Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
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[Patrick Ortman] “Go Walter!”
[Walter Biscardi] “The big trend of the past few years has simply been the availability of the tools to a much wider audience. Anybody with a Mac laptop is a video editor with a very powerful suite of tools for $999.”
Walter, Ronald and I started lamenting this in 1998, when you could start doing DV with a Media 100 card for “only” $16,000 dollars, not counting the computer and drives. No software solution existed yet, and no laptops could do this yet…but it was a major collapse in even our cheap, one-man band markets.
A friend of mine knew that I was using Media 100, for which I had paid $30,000 three years earlier, saw how far the price had come down, and when his kid said he was interested in video, he offered him three choices for his high school graduation: a boat (this was Florida), a car, or a tricked out Media 100 system. The kid picked Media 100.
Of course, this was the wheel of karma. When we set up our shop for $100,000 all in — 1 computer, drives (I spent $15,000 for NINE GIGS), one BetaSP camera, one UVW-1800 deck (for my money, the thing that lit the fire on the NLE revolution: now we could actually DELIVER broadcast video), 2 computer and 1 broadcast monitor — and I could get away with $1500/day, this was a staggeringly low price that cratered my local market.
And to underscore Walter’s point about going for broke, we featured his story in an issue of the COW Magazine called “The Think Big Issue,” full of stories of people who risked bankruptcy to swing for the fences. I set up my first system by taking out a second mortgage, and it was scary as sh**, in the middle of what was considered the Golden Age.
re Bob: Ronald and I have known him for 15 years, and we were the people he used to rail against in 1995 — these people with cheapo $30,000 Media 100 cards and BetaSP/UVW gear who were taking big money away from the Avid/DigiBeta/BVW crowd.
He has also spoken on almost a weekly basis about how, if you don’t stay motivated to drive yourself into the ground learning EVERYTHING new, you’ll find yourself working at McDonalds, having been replaced by people working at McDonalds now.
And fwiw, Bob has changed his focus for the same reason Walter has: the old wells are drying up, if not completely dry. But there are new wells if you’re able to blow everything up and start over.
But this isn’t about Bob and Walter. I don’t mean to do anything but SUPPORT the observation that the signs of the apocalypse are all around us.
Just for grins, I reviewed my notes on the past 2,000 years of the usage of “apocalypse,” and they hold in common that ain’t none of this tribulation going away any time soon.
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Kids, kids, kids – we featured this story in Creative COW Magazine quite a while ago, and featured it as the lead story in our newsletter JUST LAST WEEK.
It was written by Richard Harrington, who runs a company doing local work in Washington DC, with a dozen or so employees. He has very specific suggestions – some of which have been covered here already, some not.
Take a look at “Social Media: Is it Real?” right here. The short answer is yes, if you do it right. Otherwise it can actually SUBTRACT from your business by wasting your time.
Don’t hesitate to ask him your questions there. He is truly one of the world experts in social media for traditional media companies.
Among the suggestions he points out that I KNOW some of you aren’t taking advantage of: the services listings at services.creativecow.net, and where applicable, tying it to a reel posted at reels.creativecow.net. Because of the relevance of the COW’s traffic to your business, we regularly see placement for our service listings even higher than some folks own corporate listings. You are doing yourselves a deep, deep disservice if this isn’t part of your online profile.
You are also doing yourselves a disservice if you don’t read Creative COW Magazine, and keep at least one eye cocked toward the newsletters. We spend a lot of time reading forums like these, and coming up with the best possible information for people all across the COW, and beyond.
Sorry for the scolding, but we’re doing everything we can to make it easy for you.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW MagazineMy Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”
Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!
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Our terms of service are quite explicit – we DO reserve the right to prevent, edit or delete posts because of a number of objections. You can guess these or you can look ’em up.
This ain’t that. 🙂
That said, it turns out the name “liver pills” is frowned upon elsewhere.
[The FTC’s] ruling last week not only forbade Carter Products to use the word “liver” in the name of its pills, but told Carter’s to stop claiming that its pills are specific remedies for conditions in which an individual feels “down-and-out, blue, down-in-the-dumps, worn out, sunk, logy, depressed, sluggish, allin, listless, mean, low, cross, tired, stuffy, heavy, miserable, sour, grouchy, irritable, cranky, peevish, fagged out, dull, sullen, what’s-the-use, bogged down, grumpy, run down or gloomy.”
The FTC left one door open. Carter’s can still recommend its pills for such miseries to the extent that any of them can be temporarily relieved by an evacuation of the bowels.
