[Tim Wilson]

Of all the virtual events out there, I’m most interested in how Apple is going to handle WWDC. While none of the WWDC shows have been quite as zippy as the old MacWorld shows (which Steve quit doing because mostly because the adulation was getting out of control even for him LOL), Apple has always put on a pretty good show….and pretty much EVERY virtual event so far has been the OPPOSITE of a pretty good show.

(I may start another thread on this topic. It’s really been bugging me.)

For example, I’m guessing that the keynote isn’t going to be from Timmy Cook’s dining room table where he’s backlit from the living room window and the cats are knocking vases off the bookshelf. Although I’d pay ALL the money to see that.

But I really, really want to see what they’re doing for the production itself. Maybe they’re still gonna do it on a big stage. I have no idea. I certainly don’t think that when Apple announced in March that they’d be taking this online that COVID cases in California would still be rising in June.

(Not intended as a shot at Cali, or a political statement at all. Just a fact. Cases are still going up in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, too.)

I know that developers have always treasured rubbing elbows with Apple folks, and I’m sure that the feeling was at least mildly mutual. LOL Kidding aside, meeting with customers and developer partners was always my favorite part of being a corporate weasel.

I know that Zoom isn’t the same thing as meeting someone in person, but you know what? It’s not NOT the same, either. This was something that Post Production World absolutely nailed. Did any of you attend that? The sessions were fine, but the “after hours” mixers were fantastic. I definitely want to host some of these in the COW down the road.

(Not now, ffs. I can’t stand how much Zooming I’m doing already. My primary coping mechanism is turning off my own view of myself. I don’t mind other people looking at me for an hour here or there, but I don’t need to spend hour after hour, day after day looking at myself. Nobody needs to see that much of me. LOL

And I don’t think that we’ve really reckoned with the psychological toll of staring at ourselves on Zoom calls. We as a species weren’t designed to spend so much time looking at ourselves, which is the seed of toxicity at the heart of all social media — and I say that as someone who enjoys Instagram a lot.)

I really liked this coverage at Apple Insider, What To Expect at WWDC 2020 — And What Not To.

Looking at articles like this, I’m always struck by how much of it I don’t care about. LOL Nothing personal to anybody who does of course. Plenty of folks are feeding their babies with the Apple Watch apps they develop, and bless them every one. And I do get the need to rally the developer community, and inform them about big changes that are coming, but I miss the user-facing stuff too.

Anyway, if anybody can manage to put on a good virtual show, I’d hope it would be Apple. I’ll definitely be poking my nose in just to see how it looks from a production perspective.

[Tim Wilson]

For all that it’s 22 pages long, it sure doesn’t say much!

(I know that I’ve got some kind of nerve saying that, since I specialize in 22-page posts that don’t say much. LOL)

Kidding aside, a couple of things jump out at me. One is that this is worth reading for everyone in production. Even if you don’t have huge union crews or big network money in your pocket, the general principles of how to manage time, space, people, and hygiene apply to everyone.

Besides, “Hollywood” isn’t just Hollywood. It’s every place that a “Hollywood” production shoots. Major production hubs including Georgia, North Carolina, and New Mexico will be having to think about this. I’m guessing Vancouver too, right?

Certainly other countries have already been thinking about this. Denmark and Sweden are two countries that chose not to shut down production, but instead focused on social distancing. They’re both limiting sets to 50 people total (cast and crew combined), and mandating no crowd scenes.

Still, this is a Hollywood document, wherever Hollywood may be, so I’ll focus there first.

— Most of this document is boilerplate. Don’t touch your face. Pages 11 and 12 can be pretty much summarized by “Don’t share condiments.”

— The recommendation of shorter days with smaller crews and fewer people hanging around the set seems prudent as a starting place, but a lot of the economics of TV are predicated on throwing bodies at problems, and making those bodies work long hours.

This could represent a tectonic shift in how Hollywood structures productions, if these recommendations are really followed. I don’t know that it means that things would HAVE to cost more, but we honestly have no idea how much it would cost if every show kept “shorter” hours for their entire durations, because so few productions have ever considered this as a goal.

