[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Shucher] “You gotta admit Tim, that for a product that needed a boost in professional credibility, it was a disappointing show.”

Not disappointing for me. 🙂

I was curious going in what its profile would be. Part of me assumed that people would be demonstrating it in quite a few contexts along with other solutions, or running on a couple of computers among several in a booth. Even on that limited level of expectation, the reality appears to have still been well short of that.

I do think that its profile is higher than that, even among “real” pros, who are increasingly coming out of the closet in this forum, to say nothing of the very-well trafficked forum next door to this one. That said, I gotta agree with you, Scott — this show certainly indicated something approaching a vote of non-confidence for many vendors….

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

Another of the companies talking FCPX workflows was Autodesk with Smoke. FCPX wasn’t everywhere, but it wasn’t nowhere.

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

Please, please pretty please: we actually have a forum for this very topic: the Film History & Appreciation forum.

Like this forum, it was created for one purpose (which you can discern from the name), but quickly morphed into a “what’s playing, what’s coming” forum for TV and movies, as well as discussions about distribution, the moviegoing experience and more.

It’s a great forum, but light on traffic. I’ll be honest: the forum was my idea. I think we’re not only among the most sophisticated media creators, but some of its most sophisticated viewers. (I’d say consumers, but I don’t want to start THAT fight again.)

I’ve always hoped for more traffic there, so help a brother out. You folks can really help stir things up — I’m right about that, right?

And yes, Prometheus has been a hot topic there for a very long time.

So please, please pretty please: pay a visit and speak your piece in the Film History & Appreciation forum, whatever’s on your mind re: film & tv.

Thanks so much,

Tim

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

We consider this a process. If two forums doesn’t work, it’s easy enough to go back to just one.

We’ve seen this play out in a number of different ways. For example, we have had the web’s largest communities for Final Cut Pro and After Effects for some time. “Basics” versions of those broke out, and remain quite active many years later.

Now that you’ve brought it up, though — should we name it “Resolve Basics” rather than “Resolve Lite”?

In either case, we tend to move more slowly than some people might prefer. We want to be sure that requests are generally representative, and not just a few loud voices. We also take into account traffic from people who don’t post. Over time, our goal is to make things work for as many as people, which it mostly does.

Three last things to consider:

1) This is the second most-trafficked forum in the COW. Obviously not by number of posts, but number of people reading. Our guess is that that number will increase with each new release, and, frankly, with the number of people who will be getting Resolve free with their Blackmagic Cinema Cameras.

2) There’s no way that separate forums will ever keep them from overlapping. Some people who consider themselves beginners can start with very complicated questions, and so will post them in the Basics forum.

But you have to also be aware that some of the people posting what look like incredibly basic questions are in fact quite advanced colorists who have worked in facilities on other systems, all of which were configured by The Man. They are looking at striking out on their own, and having to consider configuration for the first time in a long time.

We’ve actually seen this all over the COW for a very long time, as the top supervising engineer for a major network will dip in to ask a basic storage or I/O question because their digital transition is in the early stages.

3) If you see a question that has been asked before, DON’T ANSWER IT, especially not with a response along the lines of “Look it up, newb.” Let somebody who WANTS to answer it do the posting, and move on to the next thread. It’s part of the process of letting the group’s expertise refresh itself as the community grows — especially one growing as quickly as this one is.

Anyway, we hope that separating forums helps, but we still rely on you to cut people a little slack as all of this settles out. We also rely on you to keep giving us your advice as we try to make the COW work for you the best we possibly can.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

Funny that you say that. This is my NINETIES hair. What can I say? My wife thought Eddie Vedder was kinda cute, and wondered how long hair would look on me. She likey, so Timmy likey.

I cut it when I went corporate in 1998, and have just grown it back in the last couple of years. But the whole rest of my life, it was really short.

I also figured that the clock was ticking. My hair has been receding at an astonishing rate. So before it turns into a bald guy mullet, consider this my comb over.

FWIW, it’s longer than I was able to fit into the picture. Here’s a little more below. And for the record, I ADDED the red eye to my right eye because I thought it looked kinda bad ass. When you’re as old as I am, there are only small victories. LOL

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

Please, please PLEASE come to the Creative COW Film History & Appreciation forum.

Like this one, it was created for one purpose (which you should be able to guess), but pretty quickly morphed into something else. Now, it’s more about what we’re watching on TV and at the movies, and I gotta tell ya, Community is a HUGE topic. People in that forum LOVE this show.

Creative COW is of course the community of the world’s most sophisticated media CREATORS, but as a result, we’re also sophisticated WATCHERS. (Except for the people who don’t agree with me. You people are morons.) And certainly pretty sophisticated talkers. (See previous parenthesis.)

So by all means carry on here, but please stop by Creative COW’s Film History & Appreciation forum as well.

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

There are a bunch of folks posting live updates from the Supermeet, including COWS @walterbiscardi and @ryansalazar who will be tweeting like maniacs.

But don’t forget: this forum was founded on live posts coming out of last year’s Supermeet. It was quite remarkable seeing posts at every major stage of the reveal. It was chilling to see just how quickly this thing crashed and burned….which may not have been fair based on a pre-release preview…but turned out to be a fairly accurate reflection of what the next year looked like.

So wherever else you turn, I heartily recommend tuning in right here, and once again invite people to post live to the COW, just as they did last year.

Although if people like what they see this year, they may not be so quick to post. The nature of the beast. 🙂

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

[Paul Nordin] “But we have to expect that Adobe will be forced to continue to ingest projects from Avid and FCP, so Resolve should have an on-going way to grow Adobe-based round-tripping.”

There are few companies that understands “playing nicely with others” than Adobe, because of so many hooking into After Effects, and so many projects pushed out of After Effects to perhaps even more destinations.

This is also true of Premiere. Oscar-winning VFX supervisor Rob Legato described how Thelma Schoonmaker did her editing in Lightworks, he did his work in Avid Media Composer, and they dropped all kinds of NLE sources (as well as surprise surprise After Effects), and all kinds of formats, and dropped it all natively into Premiere for playout.

I agree that in the long run, Adobe will indeed be building better bridges (ha ha) with Resolve and others. My guess is that this is part of why they hired the developer of Automatic Duck, whose only business was facilitating project exchange between products of different companies.

The lesson that everyone is increasingly learning is that, despite whatever advantages one company can offer customers who stay entirely within that ecosystem — well, it don’t happen that way in practice, does it?

And frankly, I can’t think of a company more open to work with any and all comers than Blackmagic. It’s all a process, but the process is definitely in motion.

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

I use MediaFour MacDrive. $49, works fantastic. No discernible performance hit, absolutely invisible.

There are so many other utils, including some good free ones, for reading drives of any format that I just don’t sweat this stuff any more.

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou

[Tim Wilson]

Nice job pointing to the product page Ryan. The front door is even harder to get into.

To make your life a tiny bit easier if you’re trying to see the whole sweep of BMD’s announcements, you might also try going straight to the press releases page: https://www.blackmagic-design.com/press/

Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyou