[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Sacci] “Do not take brochures at the show…”

I respectfully disagree. Printed stuff from a booth like Blackmagic can run 200 pages or more. I can also tell you from both experience as a showgoer and careful research on the vendor side, people are a lot more likely to look at a brochure when they get home than a PDF. Your mileage may vary, but “that’s the way we’ve always done it” isn’t the only reason why they still do it.

The solution is to bring a USPS Priority Mail box, one of the ones shaped like a cube. Buy the $4.95 postage for it before you leave home, pack it with the 30 pounds of paper you pick up at the show, and you’re done.

But I couldn’t agree more that carrying piles of paper on the plane is more work than you need to do.

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Richards] “[Tim Wilson] “I doubt it….but it wouldn’t matter. You can buy a Thunderbolt adapter for $150 today.”

Where? Who makes it? Have a link?”

I found 4 of ’em in less time than it took me to type this sentence. Prices start at $100. My recommendation: Matrox MXO2, which has lots of other dandy features. More than $100, but more than worth it. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Ronald Lindeboom] “With a deal in hand to be licensed to run OSX on its workstations, I think HP could have its arm twisted to change its position on Thunderbolt.”

I doubt it….but it wouldn’t matter. You can buy a Thunderbolt adapter for $150 today.

Yeah, yeah, I get the convenience of having it on the motherboard. , I also get why people are loathe to think about expanding their Macs — it’s a pain, and there’s so little room to grow that it would be silly to think about wasting one of those opportunities on low-grade I/O.

The Z workstations, though, have a ton of expansion options, and it’s all done without. No tools – not for swapping out motherboards, power supplies, RAM or anything else, including opening the box. Sure as sh^t not for something as simple as adding Thunderbolt.

Andrew Richards: Tablet OS on the desktop? Blech!

Tell that to iOS, my friend. LOL (Yes, literally, actually laughing out loud.)

The point isn’t a tablet OS on the desktop for either company. The point is to have one iOS everywhere. Or, perhaps more accurately, getting rid of the current notion of an OS altogether.

FWIW, I think the “who developed it first” notion is nonsense. Computer stuff is like beer, bread, and color TV — different variations of it sprung up at more or less the same time around the world, because the same dynamics were feeding it.

But you can find examples of Microsoft showing touch interfaces before the turn of the century. I have no doubt that Apple was working on it. On a trip to Japan in 1992, I met a guy at Hitachi who was working on gestural interfaces.

Feel free to barf on the idea of squishy interfaces, but no company has a monopoly on them, and no computationally inclined dude will be able to avoid them for more than a few more months — a year, tops.

Unless you’re one of those crazy-ass luddites who doesn’t upgrade anything until there’s a clearly demonstrable NEED to. But what fun is that? Where would the COW be if everyone was prudent?

Mac OS on HP is never going to happen of course, for reasons almost too numerous to name….but it would also be no fun to limit our speculation to things that might conceivably happen, and what fun is THAT? Where would this forum be if everyone was reasonable?

LOL-ing again.

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

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “If it wasn’t mentioned up front, I think it’s poor form to try to retroactively apply it. I say you put him on the “not so good” list, and he’s on a cash prepaid in full basis for any and all work to follow. “

I had a client who was actually pretty embarrassed about not paying (extenuating circumstances, blah blah blah). He appreciated that I didn’t try to add late fees, but also understood why I was going to ask for cash up front from then on. We were fine. Did a lot of business together.

My favorite trick was to come up with the “real” number for the job, then add 15%. THAT was the number I put on the invoice, with a “15% discount for early payment,” ie, 30 days. So if he pays “early,” he gets my “real” price. After that, the “penalty” is what he THINKS is the real price.

But yeah, no way you can add penalties after the fact. The only ethical way to change the terms of the deal while it’s underway is if you both consent.

Unless of course you’re operating a bank, credit card or mortgage company, in which case your clients have already signed a contract saying that you can change the terms at will. Then you’re golden.

[Tim Wilson]

[Richard Campbell] “Nab rates are going up as hotels fill up. If you book and the rate goes down they will re-book at the lower rate. If rate goes up, you still get the lower rate.”

Which is why it’s always wise to check with them first….although, as you note, sometimes you can beat ’em, and of course, not every hotel has an NAB rate.

Don’t dilly-dally though. The Venetian is already sold out. I stayed there for 2 NABs. I know that it’s a generation “old” now, but an amazing hotel. One of my favorites in the world, and having stayed at 75+/yr during my peak travel years, that means something…

[Tim Wilson]

My annual slight disagreement with Bob re: which halls you need to see. 🙂

Many camera manufacturers are in the Central Hall. These include Sony and Panasonic (traditionally 2 of the biggest booths at the show), JVC, Canon (both of which have hot new offerings), and ARRI. (Red will be in the South Lower, though.)

