Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
-
@Patrick, Post of the year.
-
BMD had more product releases at the show last year than any other company, in any facet of the industry. They were also really, really good products, most of which either started shipping right away, and all of them soon thereafter. They may even have been the only company to ship everything they announced! 🙂
Anyway, their rollouts last year were flabbergasting, which is why we awarded the entire company the Creative COW Blue Ribbon Award.
So yeah, count on quite a few announcements. The press conference is at 9:30 on Monday, and I imagine that the press releases will have hit just before that.
Can they repeat last year’s performance. I’m certainly pulling for them, inasmuch as I want EVERY company to demolish my expectations, but even if not, count on something big.
FWIW, I know that Grant is personally a fan of Revival. Last time I checked, Blackmagic’s post house in Singapore had two of them.
And no, I’m not being cagey. Despite my best efforts, they’ve told me nothing. 🙂
Tim Wilson
Creative COW Magazine
magazine.creativecow.net -
Wall to wall mousepads and iPhone covers. Otherwise, mostly earbuds and one-trick apps. Yawn.
-
[rochelle winters] “Community – learn how the DP, showrunner and crew used an exclusively in-house post production workflow – shooting on HD-XDCAM, ingesting and editing XDCAM natively on Avid Mojo DX and sound mixing in an editing room. – Tuesday, 4/12, 2 – 3PM, North Hall 109 at the NAB Show in Las Vegas”
This session is being hosted by Creative COW’s Debra Kaufman. She heard the story from the folks working on the show, and was so intrigued that she pitched it to NAB, and naturally, they signed up.
Debra will also be posting an article offering some of the insights she has gained into that workflow. Should be up any day now, so keep your eyes peeled. I’ll post the link in this thread.
Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine -
[Bob Zelin] “If you concentrate on the south hall (especially the lower level) you will see everything….
…AVID”This is the point I have made several time: this year’s floor is completely different than in years past.
Avid is on the second floor.
Grass Valley is in the position that Avid used to have at the front of the room. They’re going to be showing some heavy-duty post goodness.
Ditto Quantel, right behind them. You know they just released a software companion to Pablo, right? And that they’re showing a workflow built around FCP?
Did I mention that Chryon is across the aisle from Blackmagic, who has the second-largest booth in the South Hall, right behind Grass Valley. Is this telling you anything? Oh, and Blackmagic just bought a switcher company.
Don’t look past “storage” companies like JMR. Their booth is going to be all about workflow, featuring products like Epic, Scratch and more.
If you’re interested in RED, you might also want to know about ARRI and Canon, both of whom are in the Central Hall. In fact, almost ALL of the cameras are in Central this year, including Panasonic, which is dead center in Central. Cables, batteries, lenses – Central. Most of the audio stuff is too.
In fact, look at the map. Lower South might FEEL like the center of what you need, but Central is a bigger hall. There’s a reason for that, and it ain’t just for the pocket protector crowd, who are still in the admittedly engineering-centered North Hall.
Although Asset Management: a whole section of the North Hall.
If your post facility uses routers, include the North Hall in your shopping.
Digital Distribution is one of our hottest forums: Upper South.
Dolby has one of the most outrageous reference monitors you’ve ever seen. Upper South.
Even if all you care about is desktop NLEs, the best stereo 3D plug-ins, including companies like Qube and Dashwood who have heavy-duty products for Final Cut Studio: Central Hall.
And those are just off the top of my head.
This may be the only time in the past 16 years that I’ve disagreed with Bob, but I think that sticking to South Lower is a recipe for missing the boat. Think about what you’d like to see. Make. No. Assumptions about where it might be. Use the interactive planners at NABshow.com to build the plan that makes sense for YOU.
Your mileage will vary of course, but I guarantee that not one single person reading this will see everything they want to see in the South Hall, certainly not by necessarily focusing on the lower floor, even for a 1 or 2-day trip.
I’m just saying.
-
[Richard Herd] “– Accounting, not just business stuff, but actual accounting, because that’s where the money literally is; that means you might need to take prerequisites like math.
— Poetry, because being able to write in an imagistic way is exactly important, things like metaphor, synecdoche, and meronym all deal with turning words into images
— Film Editing, because you should get some critique and direct instruction on aesthetics and technical vocabulary “
Great stuff, Richard. I’ll add some anecdotes from my specific experience.