So there you go.
As COWs, we eat a lot of roughage, and so tend not to need a lot of help in this department. Quite the contrary.
PS. I remember this article…originally written in 1951…but can’t remember where I left my keys….
tw
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I’ll give you my favorite example.
Tony Hudson worked in the Lucas creature shop. You can imagine the kind of things he worked on in the 70s. He became one of the leads of that team. He designed and operated the whales in Star Trek IV.
Then when things went digital, he added those skills. His first digital character was Dobby the house elf in the Harry Potter movie. His also designed that effect in Men in Black where Tony Shalhoub’s head gets blown off and regrows.
He first came to the COW because he needed to learn Final Cut Pro. He was doing some work on the side for Ray Kurzweil, and needed to do his own assemblies. (Along with a couple of music videos, it wound up being 600 shots…on his own. No team.)
He’s now the Pre-Production Asset Supervisor at Lucasfilm Animation – a job that encompasses art, science, database management and people management.
He didn’t show up at the top. He started operating puppets for Sid & Marty Kroft as a teen, and didn’t stop. He became a generalist, which allowed him to not just be on teams, but to lead them.
And, he came to the COW as a newbie. 🙂
Here’s the story he wrote about it for Creative COW Magazine.
And here’s his reel at reels.creativecow.net…which you should all be using. There’s a whole section in it with matte paintings he created and hand drawn conceptual art, using his fine arts skills.
Learn everything.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW MagazineMy Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”
Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!
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Refresh cycle for Avid is a year-ish at the moment, but took 2 years coming out of the gate:
2.5 (the first version of MC Soft): June 2006
3: June 2008
4: Sept 2009
5: June 2010Using Sesame Street numbers theory (one of these things is not like the others, all of the rest are just the same), I’m gonna say next release: June. Just a guess.
Premiere Pro, post-Macromedia:
CS 3: July 2007
CS 4: Sept 2008
CS 5: April 2010Look around the COW’s Premiere forum, and ask them if they were happier with the release that took 1 year, or the one that took closer to 2. Show of hands? Correct. Happier with the 1 that took closer to 2. You don’t want to rush this stuff.
Reminds me….I was frustrated with how long a software release was taking at a company I used to work for. Can we puh-leeeez hire some temp engineers, I asked? Pleeeze? The boss said, doesn’t matter how many doctors you throw at a baby. It’s still going to take about nine months. Plan accordingly.
You know the gestation cycle of FCS. Plan accordingly.
Lightning round observations. While Steve promised something mind-blowing before year’s end,
- When was the last time Apple featured FCP in a keynote? The last time I remember was the launch, so what? Most of a decade?
- Even if I’m wrong about that, for this event, any FCS news would have been in the weeds. For years, the keynotes have been strictly about high-level messaging for the market as a whole. Not even any Photoshop shoot-outs anymore – remember those?
- It’s not the end of the year
Dude, and Lion? OS X is so old they should have called this release COUGAR! Hey-yo! I’ll be here all week! Tip your waitresses!
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[Mark Suszko] “But yes, the discipline applied to learning is a factor, and the background you acquire informs your work. The critical thinking and analysis skills hopefully honed by formal schooling are valuable to an editor…the more well-rounded a human being you are, the better I think you can potentially become as an editor.”
Full Sail, one of the most hard-core trade schools, puts everybody in every discipline through drawing and painting before they ever touch a piece of hardware.
None of this is to belittle the value of decades of experience in the trenches, or your experience in particular, John.
But speaking strictly from the perspective of somebody who has been through the HR process from both sides of the desk: skills are teachable, traits are not.
So in disciplined hiring, you look for signs of traits, not skills.
Education is obviously not a trait in itself. But it’s a great way to look at a lot of traits in a very short time. Discerning traits through a lens that takes education seriously has also proven itself to be a better predictor of success in an organization than skill.
The best HR people are working from their own long experience too – and this is what their experience has taught them.
And not to put too fine a point on it, my experience is that HR didn’t write the job description or requirements. The manager did.
Switching tracks to a secondary, but intriguing sub-thread:
To extend Nick’s point about successful drop-outs: every one of them succeeded BECAUSE they were bad team players.
I’m not speaking about dropouts in general. There are many excellent reasons to drop out – family, finances, etc. Many people have diligently taught themselves what they needed to, and risen to the top with a spirit of creativity, energy, humility and generosity. The sense of responsibility that led them to drop out may in fact reflect the core traits that make them successful.
My experience is that folks who drop out in those circumstances are still reading more decades later, working harder to keep themselves educated with fresh perspectives than graduates. They succeed through a remarkable combination of passion and discipline.
Nobody like that is on Nick’s great list from Wikipedia.
A lot of these people were (and are) egomaniacs, in some cases driven by their senses of previous failures, or their desire to show up the people who said they were failures, and without exception, share the trait unmanageability.
Many of the ones in creative fields have all also publicly missed huge deadlines, including deadlines of their own making.
Most of the ones who succeeded all the way to the top are also famously awful bosses. The best of them are merely neurotic rather than psychotic, but many are famous for some combination of management through intimidation and humiliation, random psychological brutality, and fostering overt hostility between teams in the same organization.
The absolute worst of them make wonderful products. But, to cite two of them: don’t be shocked if you never see a high-level collaboration between Steve Jobs and James Cameron. 🙂
And to bring it back to the main topic, the most enduring of what people learn in school often happens outside class, and HR pros are well aware of this. Indeed, what Nick did outside class showed the set of traits that has made him a spectacularly successful entrepreneur without being a weenie.
Bosses expecting education is frustrating, yes. Unfair, often. Ideally, folks hiring would be infinitely flexible, but the set of traits related to education has proven to be a better predictor of success in an organization than skills.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW MagazineMy Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”
Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!
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[Cory Petkovsek] “Write in your cover letter that you are happy to demonstrate how your experience will meet their needs more effectively than having a degree. Be prepared with your client list and portfolio.”
Y’know, once you have the client list and portfolio, you probably won’t even have to mention the degree. The HR folks have a list that says “You must be this tall to ride this ride,” but for the right work, they’ll set that aside. I’ve seen it before.
The point is, don’t let the “requirements” throw you off your game. If it’s the right job for you, show them.
Besides, a lot of companies will pay you to go to school. Never too late if somebody else is paying, and it will set you up for the next job. 🙂 Because one thing about the market right now is that people with experience AND education are desperate for jobs.
For now, though, show ’em the work, show them the recommendations on your LinkedIn page- which goes a LONG way with HR people, and, no kidding, by itself could be enough to overcome the education objection – and don’t sweat the rest. From the sound of things, your larger risk is getting bounced because you’re overqualified.
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I’ve already pestered Darin about writing about his experience for Creative COW Magazine. Look for it soon.
A reminder, though: anybody here who wants a blog has one, at blogs.creativecow.net. If you’re logged in, you should be good to go.
If you already have a blog and would like to syndicate it through the COW, click on “Settings” in the upper right of your browser to edit your COW profile. Or I can save you moving your eyeballs all the way up there: just click this link: https://secure.creativecow.net/account/edit
On the Blogs tab of your profile, you’ll see where to paste your blog’s RSS feed. Trust me, a lot easier than it sounds. From then on, whatever you post on your blog, wherever it’s hosted, will magically appear at blogs.creativecow.net.
The thing is, if you have a blog, it’s presumably so somebody will read it, right? So push it through the COW. We’re all about trying to draw a crowd to what you do.
And Darin, get back to work, man. I need my article! 🙂
Tim
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW MagazineMy Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”
Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!
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[Mike Cohen] “Editing 3D is even further downstream, and there of course would need to be an installed user base of 3D televisions and a standard for 3D media playback.”
You can edit native stereoscopic in Avid Media Composer software for $2500. Monitoring is being done on inexpensive desktop monitors with active LCD shutters.
The COW’s Paul Carlin has been using this setup for some time. He used it to edit the Avatar trailer in his home studio!!! I took a look – not with the Avatar footage; you can imagine that they didn’t leave any of that floating around – and it’s flabbergasting. You’d use a higher-end system for final grading of course, but editing is a breeze, and watching it play back is a delight.
I know you know this, Mike, having seen it too…but for the rest of the class, this isn’t some future thing. It’s here today, and it’s both easy and inexpensive – even for world-class work.
Tim Wilson
Associate Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW MagazineMy Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”
Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!
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[Bob Zelin] “if you are lucky, they will pick you, and put your video on TV, and you will see your name at the end of the credits”
Doritos has done with SuperBowl ads – work seen in front of nearly 100 million people in the US alone, with massive coverage in the trade magazines (think AdWeek, etc.)…and there’s always a follow-up about how little work came to the producers because of it.
There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There’s mostly just what you get paid before you hand the work over.