[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Rendell] “So I guess that’s probably part of it going quiet.”

So it’s YOUR fault?!? We were wondering.

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

This is the hardest forum in the COW for me to post in. A lot of times, I’m here as full-time COW employee, speaking about the COW itself.

I’m here a little more often as mid-50s, video company-owning, world-traveling, paid to observe the industry guy – posting ENTIRELY on my own, with opinions that other people who work here would strongly disagree with. But that doesn’t concern me, because I’m posting as ME. But it DOES concern me that when posting as ME, it might be construed as having some connection with the COW…when it absolutely does NOT.

So this post is as ME.

And Jason, this last post of yours has been chewing at ME since you wrote it. LOL I wanted to let it go, but I can’t stop myself. LOL I figured that since I was still talking about it to other people, I should probably bring it up with you again.

Also note: I have no idea how young you are, but I’m making the assumption that you’re younger than 55. So consider me your kindly internet brother or uncle, kind of an a-hole, but a more or less good-hearted guy who’s worried about you.

[Jacob Marley] “…Sure, their budgets are probably no better than the ones I’m doing here…”

Budgets will be a LOT LESS in Texas. Yes, it costs a lot less to live there — depending on where you’re living and whether your lifestyle includes private schools for the kids, it could maybe be 40% less — but you will probably make about 40% less too. Re-read Bob Zelin’s post about NY vs. Orlando that way. It can work out over time as things equalize, but in the short run, it could well be gruesome.

[Jacob Marley] “So I look at places like Dallas and Austin, who have so many new tech startups, and figure that each of those startups is going to need a product video.

California is creating many MORE jobs than Texas. So start there. You’d be moving to a state with FEWER new jobs.

Maybe your experience is different than mine, but I’ve also never seen a tech start-up need a product video. Tech start-ups in general tend not to HAVE products. They have TECHNOLOGY. A PowerPoint presentation will make more money for them than a video.

Many start-ups will also have leveraged every penny from everyone they know. They may not even be taking salaries yet. So your target market may be product videos for people who have no products and no money?

Maybe I misunderstand you. Maybe I’m mis-characterizing that business landscape, but I encourage you to do what you’d do when you got to town: look online or check with the chamber of commerce. Try to identify potential clients, and map out pitches in your head. Then check websites of guys like you and see what they’re charging to do this kind of work.

Similarly, get on the phone, talk to a bunch of post houses. Don’t email. CALL. Find an editor’s group or a user group for the software you’re using. Talk to people who are doing the kind of work you’re interested in. ASK THEM. If they tell you “the water’s warm, dive on in!” then I heartily encourage you to do like everyone else and ignore my advice. LOL

The phrase that has been eating at me, though:

[Jacob Marley] “I bet there’s a lot more opportunities. At least, I think there ought to be…”

There’s no getting around that you’re considering moving to areas with LESS opportunity, not more, starting with the fact that California is creating more new jobs than Texas.

Let’s get specific with the possible potential of numbers of opportunities: the number of people.

The Dallas-FW area combined is 6 million people. That’s good for #4 in the nation — but once you get outside that area…nothing. Look at Google maps to get an idea what I mean when I say “nothing.” NOTHING. It’s kind of like hitting the Grapevine coming out of LA.

Note that when I say “nothing,” I’m not referring to all the lovely towns and all the lovely people. I’m speaking strictly in terms of “nothing realistic for an LA freelancer looking to financially reposition himself.”

But do take a look at a couple of screenshots I just took. In the first, you can see Dallas-Ft. Worth from the air. Around that? NOTHHHHHING.

Now here’s the same picture with labels. You may have heard of Plano, but after Plano, Dallas and Ft. Worth, how many towns in this 7 hour radius are you familiar with? Waco, probably not in a good way…although it’s a nice town…I went to college there…at Baylor, where a huge, excellent media program pumps hundreds of well-qualified graduates into a tiny market every spring. You may have heard of Abilene, Wichita Falls, maybe Hot Springs, Arkansas? The biggest of these is about the size of Burbank, the smallest is smaller than Venice. And unlike Venice and Burbank, these are hours apart.

I know you’ve visited Texas, so maybe you’ve been through towns like Cleburn and Killeen and know that, as great as they are as TOWNS, with lovely people having lovely lives, you know EXACTLY how much ISN’T available for an enterprising video freelancer looking to financially reposition himself.

But as you read the labels, note that THESE are the towns big enough to show up on the map at a 400 mile diameter zoom.

Asking if you’ve heard of any of these towns is almost a trick question, because Austin is immediately below Round Rock(center bottom of map), which is definitely considered part of the Austin area. But that whole area? 1.7 million, landing it at #35 in the country. (Austin itself: 750,000 people and change.)

For this, you’re leaving SEVENTEEN MILLION people in the LA area, three times the size of Dallas, a dozen times the size of Austin.