Most of your math will be word problems. You have to be able to wrap your head around the actual issues before you can make calculations. In fact, in my Physics classes, we only had to come up with the equation. As one of my teachers said, a monkey can solve it from there. But in addition to accounting (agreed, a must), old school algebra will come in handy.
My favorite math joke: a calculus major, when you turned to her to split the bill for lunch – hey, it’s your major, right? – would stare blankly at you, and say in complete seriousness, “I don’t do finite math.”
Precision elevates your work. And more than any other kind of writing, poetry is precise. Think about even low-level forms like limericks. 9 syllables, 9, 5 5, 9 – 9s rhyme with each other, as do the 5s. You can’t get away with just anything. You have to think it all the way through, and if you can’t get it right, you start again.
But also precision of language. I was an assistant to a teacher, an older woman quick with a randy wink, who wouldn’t tolerate anything that lacked specific images. She also insisted on memorizing poetry. “Start with this one,” she said, by Robert Herrick, 1591-1674.
WHENAS in silks my Julia goes
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!Love it.
Training your ears will train your eyes. Specific images.
Watch and learn. I think you should spend more time watching movies than cutting them. Almost to a one, the great filmmakers are film WATCHING nerds. Scorsese would be the first to tell you: skip the films of Michael Powell at your peril.
Magic. A guy who has written a couple of articles for Creative COW Magazine told us that sleight of hand was the best thing he ever learned, because it taught him how to direct people’s eyes in the course of a narrative.
Not related to any of these, but I always like to note that Full Sail, one of the hardest of hardcore industry-specific training facilities, won’t let you touch a computer before you’ve mastered a pencil. Life drawing for everyone, period.
Last observation, following Mark’s: when I went to school, there was no such thing as a personal computer. Computer graphics was a field beyond arcane. Virtually nothing that exists today existed then, certainly not a job like anything in the COW job listings. Heck, as recently as 1998, you couldn’t even edit text in Photoshop!
The job that made me the most money: yeah, I had visual chops, but a monkey could too. What vaulted me over everyone else was my knowledge of geology and biology. There’s no such thing as “I’ll never use that after I leave school,” not if you’re paying attention.
And then there was that class in symbolic logic, which I could take as a math credit – how hard can it be, right? It was the hardest class I took in my entire education.(You could also take a 5th semester of Greek to substitute as a math credit. Ever try it? There’s a REASON why it’s a math credit.)
So the symbolic logic teacher kept hammering on you if you only got half way through an argument: “Necessary, but not sufficient.” You laid the foundation for an argument. You didn’t actually MAKE the argument.
The degree is necessary – you already pegged that – but not sufficient. Do the rest of the work to get the rest of the way there.
-
[Tyle Renake] “I find that most jobs i find and apply for ask for a bachelors degree. “
You’ve just answered your question.
There are a lot of passionate pro- and anti-college sentiments you’ll see throughout this forum, and indeed, some of the most visionary and successful people I know don’t even have high school diplomas, but this is the one and only thing you need to know: most jobs you will apply for ask for a bachelor’s degree.
Period.
Don’t let the hype take your eye off the ball. Nobody has ever said, wow, I really blew my chance to NOT go to college! Dang, I have too much education! What an idiot I was to try to get a broader context to life, knowledge and experience!
[Tyle Renake] “I find that most jobs i find and apply for ask for a bachelors degree. “
And guess what? Very few people stay in the career they got into in their 20s. Most of those next jobs will be looking for people with bachelor’s degrees too. That’s why, when you study, study broadly.
Get your degree. It will pay for itself many times over. Perhaps in your very first job.
Keep your eye on the ball. In this day and age, the point isn’t how YOU, or anybody else here, feels about college. It doesn’t matter even a little bit. Here’s the only thing that matters:
[Tyle Renake] “I find that most jobs i find and apply for ask for a bachelors degree. “
Again, all respect in the world to everyone who makes it through SELF education and force of will, and building their own resumes one drop of blood at a time. Fooey on narrow-minded HR drones and short-sighted bosses.
Tough. Needing a degree will be more true over time, not less.
Let the passionate debate start here, and I assure you that it will.
Before I go, did I mention that
[Tyle Renake] “I find that most jobs i find and apply for ask for a bachelors degree. “
Yr pal,
Timmy -
And don’t forget, private messages are exactly the OPPOSITE of what we’re trying to do at the COW. Please avoid them unless you are on fire, and the other person is the only one with water.
Please please PLEASE ask your questions in the forums. Please.
-
[Andrew Richards] “New, supportive shoes. “
To clarify, my experience is that the show floor is not the first time you should wear those new shoes. Even if they’re sneakers, break them in first.
Even more important to me: new socks. Wear a fresh pair every day. When I was spending all day on stage doing demos, I actually changed socks in the early afternoon, and it made a huge difference.
Protect your voice. Go easy on alcohol, and watch the amount of time you try to spend talking in crowded bars. You’ll be amazed how much better you feel on Wednesday or Thursday if your throat doesn’t hurt.
Have a big breakfast, and bring some snacks, a bottle of Superfood or some such to get you through the middle of the day. You can kill an hour waiting in line for a lunch that’s expensive and not very good. If you have to eat at the show, avoid the main dining area at the bottom of the South Hall. I don’t know if it’s still there, but I (used to?) really like the Indian place tucked into the right side of the second floor of the South Hall as you come up the main escalator, halfway or so back.
But better to tank up at breakfast, a light snack in the middle, and have a really good dinner. (Before dinner, some generous vendor will often have nice hors d’oeuvres for free if you keep your eyes peeled.) Prepare to spend grown-up money to dine really well. Vegas has some of the best food on the planet, and it’s incredibly accessible if you pay attention. You can walk into Postrio in Las Vegas (in the Venetian), and need a reservation way in advance in San Francisco. Ditto Nobu in Vegas (Hard Rock) vs. New York, Figs (Bellagio) vs. Boston, and many others. Those are somewhat old-school. It’s true for lots of newer ones too, as well as outstanding restaurants whose flagship, or only, location is Vegas.
I’d even say cheap out on a room to spend the money on really good dinners. With obvious exceptions, there aren’t many truly awful rooms left in Vegas, and even less expensive ones are usually pretty nice. You won’t regret spending the money on real food. Truly world class dining. There are trips that I ONLY go to town to eat dinner.
Never pass up the chance to have water. Or go to the bathroom. 🙂
And as I mentioned in my previous post, it’s especially important even for show vets to check out the map and make a plan. Many of the vendors that mean the most to you have changed locations, in some cases dramatically. The map will also tell you a very interesting tale about who’s swinging for the fences.
For that matter, use Monday to scope things out, watch the demos, pick up the literature. The later it is in the week, the more one-on-one time you’ll have with people working the booth, even in booths that look like pandemonium on Monday.
Read the literature in your room. The stuff you feel like keeping, mail back. Senseless to carry it. If it’s too precious for you to part with, at least show up with room in your suitcase to carry it home.
My favorites of this advice: new socks, expensive dinners.
-
The primary idea behind COW “friends” is that you can note the people you find especially helpful, and track every post they make. I’m not entirely happy with how it’s implemented yet, so if you have any suggestions, please make them here.
When you say “hijacked,” though, it reminds me of the 1950 film “Hi-jacked,” starring Jim Davis, who went on to portray Jock Ewing on Dallas.
Even more interesting to me is director Sam Newfield, the prototypical “B” director. He passed on at the relatively young age of 64, yet directed 297 features! Indeed, in the decade preceding “Hi-jacked,” he directed over 100 of these.
Another from 1950 was “Wild Weed,” revolving around the havoc and death in the wake of one chorus girl’s use of said wild weed. The poster screamed, “She Should Have Said NO!”
The point I’m playfully making is that hijacking threads is okay. If your subject is so different that you fear you’re veering off course, start a new thread!
We have over 1.7 million visitors a month, with over 250,000 active posting accounts. You think you get a lot of email? Can you even imagine what would happen if even one percent of 250,000 people thought you were helpful enough to ask you directly for assistance on a post you made? 250 emails in a day! If 2 percent had a follow-up question, 500 emails in a day.
And with more than 15 million unique individuals over the course of a year, new accounts being added every day, you could be looking at literally thousands of direct emails in response to one post. It’s simply not possible.
Our community depends on people asking questions. Without that, we would die. It also depends on answers being provided in public, so that the site is actually helpful. So please, out of consideration to people who answer questions out of the goodness of their hearts, and out of consideration for the people behind the COW who support everything you see here, please, please: POST!
And looky there, starting with one sentence on one topic to a long post on a related topic. Works out pretty well, I think.
🙂
Tim
Creative COW