Roughly one-third of the two million people who come to the COW every month identify themselves as broadcasters, including many broadcast engineers. There’s no question that such folks will need to stop by the South Lower hall to see Blackmagic Design (the showstopper the last two years), Grass Valley, Chyron and others…but there’s too much in the North Hall to miss, including audio (and radio) vendors.

Note too that last year’s 3ality “booth” was a basketball court outside the Central/North area, where they showed some of the show’s most compelling live broadcast technology. Following the merger with Element Technica, expect even more.

While you may not need to spend much time there, South Upper includes Avid, Harmonic, display vendors including Dolby (don’t miss looking at these — even if they’re out of your price range, this is the kind of thing that you need to experience if you go to the show), Toshiba, and the Content Theater, which often shows the kind of mind-boggling stuff you used to see at Siggraph…but is now at NAB instead.

As mentioned in a couple of posts above, you really need to check out some of the presentations, keynotes and the like. Last year, the COW’s Debra Kaufman hosted a remarkable session on the file-based workflow for NBC’s Community. (I know she’s doing something this year — I’ll get her to remind me.)

Another example, Creative COW’s Gary Adcock has four sessions:

• 3Ality: 3D from the DP’s Perspective
• High Speed Happiness – Phantom, Alexa & Epic in 120 fps
• LOG, LUT’S & RAW – On Set Color Management
• Stereoscopic Vision as a Storytelling Tool

And he’s just one speaker among scores of ’em.

If you click the NAB banner at the top of this page, you’ll get a discount code for NAB’s conferences, which include Technology Summit on Cinema, Disruptive Technologies, The Creative Master Series, Faith and Film, and much more.

My thinking is that if you limit yourself to South Lower, you could miss 80% or more of the show.

All the more reason to start planning now. NABShow.com has some pretty cool (if frightfully sluggish) planning tools, along with an app to help sort all this out, and includes maps and schedule reminder alerts.

Last but not least, my general show advice:

• Bring a fresh pair of socks for every day. I actually recommend brand new socks…but for pete’s sake, don’t wear new shoes!
• Drink lots of water.
• Avoid alcohol until you’re ready to go home. NAB is no place to be hung over and dehydrated. You’ll also torch your voice, and nothing will give you away as a rookie or wannabe faster.
• Make plans to ship your brochures home. It’s silly to carry 20 pounds of paper home.
• Look for show specials online. Many vendors will drop ship from the floor, but if not, check their website to avoid carrying stuff home.
• Unless you have an hour to kill, avoid the Starbucks at the entry to South Lower, and don’t bother with the food court there. There are loads of other alternatives, all of which will suck down less of your day.
• Better still, drink coffee at your hotel, eat a big breakfast, and skip the equivalent of lunch in a mall in order to blast through the show. Seriously, did you spend all this money and time to eat at Sbarro? Have a nice dinner instead.
• Make it a NICE dinner. Cheap buffets? NO!!! Las Vegas is one of the world’s great restaurant cities, arguably in the top three or four. (I’d put NY and Rome on the list…but by density, Vegas wins handily.) Even if only one night, go someplace NICE. You can walk into restaurants that require reservations days or weeks in advance in their home towns (say, Postrio in San Francisco or Nobu in New York),
• Some of the best ones are still comfortably under $50/head. For example, India Origin across from the Hard Rock is one of the best Indian places I’ve been to in either the US or Europe (and I’ve been to a LOT of Indian places around the world). But you can do well at Olives in the Bellagio, a number of places in the Venetian, and quite a few in the newer hotels around Aria in City Center. Do the buffets after you turn 70.

Also as mentioned, there’s a bunch of awesome free stuff, but O, the Cirque du Soleil show at the Venetian, is one of the most powerful entertainment experiences of my life. When the Cirque show Mystere was the only one in town, it was an annual event — I knew SCORES of people who bought tickets in blocks. Still absolutely amazing. And you really have to see and HEAR The Beatles Love to believe it.

All expensive, all need reservations made soon — and all incredibly much worth it. Other than clean socks, this is actually my strongest recommendation. A wonderful break from all the hub-bub of a**hole to elbow madness and be reminded just how beautiful the best technology can be when put to the service of human creativity.

[Tim Wilson]

Adobe is clearly doing what they can to gather steam right now. You don’t have to look too far to see that there are some heavy new features coming, including the Adobification of SpeedGrade.

I think it’s worth rolling the dice that if you crossgrade now that you won’t be hosed by a new release in a month. My experience as a corporate weasel at Boris and Avid tells me that upgrades within a few months are treated differently than upgrading software from a year or more ago.

I also think it’s conceivable that Adobe will be looking to make an especially good impression on new customers who showed up because their last vendor hosed them.