That doesn’t even include Orange County!!! There’s another three million. Then ANOTHER 3 million people in San Diego, the #17 metro area in the country, nearly twice as big as Austin.

Park yourself in Orange County and you can commute to dang near ALL of it.

To put this another way, from Chatsworth to Chula Vista — whaddya got?

TWENTY THREE MILLION PEOPLE, in 150 MILES.

vs. 26 million in the ENTIRE STATE of Texas. It’s a pretty damn big state. Bigger than 150 miles. Living in Plano, I was closer to CHICAGO than El Paso.

So, just about the same number of people in the whole span of 790 miles by 773 miles in all of Texas, as in a 150 mile long stretch of Cali, a couple of miles wide on either side of I-5.

Look, if you want to go to Texas, GO. If you want to go, there’s no such thing as a bad reason. The ONLY reason you need is that you WANT to go. As I mentioned, I’ve moved 22 times in the past 30 years, with a half-dozen career changes. Even the worst places I’ve lived, and the worst career moves I’ve made, have at least a couple of GREAT stories. I’m really happy now. It really does tend to all work out over the long run.

Last but not least, I could be every bit as wrong about all this as you are. LOL Kidding. Who knows? I have a bunch of numbers I got from Wikipedia and my experiences, and you may be older than me and have already done the research to know I’m full of it. Your mileage will vary, no matter what. That’s why you need to get on the phone, or hop on a plane and ring some doorbells in DFW and Austin.

No, HERE’s the last but not least. After a trough, the video business is starting an upswing overall, but not for every job profile in every market. If you’re getting pounded doing what you’re doing, consider that going someplace else to do the exact same thing may not work any better THERE. Consider staying where you are and doing something different. Or doing something different in Texas. Maybe it’s as simple as a move into corporate, or working with a post house, or any number of things rather than freelancing.

Or as others have, another career altogether. I’m a huge fan of career changes, but that’s another post. Only so far off topic even *I’m* willing to get. LOL

There’s my bottom line. If you want to move, forget the numbers. Just GO. The worst that will happen is that it’ll be fun — especially Austin, imo — and you’ll go somewhere else after that if you need to. But forgetting the numbers also means not counting on them to work in your favor. Because from here, they don’t appear to.

Sorry to a bummer, but that’s what I’ve been thinking about almost non-stop for the past week or so. That, and some more moron in a book who said that music in the 70s trended toward conformity. What the…?

Anyway, just a few thoughts from your concerned internet brother or uncle, yes, a bit of an a-hole, but with generally good intentions.

[Tim Wilson]

It was CalDigit’s choice to no longer be involved with the COW. Feel free to tell them you’d like them to reconsider.

In the meantime, I can point you to the COW’s SAN Forum, as well as the COW’s brand new Storage Forum, to find what you’re looking for.

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Sorry Marty! I have no idea what’s up. I’ve checked everywhere in our system, and it all shows you as NOT moderated.

Maybe try logging out and logging back in again? That’s all I can think of. Be sure to let us know if that doesn’t set things right.

Best,
Tim

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks for the clarification. 🙂

tw

[Tim Wilson]

We used to watch Alexa maybe five years ago, but the numbers got less and less accurate over time. C’mon man, it says our top search term is “Texturing a ball in Maya,” and the second is “Coloring a ball in Maya.” Ridiculous. We look at Alexa every year or so, and go back to ignoring them. The information isn’t worth the pixels it’s printed with.

Instead, I quoted the numbers from Google Analytics. Rather than work as Alexa does, by guessing the aggregated accuracy of a number of sources who are also guessing, Google DIRECTLY tracks everything that happens. Google tracks every click, every view, lines them up with every IP address, etc etc etc. — DIRECTLY, straight from our servers to theirs.

I could be reading you wrong — and I apologize if I am — but it appears that you’re predisposed to have a negative opinion of us right now. I’m 100% okay with that. Your opinion is as valid as anyone else’s, and I certainly have my own list of things that I don’t think we’re doing well enough. It’s probably longer than yours.

But the numbers are the numbers, and Alexa has no way to see our actual numbers at all. Google can, and does — taking every pageview, every click, every person, DIRECTLY into account, from our servers to theirs, no mediation, no guessing.

The fact is that you can see high traffic very plainly yourself if you look at COW forums that aren’t this one, which, as I mentioned, has perfectly understandable reasons for going down: the exact conversations that used to happen here, with some of the exact same people, have shifted elsewhere in the COW.