— It’s one thing to say that paid sick leave policies “must” be flexible and non-punitive (page 14), but what the heck does that mean? It surely doesn’t mean that one sick person will hold up an entire production, but might it? I could see a production arguing that they had to replace the six people who were sick so that the other 94 people could keep working, but find themselves facing six lawsuits for punitive behavior.

And what does “must” mean? Who enforces that imperative?

I don’t mean to sound negative about this on the whole document, because there are a bunch of these recommendations that shouldn’t have been necessary to lay out in the first place. So I’m glad that there’s a sharper urgency around the notion that productions have more responsibility to their workers than not killing them right this minute, but it mostly reminded me how much we’ve taken safety for granted in general.

btw, I was curious about production insurance, so I looked it up. There is such a thing as pandemic insurance, but previous policies covered from 2 – 5 days off, max. Even so, the amount to be paid out could run into the billions. And there are no insurance companies on earth currently writing these policies anymore.

You can also forget production completion bonds for the forseeable future. I love this quote from a lawyer in an Indiewire article on this topic: “This is hitting every single production at the exact same time, which is not an insurance model.”

More here. The article is 6 weeks old, so not entirely applicable, but the math is the math, and it’s sobering.

In a way, the whole idea of insurance is predicated on knowing the odds, and trying to fix them in your favor through superior math skills and fancy marketing lingo. LOL But insurance companies can’t use math or marketing to tilt the odds of productions crossing the finish line in their own favor. Better not to take the bet, unless production companies are willing to use an insane amount of money to secure those bonds.

Even so, how many companies posting those insane amounts would need to actually complete on time, making no claims, in order for an insurance company to pay out even a handful of claims for productions that can’t finish? I just don’t see any way for the numbers to work.

We’re just going to have to trust an awful lot of people to stop sharing condiments I guess.

I do hope that more folks will take at least a quick look at the document Oliver links to and consider how these suggestions might or might not apply to your very different production environments. And of course chime in on what you see. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

Yikes! So sorry I missed this Bryce! Please drop me a line directly at tim@ this domain, and I’ll get you sorted right out.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Ray Butler] “I am not sure if the masking technique will really work, especially as their is head and arm movement fairly quickly exposing the wall. I would like an opinion of the feasibilty of outcome so it doesnt look like mask. I basically want a same colored wall.”

Hi Ray,

I’m sorry for the late reply to this post!

I’m also not sure how to help point you to the right forum. It sounds like you have a “fix it in post” problem here, but I don’t know which software tools you have in your kit. There are some general approaches that might be considered, for sure. You’re right that your solution will involve some masking, and there are thousands of people in the COW who create masks that don’t look like masks for a living. You can definitely find answers in the COW..

…but the specific answers will vary wildly depending on whether you’re using After Effects, Resolve, Vegas, or FCPX, to name a handful of possible candidates.

If you can help me narrow that much down, I may be able to point you in the right direction.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[greg janza] “[Mark Raudonis] “I think you’re VASTLY over estimating the cost of gear. For basic off-line “story telling” editing, a low end iMac or comparable Windows system is fine. You could eBay one for way less than $5K, all in.”

I agree. The move to remote workflows for editors has been made possible in part, by the incredible advances in computer hardware design and the cost reductions that’ve accompanied it.”

Look, nothing would make me happier than to be wrong about this. LOL But you don’t have to go too far back in the COW to see folks excited about their $20,000 Mac Pros, with no external storage or monitoring. I understand that this is overkill for a skinny terminal, or for offline episodic editorial, and isn’t expected to be included in the “journeyman”-level package.

But we’re nowhere close to setting an industry-wide expectation for what that would be. What kind of storage would someone need to expect to have in order to get a job working from home in offline editorial? Obviously fast internet access, but what else are we talking about?

Nobody can answer that question yet because we have no idea what a standard “WFH” scenario looks like. I don’t, and neither does anyone else. Mark comes closest of any of us course. ☺ But of course, there could be as many WFH workflows as there are combinations of employers and employees.

My hope is that all employers are as broad-minded, creative, and generous of spirit as Mark Raudonis, and are thinking about ways to make the industry more inclusive, more flexible, and provide more and better jobs to the graduates of media programs who are graduating with plenty of chops, but little more in hand than an iMac or laptop and a lifetime of debt.

That’s the fork in the road we’re approaching. Will this be an opportunity to make more people’s lives better? Or cutting off opportunities to people who can’t afford the gear that employers were providing as recently as February?

I find myself thinking about the balance of power in this context. If you’re in the office, you don’t have a boss saying, “If you want to keep this job, you need to upgrade the computer.” If the boss wants you using a new computer, the boss has to buy it.

Whereas if you’re working from home, you can imagine some employers saying, “This is absolutely your problem. I’m not going to pay to upgrade a computer that you can be using to work a bunch of other jobs.”

There can also be a lack of respect for boundaries. Hey, you’re working from home. This means you can work a lot more hours.

Whereas we now know that there are cases where you’re available for fewer hours, because now you find yourself having to be running your kids’ education while they’re home too.

[Oliver Peters] “[Dom Silverio] “Yahoo I think found that overall, there was a reduction of efficiency compared to their in-office counterparts.”

I believe Marissa Mayer ended the practice because of this”

I think that a lot of the talk of “efficiency” is a smokescreen. There’s a whole class of managers who rule by intimidation and hectoring. Marissa didn’t think twice about 100 hour weeks, was famous for them in fact, and she had zero respect for people who didn’t work as hard as she did. And guess what? It turns out that once people leave the office, you can’t berate them to their face for wanting to leave the office.

One of her SVPs went on the record about it at the time:

“Marissa is the type of boss that makes you feel like you’re disappointing her at all times, so I always feel like I’m on the verge of being fired,” Jeff Bonforte, Yahoo’s senior vice president for communications products, tells the New York Times.

In some fairness, she was undermined from the start. (Google “glass cliff” and “Marissa Mayer” if you’re ready to have your stomach turned.) Probably the ONLY thing that WASN’T wrong with Yahoo was an overzealous CEO, but she was far from the only senior manager in tech with outlandishly toxic views of what “productivity” means.

You know the thing that some people have said as not much of a joke, “If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in Monday” — ie, not showing up on Saturday was tantamount to quitting. The one I heard at Avid was, “If you don’t come in Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.” Because yes, there were times when 7 days a week was demanded, and anything less was explicitly tantamount to quitting.

And zero working from home, on workdays, EVER.

Of course, that was then. Aside from nobody being able to get away with demanding that now, management there has been saner for a while. ☺

So while I definitely see potential risks in putting the responsibility for buying and maintaining gear on home workers, I love the potential to remove power from abusive managers who demand that YOU to work around the clock to cover up for THEIR inability to actually manage.

People who want to figure out how to manage true productivity in the spirit of collegiality and mutual trust can do it, which is why companies like Twitter are saying that they’ll be supporting most WFH scenarios for forever. There’s no definitive reason for this not to work.

We can have another conversation another day about how inefficient EVERYTHING about American approaches to work are. We have less time off, and shorter lifespans, than pretty much any industrialized nation (and plenty of non-industrialized ones) for no good reason whatsoever, apart from the chimera of productivity. That’s something I’d like to see blown up right there.

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Michael,

All reasonable questions and criticisms, and I’ll be happy to answer.

Creative COW’s origins go back to 1995. There was no such thing as forum software at the time, so we wrote it ourselves.

I say “we”, but this happened before I joined the COW in 2006. And when that original community rebranded as CreativeCOW in 2001, there were no mobile devices, and the very, very few forum software options were extremely limited in features, had no ability to support database tables as large as ours (15 million posts from 350,000 members, tens of thousands of articles and tutorials, etc.), so we continued to go our own way.

Today is a different story. You’re right, we’re overdue for a change, and we hope to launch those soon. Mobile friendliness will be a big part of that for sure.

In the meantime, there are actually more ways to customize your views here than most other forums offer. Those options are at the top of each forum landing page. We have this as user-defined for each forum, because some forums get more posts in a day than other forums get in a month.

But look at the top of the page, right under the forum name. Here’s the one for Avid Media Composer. You have to be logged in to see these options, but check the popup on the left — set any duration you want, from “New Today” to up to four years on a single screen. If you find any forum offering more of a spread than that, let me know. ☺

The pop-up on the right also offers WAY more options than we’ve seen elsewhere. The default view is similar to most forums out there — most recent answers on top.

However you can also arrange by the most recent thread (ie, the date of the first post in the thread, rather than the last)

or by most recent POST, irrespective of thread.

You can even see the threads exposed, and go straight to the individual posts that you want to see. This view also allows you to see the subthreads within a thread, as people respond to each other.

I’m not aware of any forums with more options than this, but again, if you know of any, sing out, and we’ll take a look. We’re always trying to improve, and as I’ve hinted, lots of new stuff rolling out very soon!

Thanks again,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

You raise a great question, Michael!

Your first impression is correct, we don’t, but you know what? I love this idea! I think we can fire one up!

Tell me more about what you’d like to see in such a forum. What kinds of conversations? We’re trying to create some more general-purpose forums, somewhat separated from the main forums we have that are more focused on specific tools.

Any ideas you have, let’s hear ’em!

Thanks so much for joining Creative COW, and helping us make it better!

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “WeWork might survive after all ☺”

My favorite analysis of the rise and fall of WeWork is actually a series of GIFs from the US version of The Office illustrating major events in the company’s saga posted last October, after the entire company had been laid off, here.

The questions about gear and expectations for WFH come down to, who’s eligible to work?

Just as a reminder for context using the COW, we’re seeing 800,000+ visitors a month, and 71% of them are under 34, age groups known as Millenials and Gen Z. Gen X is another quarter, and Boomers represent single digit percentages.

Which also means that some of us on this thread are older than the parents of the COW’s largest demos. If my kids and I had kids at the age my parents did, the youngest would be the age of my grandkids.

As the label shows, we’re talking about 5 million Gen Z and Millennial folks passing through the COW in the past year alone.

The systems that Herb and Greg and others of you are running cost more than cars, which many young graduates can’t afford in the first place. I think people our age who don’t have college-age kids haven’t reckoned with the scale of student debt. The average student graduates with $25,000 in debt, and by the time they turn 30, currently onerous rates mean that their student debt has gone UP at age 30 to $32,000!!!

WFH is interesting for distributing workforce, but the point that Tony and Warren are bringing up is that it’s also shifting infrastructure costs onto people who are already swimming in debt.

There are trades that do that, of course. Mechanics have been paying for their own tools for generations. Barbers often rent their chairs.

But if someone in their mid-20s needs to own their gear as the cost of entry, what does that mean? A laptop? An iMac Pro? How much high-performance storage? Because if we’re saying that, “To work for me, you’re gonna need $25,000-$40,000 worth of gear” is cutting out nearly everyone in their 20s and a good chunk of folks in their 30s.

Even my idea of renting gear assumes that you’ve got $1700/mo to carve out of your revenue stream that’s also going to have to cover the average $400/mo of student debt service, and have anything left over to live on.

The combination of the pandemic and social unrest is also underscoring the risks to society as a whole in tying health insurance to employment. So now, somebody who’s 28 and no longer included in their parents’ health coverage is having to manage health insurance, debt service, AND gear? WHICH GEAR?

If it’s gear that anyone is reasonably expected to have, or that’s within reasonable reach, that’s one thing. This pushes some responsibility back onto facilities to create distributed workflows that help grow industry-wide opportunities, instead of using this as an excuse to make the industry easier for themselves and harder for workers.

Maybe someone else thinks that it’s political to assume that companies are responsible for making the industry either better or worse, but I don’t agree. I think of it as a value-neutral observation. Companies DO make the industry as a whole better or worse with their choices, and I think that there are implications for this that are no more or less than they are between any two random people. The general concept of “Don’t make other people’s lives worse” doesn’t feel political at all to me. It’s what you do in retail transactions, or when you drive, or clean up after your dog — you conduct yourself to not make other people’s lives worse.

But it also doesn’t happen by accident. You decide that this is how you are in the world.

What I see is an opportunity to make the industry more flexible, more open, more ready for anything….but it’s a very short distance from “flexible” to “unstable.” As much as we’re looking at possibilities that open up the range of what’s possible for both producers and creatives, there are also definitely some WFH scenarios that will slam the door shut on potentially millions of trained post professionals with degrees and experience, but without a pile of cash or the wherewithal to take on more debt.

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Raudonis] “In this conversation of WFH, people seem to focus ONLY on their own situation. The one thing I’ve learned in the past few months is that EVERYONE has a different idea of what WFH means. Therefore, the solutions, costs and technology deployed to make it work is going to be different for everyone.
“

This is HUGELY important.

For example, I mentioned skinny terminals, which works for VFX folks, but may not be even remotely possible for editors. (Pun not necessarily intended, but seemed on topic. LOL)

I’m aware of some editors who are at home with gazilliondy terabytes of footage, doing all their work on local devices at full res, to be sneakernetted to its final destination. I don’t even know how much review an approval they’re doing online. Maybe no cloud nuthin’.

But this is where my idea of rental comes in again. Doesn’t need to be Hollywood. Could be Key West or Kankakee or Kailua, but the call comes in for a series, and NOW I rent the system I need to do the work. Using Professor Zelin’s example again, I get my Creative Cloud and Media Composer system with 40TB of storage, delivered. I pay for it for the three or six months that I’m on the clock, then I have the rental house come pick it up when I’m done. For the rest of the year that I’m not actually using that much iron, I’m not paying for it either…

…and best of all, my rental expense is a straight deduction, this year, instead of spreading it over five with the IRS’s depreciation table. And rather than having had to save the price of a Tesla to pay for all that in cash, I’ve paid a much smaller amount that’s tied directly to revenue.

Seriously, it’s not just Hollywood that’s renting gear. It’s indie creators all over the world. I can absolutely see this as becoming an increasing characteristic of WFH scenarios, which becomes freelancing on a 3D chessboard. Companies and employees/contractors have a new relationship that may become negotiated anew with every project or season, and evvvvvverybody’s relationship with gear changes.

[Tim Wilson]

[greg janza] “In 2020, editors need to have their own full edit systems at home to remain competitive.”

Except that renting a system and “having a full edit system at home” aren’t contradictory. Imagine a freelancer saying, “I have the latest versions of Media Composer and Creative Cloud, I’m completely set up for an RGS workflow, oh yeah, and I have a 40TB Nexis.” Netflix or whoever is doing the hiring will say, “FANTASTIC! When can you start?”

They will NOT say, “Wait a minute — did you pay cash for that, or are you renting it?” They won’t care.

I mean, we got caught in this fever of “NOW YOU CAN AFFORD TO BUY IT” in the 90s, forgetting the lessons that Hollywood learned in the 40s — ownership is for chumps. LOL Or to put it in business terms, it’s financially advantageous to rent. They rent EVERYTHING. Lights, cameras, Avids, you name it. That’s because you cover the rental cost in the production budget and take it as a straight deduction. Production companies only last as long as the project is in motion, so there’s no time to amortize a purchase. It makes no sense to buy.

(This is one reason why FCP’s price had ZERO impact on FCP’s footprint in Hollywood. They weren’t buying Avids. They were renting them, and few companies cared to provide the rental inventory AND onsite support that Avid dealers were. So for them, FCP would have cost more, and come with less support. The exact opposite of a good idea.)