Just a guess, speaking strictly as an Adobe customer and former software guy, and not in any official COW-pacity.

[Tim Wilson]

[Alan Lacey] “Avid bought the Liquid line, to kill it,”

Okay, I tried to not respond to this for a couple of days, but once again, I fail. 🙂

I was at Avid when Liquid came in, and became part of its product marketing team. I can assure you most strenuously that it was not bought to be killed. Quite the contrary. Avid Xpress Pro was killed two years BEFORE Liquid…which was only EOL’d as the software-only Media Composer was given free rein.

In fact, right here at Creative COW, you can see a post from our old friend Gary Bettan at Videoguys.com in 2006, promoting an interview I gave in support of the first new version of Liquid under the Avid banner. As I said at the time,

“Gary, you’ve been talking to me about Liquid for as long as I’ve known you, and some of the features you’ve been most excited about – thousands of real-time GPU-accelerated effects, background rendering, instant auto-save updated 30 times a second, 5.1 audio mixing, and DVD authoring directly from the editing timeline – are exactly the same ones that excite us at Avid.

Avid Liquid is unique: video, surround audio, DVD, and effects in one application. Not one application for each of those tasks – one application that does it all. Nobody else can say that.”

Videoguy Interview: Tim Wilson of Avid tells all about Avid Liquid 7

There was nothing else like it then, and nothing else like it now.

When Liquid was first featured at NAB, it was featured very prominently indeed as the only product in the company that supported uncompressed video — back when people thought that that was a good idea. 🙂

Avid — including me personally — spent considerable time and money building the Liquid dealer channel, including training existing Avid dealers on selling and supporting Liquid. I hosted a very-well attended webinar rolling out Avid Liquid, I traveled from Avid HQ in Massachusetts to Cali to lend my experience in title animation software (from my days at Boris FX) to help develop the next generation of Liquid CG….as well as to try to find ways to incorporate that technology into legacy Avid titling. I also traveled to meet with Liquid customers and user groups, and was only one of a large group of people travelling across this great land to ensure Liquid’s growth.

Now, of course Liquid was EOL’d in 2010, but its growth over that 5 year span at Avid is far different than “buying it to kill it,” especially when it outlived a much older legacy Avid product that might be considered to operate in the same market space. Xpress lost. Liquid won.

Despite my respect, and, yes, love, for Liquid, I have to agree that Avid renewing its focus on Media Composer was the right thing to do…especially in light of recent events.

All of which is to say that I completely agree with everything you said — except for the part I completely disagree with! 🙂

Whew! I feel much better now.

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Sanders] “I know its all been said before – I’ve said it here and other places over and over again. “

Repeating ourselves from slightly different directions is what we do all the time, in every aspect of our lives. It’s part of the process of deepening roots. No need to point this out as if it was a bad thing.

There’s certainly not been a single topic I can think of that’s not revisited on a fairly regularly basis (how much should I charge, et al). That’s how it happens when two million people visit a forum every month, and especially in this case, when stakes are so high.

More important, there are literally tens of thousands of brand new people finding their way to this forum every month. I predict that the number is going to explode soon…if you know what I mean. 🙂 To all of these folks, the discussion is brand new, and it’s not reasonable to read all of the thousands of posts that go up in this forum every month. In fact, we’ve gone through phases where posts were going up every few seconds.

So I’m asking now, please, stop stop stop saying “we’ve talked about this already.” This is all brand new to a huge number of people all te time. They’re going to be blowing off as much steam as you did. Give ’em room, give ’em help, give ’em hope….

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

[Tim Wilson]

[Jim Giberti] “Fingers have amazing sensory and manipulative abilities, and our ability to do amazing things with them comes from eons of evolution. All of this tactile response isn’t because millions of years of previous fingers moved over glass surfaces.”

Not to say that these skills can’t be applied to glass…eventually. The larger issue for me remains precision. Being precise on an iPad is a pain in the ass. Can you imagine trying to use that text selection “press, magnifying glass, slide…oops, dangit, press again, etc” process for multiple fields of metadata?

I’m not saying that you need arrow keys per se, but in the current scheme of things, there’s not a simple way to nudge something on any touch interface I’ve worked with (not that I’ve worked with them all), and frankly, I need all the nudge tools I can get my hands on.

And better access to an undo button, or even better, a list of previous undos a la Media Composer. I can imagine a touch interface getting there eventually…maybe…but I don’t see anything coming that will increase my precision. The solution for now seems to be more toward the application making MY precision part of the “old, outdated” way of doing things, by linking things together in ways that avoid circumstances where precision is called for, like re-syncing.

Good for them for thinking of ways to reduce my opportunities for making mistakes. Fooey on them for thinking of ways to reduce my opportunities.