Again noting that our traffic typically goes down by hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors in the summer. It has happened in each of the last 12 years, with one exception, and ONLY one: when Apple was kind enough to release FCPX in June. LOL Now THAT was some increased summer traffic. Thanks again, guys! LOL Otherwise, we tend to bottom out around July 4, and start easing back up from there. This too has happened every year since we opened in 2001. But I don’t expect the traffic in this particular forum to go up in a huge way, for reasons I’ve mentioned. Although you’re helping with that right now. 🙂

Anyway, I’m very comfortable with the numbers I quoted. We put our money where our mouth is with them every day, too. If we made this stuff up, our advertisers would know in an instant, as they do their own internal tracking to compare to our claims. There’s simply no percentage for us in exaggerating AT ALL. We’d lose money and credibility with our partners that we could never get back. So we don’t exaggerate. AT ALL.

But I’m happy to let anyone else have the last word. Besides Alexa. LOL But this’ll be my own last word on it.

Peace,
Tim

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Andy jackson] “People have lost all hope and faith in the business so I`m not surprised the cow is seeing the results.
“

As noted in my ridiculously long post, traffic in the COW is up 11% over this time last year. People who come are viewing more pages and staying longer than last year too.

tw

[Tim Wilson]

This is definitely the slow time of the year. We drop off a lot more in the summer than we do around the end of year holidays. Forums traffic is actually up 11% over this time last year.

We’re definitely seeing upticks in Twitter and Facebook of course, but the traffic there clearly hasn’t been at the expense of traffic here. We want it all to grow, and it is.

Following Shane’s observation about the AE forum hopping as much as ever, I’ll agree and note that the DaVinci forum has been one of our most popular for a couple of years now. Sony Vegas has always been hot. And of course there’s a difference between visits and posts. For example, both posting and viewing traffic is way up at jobs.creativecow.net….but viewing is alas growing faster than the rate of new job posting. (But that’s definitely up too.)

I’ve been thinking about writing something separate about the debate forums, and I probably will, so a couple of quick notes for now.

— THIS forum used to be the place in the COW for roundtable discussions about the industry. Now, that’s the FCPX Debate forum.

If you haven’t noticed, the conversation about FCPX itself represents about 15% of the posts there. The rest is about evvvvvverything. So if all you see when you look at that forum is FCPX debate, you really are missing 85% of the picture.

You’re also missing some really interesting conversations that I think every one of you would both enjoy and be able to meaningfully enrich with your insights. The trick of course is to step around the other crap, which I absolutely understand why may not be worth your while.

— What looks like a circular discussion to you is actually quite linear in its own way. Every time somebody hears that THIS is the release of FCPX that fixes what they need fixed, they download it for the first time — and are as horrified NOW as OTHER people were two years ago.

(Can you believe it’s been two years?)

OR, somebody gets a new computer, new job, new client, etc, and NOW they have to engage. For them, this is all entirely new. THEY have never talked about this before, even if YOU have been hearing it for years.

YOU see the same people who’ve been pissing you off posting over and over again. I see those, but I also see an astonishing number of new names, month after month.

— This is easier for me to see because I read every single post in the Debate forums. All of them. So however much you hate somebody in those forums? Speaking as a reader, not a forum manager, I guarantee I hate ’em more. LOL But I see an amazing variety of new people, experiencing this for the very first time.

— I’m going take a risk by stepping even further out of my COW role to put on my hat of guy in his mid-50s who started a video production company in 1990, as part of my empathy for YOU. So please take what I’m saying in that context.

I think in general you (and certainly I) can lose sympathy for a lot of these guys because we’ve gone through more changes than they ever will, and we went through ’em a long time ago. Some of them more than 20 years ago.

Think about a guy in his early 30s. He may have graduated in 2003, when FCP was stable, Media Composer just got exciting again with Adrenaline(you FCPers can forget — Avid was minting truckloads of money out of thin air with Adrenaline when Apple stock was at $10/share), camera prices were stable (trending gently up, if anything), HD was an opportunity not an obstacle, the business was booming, and every indicator was pointing up.

Or even a guy in his early 40s, who was working for The Man in 2003, maybe didn’t start a business until 2005 or something. Why not? Things looked GREAT. And for a while, they really were.

We geezers knew better. Apple being all but dead in the mid-90s, crappy computers, unusable storage, Media 100 nosediving, DV/FireWire (which was an ACTUAL crisis), Apple killing off waves of companies who invented pro hardware around the turn of the century — it’s an insane list of things that people today have NO IDEA about, that were FAR more disruptive than $59/month for Adobe software. We lived to tell the tale.

It’s why most of you DON’T CARE that the Mac Pro has fewer slots? You used to have SIX slots full, plus, if you were doing Pro Tools, another TWELVE in an expansion chassis. And it all went away, and you remember that, soon enough, it all worked fine.

Heck, YOU remember back in 2002 when people were saying that Apple had stopped paying attention to pros to focus on iPods! Which it turned out was exactly true. LOL Also not true, but you know I’m just saying.

— So I sympathize with your lack of sympathy. None of these “new” problems seem new or even vaguely interesting. The parts that were interesting for a little while got old after a couple of weeks.

