[Tim Wilson]

[John Davidson] “In those instances we send you a 1080i pro res quicktime straight out of FCP and it imports directly into their Avids.”

I assume that the files are still under 2GB, right? I know that ProRes compresses nicely, and that there are different flavors of ProRes, but how *long* is a typical 2GB file of 1920×1080 that you send? Five minutes? 30?

Or are you sending via another method than YouSendIt?

[John Davidson] “I still prefer tape for now.”

I agree that tape is still king. Even places with tapeless infrastructures are still often taking delivery on tape, so that THEY can manage the file formatting, rather than wrestling with whatever you’ve mangled.

But as mentioned on the original thread, sometimes you have to send 100 spots in different formats to different places – definitely a job for digital delivery….

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “Fixed that for you, Walt.”

Actually, that would be Steve. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Rich Rubasch] “Need more?”

You mention a unique MPEG-2 format for DG Fastchannel? Without giving away any of their trade secrets 🙂 can you say more about what it is? Even generally.

Also, what file formats are the FTP folks looking for?

This is actually a question I have for everybody – what kinds of files are you working with? What are the recipients looking for? Are there standards emerging?

Thanks, kids. Keep ’em coming.

tw

[Tim Wilson]

My tongue-in-cheekness notwithstanding, yes, we have BUNCHES of folks from China logging in. Not shockingly, one of our fastest growing territories here at the COW.

One way we’re growing so fast is that Bessie speaks Chinese – one of 12 languages, in fact. Check those flags in the lower right of the “meadow” banner at the top of the page. Allll over it.

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “In the sequel, the company focus groups and marketers get involved in his update, and add in hundreds more imperatives…”

I forgot about that – hilarious!

It happens that our team goal was to get it down to one sentence, with no more than two commas. We’ll see if I can pull that off on my own.

[Mark Suszko] “Kind of like email sig files: if they are longer than the message they are attached to, you’re doing it wrong.”

Mine is in haiku, so it reads shorter than it looks. 🙂

tw

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “We are in the communications problem-solving business. Not a commoditized hardware business”

Brilliant point. While I’m still chewing the cud on a bovine mission statement, we talk a LOT about how we are NOT in the web business.

Your informal statement is a wonderful start. To Steve’s point below, you can probably turn that into two sentences for readability, and still take full marks for clarity, brevity and impact.

[Steve Martin] “….t the exercise of developing a mission statement can be painstaking process of writing and re-writing.”

It really is! Especially when you have a whole lot of people working on it. It’s funny, too – the first suggestions are almost to tweak a word or two, but it doesn’t take long before somebody offers something COMPLETELY different. Often a direction that has nothing to do with the original one. They start to reflect what each of the stakeholders feels is most important.

Having a unified mission statement starts to feel like a uniform, in the best possible sense. You have your individual contributions to make, but when you put it on, you’re ready to GO. You feel pride in being a team, and ready for anything.

[Steve Martin] “‘To use technology to effectively tell our client’s stories with creativity, honesty, and integrity.”

Sounds accurate, but kind of lofty.”

Lofty can be a problem for a slogan or motto, but is perfect for a mission statement. How often do we meet our own standards? The mission statement is a reminder of what those are, and challenge ourselves to do better.

Not to be all rah-rah, because by nature, I’m not. But the process of distilling vision was always my favorite part of being in the “business” world.

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

My Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!

[Tim Wilson]

In all seriousness, here’s a bold suggestion: show me your mission statement, I’ll show you mine.

The thing is, I don’t have one. I used to. Not just for my job as a whole, but for every mission my team undertook. It was that simple idea that if you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t get there. It’s actually bigger than that. Distilling the essence of your job/role/task, etc. to a sentence that makes sense when spoken aloud gives you clarity, and even power.

None of these fake “marketing” sentences, either. No words that your parents or kids don’t understand. The goal is clarity. The adjectival form of “essence” is “essential.”

So I’m going to work on this. Everyone else should too, and share the results with the class. We can help sharpen each other’s focus, and maybe even learn something about what each of us actually DOES.

I said this in my first post on this thread, and will again – a GREAT video.

[Tim Wilson]

>>>We Chicagoans…<<< ...live in the SECOND City.

[Tim Wilson]

FANTASTIC video! Thanks!

Two more things to learn:

1) New York is not just the greatest city in the world. It is the center of the galaxy, if not the entire universe. Go with the flow.

2) As amazing as that cab driver was, never take a cab from La Guardia to midtown. Ever. Almost without exception, American cabs are used police cars. The back seat is where the PRISONERS used to sit.

Spend the few extra dollars for a town car. You’ll arrive feeling comfortable and fresh, and not like you’ve been riding for 30 minutes in a prisoner compartment. Dude, not even the WORST prisoners spent that long in the back of that cop car. Town car.

Seriously, though, this is a truly great presentation. Thanks again!

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

My Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!

[Tim Wilson]

[David Sikes] “singleness really is the only time I can act boldly and “swing for the fences” as you said – and risk making bad career choices.”

Consider a more moderate position on that.

Let me tell you a story. A ridiculously LONG story, but a good one.

One of the things I admire most about my father – aside from the stunning good looks that he has passed along to me – is that he has swung for the fences from one career to another. We moved quite a bit growing up as he followed those dreams, some of which worked out pretty well, and some of which flamed out.

It happens that his absolutely biggest flameout opened the door to one of his biggest adventures. He left a successful job at the pinnacle of the lifelong dream he’d had since he was driving a delivery truck — publishing a newspaper — to follow ANOTHER dream. I’ll spare you the details, but it was a wonderful idea that COULD have made him big money, in a field where multi-billion deals were the norm.

But boy oh boy, did it not work out for him! Rotten timing, among other things. In the meantime, he burned through everything. He was completely broke and unemployed, with two kids and a homemaker wife to support.

The job market for formerly self-employed, now unemployed, guys in their 40s wasn’t any better then than it is now, so he did the same thing you would – send out a BUNCH of resumes.

One of them was to Apple Computer, in 1979. In the job interview, Steve Jobs told my father that the only thing that caught his eye on my father’s resume, and the reason why he was talking to my father at all, was the good idea behind his business, but also, specifically, the spectacularity of his failure.

As far as Steve was concerned, that failure was the most interesting thing about my father, and told him so in more or less those very words. Turns out that young Steve had a fondness for swinging for fences himself. Steve hired him with the unofficial title of “Graybeard.” At 43, my old man was the second-oldest guy in the company.

I’m 50 now, with a genuinely gray beard, and find this story more hilarious with every passing year.

When Steve left in 1985, Dad’s whole part of Apple imploded. He wound up a major consulting company whose stock-in-trade was getting businesses back on the rails. Turns out that a couple of exceptionally bad experiences can be profitable for somebody smart who’s paying attention.

Two of the big success stories while he was there were Wrangler and FedEx. At his next job, he spent 18 months with HP as his only account, creating their workstation division. Ironically, he also consulted with Apple, just before Steve returned.

Lots of detail to make the point. One job blew up in his face, the very next job turned into one of the most famous business debacles of all time — and lo and behold, a few years later, he was in a place he never expected, doing things unrelated to his previous success, in a field that has continued to satisfy him 35 years later. The longest run of his career path started with not just one bad outcome, but two really REALLY bad ones in a row.

Have a dream? Follow it. FOLLOW IT, and bring the family with you.

The fact is that we moved a LOT growing up, starting when I was a toddler and my sister was a baby. We moved across the country 3 times, sometimes in the middle of a school year, to places with no family or anything else to fall back on. Transitions could be tough, but I loved the life. We figured it out as we went along.

(The kids don’t need to know EVERYTHING, but include them in the process. Once when we were at a crossroad, he assigned me to research Seattle and my sister to research Chicago, then share the results with the rest of the family. I was in junior high, my sister in elementary school, and we LOVED it.)

I don’t mean to oversell this. He didn’t dream of being a carny or anything. These were actual jobs. We lived in houses. But we sometimes lived without a net, and started over from scratch more than once.

Just a month or so ago, my father apologized for that last move we made before I left home. Yeah, he connected with Apple there, but by and large, he said, it was “a lost decade.” Fortunately, he said, the next decade was a really good one. (The couple after that have been good too.)

I thought it was an awesome apology, but I had never sweated it in the first place. All part of the adventure. In fact, the problem with that last move is that we stayed too long. Should have left years earlier. His apology was for NOT moving.

Since then, I have aspired to live as boldly as he has, and to make mistakes as spectacular as his. I’ve done better on the mistakes part than the boldness part, but the lesson I’ve carried with me more than any other: yeah, maybe you can be a little more daring when you’re single, and you have responsibilities as a dad, but one of those responsibilities is to set a good example about the importance of taking chances to follow dreams. Never, ever EVER let your kids be the excuse for not swinging for the fences.

There are NO excuses. Swing.

More unasked-for advice from your aging Uncle Timmy, given in typically massive doses.

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

My Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!