And a lot of companies making stuff for Hollywood can’t build stuff that anybody could afford to buy, ever. Like that famous lens that they used for the long shot at the well in Lawrence of Arabia? That cost $250,000 in 1960 dollars. That’s over $2 million today. Not even a $200 million production has $2 million in the lens budget today, but Panavision rented out that lens for years. They made their profits over TIME, and lots and lots of people got to use it.

Same for ARRI with Alexa. Nobody in Hollywood says, “Wow, a $75,000 bare camera — you gotta be kidding me. No way.” They say, “Ah, a few thousand a week completely tricked out, configured and delivered. We can definitely fit that into the budget.” That’s why Alexa is the most popular camera in town. It looks dynamite, and EVERYONE can afford it. They key to affordabilty: not buying it. Let the production pay for it.

This isn’t just a Hollywood thing, by any means. It’s true all over the moviemaking world. Moviemakers come out way ahead of the game when they rent.

I just checked Miami for grins because I know that market well. (I ran a video production company an hour south of there for a dozen years.) Alexa, four Master Primes, CF cards out the wazoo, viewfinder, batteries galore, charger, matte box, follow focus, all the attachment plates, etc. — $5700/wk, set up and delivered. https://www.sharegrid.com/miami/l/22056-alexa-mini-with-master-prime-lenses-package?type=rent SET UP AND DELIVERED. In fact, they deliver as far away as New York in ONE DAY.

Heck, the couple of guys I know who own Alexas rent them out most of the time. That’s how THEY could afford to buy them — they let their friends make the payments. LOL

I’ve interviewed a lot of VFX companies over the years, and they rent EVERYTHING. They might have a couple of dozen staffers that keep the lights on with spots, titles, etc., but when it’s time to scale up for a big movie or prestige cable/streaming drama, they RENT DESKS to bring in people. They also rent processing power. They could never afford to buy beefy boxes for everyone to have their own processing, so it’s all skinny terminals with computing in the cloud.

I think you can see where I’m going with this. Maybe they just leave folks at home with their skinny terminals, save the desk rental price.

In a world that may be more WFH than not, most people aren’t going to be able to have a state of the art computer, the latest software, and 40TB of Avid storage sitting around idle, costing them money when no money is coming in. It’d be nice, sure, but that ain’t me babe.

But when you’re doing a project with an actual budget, $1700/month in the scenario Bob layed out is completely doable. Even if you have to pay it out of pocket, you deduct it STRAIGHT, right now, instead of amortizing a bunch of payments over years and years, even in months when it’s idle. That’s INSANITY.

Instead, you leave it parked at Pacific Post. When you don’t need it, you’re not paying a freaking dime for it. Not a penny. And when you need it, because now you have a job, you call Pacific Post and ask them to bring it to you. DONE and DONE.

Understanding that not every neighborhood has a Pacific Post, but certainly when it comes to Avid, you’d be shocked at how many places you can have a system delivered to you. Again, many of us came up in the “NOW YOU CAN BUY IT” era, whereas Avid folks have ALWAYS been about rentals.
I was friends with the Avid rental facility in Key West Florida. LOL I’m on an even more remote island in the middle of the Pacific (you can’t drive to this one), and I can have a system with Media Composer, FCPX, Creative Cloud, a full RED shooting kit with all the software goodies, plus monitors, speakers, and scopes on my doorstep in the morning. When I’m done with it, they’ll come and get it.

Not that most of us don’t have at least an iMac Pro if not something more muscular on whatever platform, but if you need to scale up to get a job, you should be able to only scale up when you NEED it. I bet that Caleb Deschanel owns more cameras than most of us, but I KNOW that also owns FEWER cameras than many of us. These guys RENT.

It’s certainly true that folks like Herb who’ve been building TV series with remote workflows for years have been able to load up for bear, and they’re ready for anything. But folks in their 20s and 30s who are buying less expensive gear for themselves will still be able to scale up IF they only need to pay for it when they’re using it, ie, when they have someone else to pay for it. They can keep training on their laptops in the meantime, and who knows. Maybe those are the skinny terminals that they use to log in remotely.