCRATCH, and a bunch of other products that aren’t geared to video editing. It’s a specialist’s tool.

The notion that FCP or HD was “the problem” for Avid is an FCP-centric idea that doesn’t reflect Avid’s reality. To Herb’s point, the tale of FCP’s presence in Avid’s most important markets was ALWAYS overstated, and now eroding even further…sure, with some high-profile exceptions…but the target Avid customer has always been primarily about cutting, primarily in mainstream delivery formats, and primarily passing off projects to other people for finesse.

HERE was the unforced error: Avid tried to provide end-to-end solutions that were outside their domain expertise, to service customers and technologies that they didn’t understand well enough. They spent a fortune on companies like Pinnacle and Softimage that took resources (human, business and financial) away from the core business.

(Agreed that DS rocked. Even as the most expensive product in the video portfolio, it was the best bargain. As an example of not understanding that target customer though: those customers complained that the price was too LOW. They could no longer charge Discreet/Autodesk-room rates, because their clients knew how little DS cost. Another story for another day, but shows the problems Avid had when they tried to compete on price. That wasn’t helping DS customers AT ALL.)

You might say that a narrowly focused, specialist core business is the problem for Avid and Media Composer. Maybe. But I look at a company that’s wall to wall with specialist solutions whose fortunes have revived: Quantel, not because they tried to become someone new, or do anything especially different. They became a better Quantel.

Of course, Quantel was way out in front with 4K, so maybe I’m full of it. LOL

Hey, and advertising in Creative COW helps. LOL I’m just saying. LOL

But to circle back to the part of your quote I agree with wholeheartedly, Quantel stopped committing unforced errors.

I just don’t see that not having 4K YET is one of those for Avid.

[Walter Soyka] ” I have absolutely no idea what Avid’s view of the future is in post.”

Well, I ain’t arguing with THAT. LOL

Except to the extent that, no matter what else is true, Avid’s future is the same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same. as. it. ever. was: cutting in a group setting.

Yes, including online…but NOT finishing. OMF, AAF, and all those are TLAs (three-letter acronyms) are all about getting your Avid projects OUT of Media Composer, to their proper next steps.

Stable timelines, stable bins, networked workflows — these are still priceless to Avid’s core business, and exactly why Avid’s not going away for those folks any time soon. Not because they’re on top of next year’s formats.

(“Same as it ever was” is a joke that some of you will be too young to remember. Even for the geezers, I guarantee that it’s been too long since you watched THIS. Skip to 1:30 if you need to.)

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A post that’s still too long, but not TOOOOO long. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

Ima start getting back in these threads earlier so I’m not replying to 5 posts at once….

The usual disclaimer: speaking only for myself in this post….

[James Culbertson] “Scroll down to the Editing and Workflow section”

Very cool link, thanks!

Some things to note, though.

First, it’s 147 self-selected respondents. Without careful modeling, that’s just not a meaningful sample.

(For reference, there are 250,000 members at Creative COW, with around 2 million visitors every month.)

Most important, the survey doesn’t address Herb’s point at all — the top 10% of the industry, maybe even less. Maybe 5%.

Let’s say that the survey is entirely representative, and that only 12% of the entire universe of editing is using Media Composer.

If you make a Venn diagram of the slice of the industry that Herb and others are talking about, you might find 90% of THOSE jobs are on Media Composer. These guys are saying that in some markets, for some of the best kinds of jobs, the number is, in practice, 100% Avid.

That’s what he means when he says, [Herb Sevush] “for employers of good paying jobs…. it is Avid or nothing.”

(I’m trusting Herb to step in if I’m misrepresenting him.)

Now then….

[Herb Sevush] ” the most logical choice to enhance my marketability would be to switch to Avid”

Look, as much as I believed when I worked at Avid, and still do, that failing to have Media Composer in your bag of tricks is betting against yourself in the long run….I’d never suggest that it be the only trick in your bag.

Going back into ancient history, my last gig when I worked at Avid was the roll-out of the software-only version of Media Composer.

In even ancient-er history when I worked at Boris FX, I was presenting at FCP user groups every other week or so. I maintained a high-enough profile in those circles that, when Avid was inundated with requests for demos to FCP groups on the heels of software-only Media Composer, it was logical that I be the guy to go.

Here’s the thing. I was adamant that nobody should SWITCH. Just ADD Media Composer. The way to run the table is to play ALL the cards.

Here was my pitch, almost verbatim:

Buying Media Composer may seem like more money than you feel like paying, but you can earn it back in a single job if you’re working for the right clients.

The fact is that you’re probably working for the WRONG clients. You’ve been trying to teach your market, ‘My NLE isn’t Avid — but it’s better, and you can PAY ME LESS.’ No WONDER your clients are cheap.

So, knowing how little you charge, why are there potential clients who still want Avid? Doesn’t matter why. That’s not your problem. Your only problem is, “How do I get EVERYBODY to give me ALL THE MONEY?”

The answer isn’t for you to give up FCP. And the answer isn’t trying to get your potential clients to give up wanting Avid. When a client wants you to use Media Composer –JUST USE IT. TAKE ALL THEIR MONEY.

Of COURSE these clients who only want Avid are idiots. Your clients NOW are idiots too. ALL clients are idiots. The trick is to find the RICH idiots — and the guys carrying big bags of money are almost always looking for Avid editors. Stop arguing with them. Just TAKE ALL THE MONEY.”

If you’d ever seen one of my presentations, you know that this is exactly what I sound like in person, that I’m laughing pretty much the whole time…and using lots and lots of the profanity that I use in real life but not in the COW. LOL

And yeah yeah yeah, that pitch is pretty offensive, no matter what your perspective. Whatever. LOL

In context, I was of course also showing features that only existed in Media Composer (mostly still the case), and reasons why it made sense to include Media Composer alongside After Effects, Photoshop, and Microsoft Word or whatever — tools that cover specific needs in the company. Even if the company isn’t built around those tools individually, the company is built around using all the tools you NEED.

This demo speech was obviously geared for freelancers using FCP. My demos to film houses, high-end post, and in-house network production mostly didn’t need to address the WHY of Media Composer. They were by and large already using it.

EXCEPTIONS ABOUND. PLEASE DON’T LIST THEM ALL. LOL I’m just agreeing.

Also please recall that I’m a big FCPX fan, far more than I ever was of FCP. I’m even on record in this forum as a fan of Apple’s rollout of it and the EOL of FCP Legend. I’m not trolling. Go FCPX! I love you, FCPX!

(For the record, I’m also fond of Premiere. There were years when people were banging their heads against FCP that I kept saying, “I’m tellin’ ya man, those problems will go away if you’d just use Premiere.”)

[Walter Soyka] ” given Avid’s current lack of 4K finishing solution.”

A problem, yes and no. Media Composer was offline-only for most of its first decade, and even at the end of my time there in 2006, the assumption was that, not always, but more often than not, there’d still be a high-end finish from somebody like Autodesk, DaVinci, etc. The extent of the successful implementation is your call, but that’s why workflow management across solutions was so important.

It’s one reason why Avid has never been in the business of supporting the largest-frame formats first. Look at how late they were to HD. And just about the time they got to HD, they were shy of a TWO K solution that wasn’t file-based, so not shocking that they’re not there with 4K just yet.

They obviously lost some customers in those pre-HD days, but they were still working fine as an offline solution, and they were still nowhere close to peaking as a company. Their biggest money and biggest profits were yet to come. Lack of highest-end format support was thus a BUMP they went over, not a CLIFF they went over.

They have other cliffs to worry about now, but 4K isn’t one of them.

[Chris Kenny] “Honestly, Media Composer has a lot of issues/limitations that you just know would be constantly used to support an “it’s not professional” narrative if FCP X had them. “

True in spades, my friend.

And trust me, in my days in full-contact marketing (a phrase AFAIK I invented — thank you, and you’re welcome!), that message got flung around every day. Heck, there were a couple of years that Avid was getting dinged for not caring about professionals when Avid Symphony couldn’t support FireWire!

Again, please recall that I’m speaking for myself in this post. I don’t need to remind you that I’m also an idiot. Apologies again too for a post ridiculously long, even by my standards.

[Tim Wilson]

First, thank you all. I appreciate your kind words and understanding.

Sorry to be away for the day. I didn’t plan it that way…although if I’d thought about it I might have. 🙂

And hey, I’ve been using emoticons since the second I knew such a thing existed, but now I worry that someone might see it as not very well-veiled hostility. LOL

Anyway…

[Chris Harlan] “[James Culbertson] “an uninterrupted echo chamber of bitterness.”

Such great phrase, is it not?!”

It really is classic, but c’mon man, this place is wall to wall interruptions. LOL

I felt bad about that thread though, because I like and respect Evan….but it’s a classic example of a thread with difficult but legit issues (less for me about the unimpeachably ethical Evan than the issue of implied endorsement in general), derailed by one guy. The thread feels a lot different with him not on it. Especially once I get around to removing the now-orphaned posts replying to him. 🙂

[Clint Wardlow] “I don’t think a few questionable posts from time to time will earn you a nuke. In fact, the occasional such post adds a little spice.

It is just when someone hijacks almost every thread, every day until it devolves into childish bicker-fest that the nuke button needs to be pushed.”

Exactly.

I regularly refer to this a full-contact forum, and I like it like that. It’s why I tend to let things run hotter than some people might like. I really only step in when it gets personal, and in this one case, where it felt wholly troll-y.

(“Wholly troll-y” is almost as good as “echo chamber of bitterness,” right?)

Everybody has a bad inning now and again, and we’re all dealing with all kinds of nonsense in life offline. (Wait, what? What is this “life offline” you speak of?) The goal is to make room for each other’s bad days, and leave time for ice cream after arguments to the death.

(Well said, Herb.)

[Martin Curtis] “Wow. Amazing. Did you see the pants Julie was wearing?”

Those pictures were worth a lot more than a thousand words.

[Chris Harlan] “Well, 3 Cheers for Mr. Man!”

“Mr. Man” are definitely two of the words I was thinking of, and definitely the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me here that wasn’t also complimenting my hair. LOL

Thanks again, everyone. We now return you to your uninterrupted interruptions and ice cream.

Tim