— But, back to me as COWboy, it’s easy enough to miss the pain driving some of this. That’s another thing I see from reading every post. For every one asshair posting the same crap that made you hate him years ago, there are dozens who feel real agony. Some of the guys in the Adobe debate were sent there by pain they couldn’t resolve with FCPX, believing that Adobe was the one company who’d spare them unpleasant surprises.

We knew there was no such thing, and have a hard time relating to people who thought this was even a possibility.

(We also have a hard time identifying with somebody calling $600 a crisis. We used to have to pay Media 100 $1000 just to get them to pick up the phone.)

— So it took, what, 20 years? before the state we lived in every day in 1990-2000 — to cycle back around: non-stop crisis, more pain than pleasure (and not in a good way), and nowhere to vent it but online. To us, the 10 years between the turn-ish of the century and 2011 were a lull we knew couldn’t last.

The people who came into the business because of how good things looked AFTER that wave of crises had NO IDEA that THAT was what a LULL looked like. It could easily be another 8-10 years before things settle down again. That’s sure how long things took before.

— For that matter, a lot of you are remembering the early days of the COW that COMPLETELY took place in that lull. Everything was shiny here (apart from dropped frames) because everything was shiny EVERYWHERE in the industry.

— But if you think things are circular and angry now, you also weren’t on the Avid-L in the 90s. Now THAT was a shark den. The Vidpro-L, pre-AOL? INSANE. There were real-world physical threats from participating on THAT thing. Contrary to the rosy picture painted by its survivors, the CoSA Lounge on AOL was online savagery of a sort I’ve never seen repeated.

The Media 100 mailing list was on FIRE with the PowerPC transition and the 2.6.2/3.0 debacle. Theo/Gaudi? That nonsense was Media 100 taking money for phantom products and delivering ones they KNEW didn’t work. Those couple of years nearly brought down our whole end of the business, and the howling was to the SKIES. 1996-97 was MUCH worse than today.

So yeah, I’ve seen that cycle too.

— But speaking fully in COW-empathy mode again, your problems (and mine – I lived through ALL that stuff) were real when you vented back in the day. The ones today don’t SEEM real to YOU, but they ARE to a generation of guys now taking THEIR turn to vent. ‘Twas ever thus.

Hey, at least it’s not dropped frames, right? LOL

— Not that I want to get into a debate about debate forums. My primary goal with them was to quarantine the noise, and guess what? It works. None of it is spilling over into the other 250-ish forums.

Saying that, I happily cede the floor who wants to tell me I’m full of crap. LOL Just know that there’s a long line ahead of you. LOL

— On a different note, one forum in the COW with pretty much nothing but happy talk — but not nearly enough talk otherwise — is the Film History and Appreciation forum. Despite the name, it’s more about today’s movies and TV, although some great history stuff too. I post there more than the rest of the COW’s forums put together, and I’d love to see you there.

ANNNNNNYWAYYYYYYYY,

• Traffic up overall 11% over last summer
• Twitter and Facebook not growing at forum traffic’s expense
• Summer’s always quiet
• Pain changes
• The talk now is NOTHING like as angry as it was back in the day
• Let’s talk about movies and TV shows, man!

Peace, love, sympathy for all, both past and present,

Yr pal,
Timmy

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Sheriff] “This thread is from 2012 and I still receive a a lot of email from like minded folks that fear posting their real thoughts in a public forum.”

Can you summarize some of what you’ve heard?

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “when did FCP-X The Debate become the most popular Cow forum ? “

By about 9 PM on the Wednesday during NAB 2011. 🙂 Things quieted down a bit by the end of that May, but when the first version of FCPX was actually released, the place EXPLODED. At its peak, we were watching over 200 posts an HOUR go up in that one forum!

It’s obviously nowhere near that now. And the one topic that is the LEAST talked about: FCPX. It is now a very engaging set of discussions about EVERYTHING that’s going on in and around this industry. I love it. We had tried to create roundtable-style forums before, and we would never have guessed that THIS is the one that took off.

We haven’t changed the name of the forum because, well, why should we? It’s working? 🙂 And it’s not like FCPX never comes up at all, but it’s much more in the context of, how does this fit into they way the industry is evolving? What does it tell us about our future with Apple? Stuff like that.

That said, every new release brings a whole new round of debates, and a whole herd of people who are motivated to download it and give it a try for the first time — which brings new people in, who have NOT been part of the discussion for the last couple of years. NOBODY who tries it the first time is happy about it. LOL

Our FCPX Techniques forum is also one of our busiest, because eventually people need to actually start USING the thing. But because that one is only interesting to people who are in fact using FCPX, I don’t really pay attention to it. LOL

Which is a long way of saying, yes, Bob, you have really not been paying attention. LOL Stop by that forum more often. I think you’ll find a lot there to enjoy.

Best,
Tim

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW