[Tim Wilson]

If you haven’t watched the video full screen, by all means do. It’s a very entertaining piece, and worth considering as a creative work in itself.

Less than a year ago, I was a total skeptic about the cloud. Not anymore.

Storage was the easy part for me to get used to. Having gone through a couple of computer disasters lately, I’ve found that my reasonably up-to-date, reasonably thorough back-ups were a major PITA to get to. As a result, I’ve now been uploading documents to online drives daily.

As is virtually always the way with such things, there are many more alternatives, many of them free on Windows, starting with SkyDrive – 25GB free, compared to 20GB for $99/yr with MobileMe. (Skydrive works on Mac, with some limitations – a lot of the juicy goodness comes from ActiveX.) Lots of free third-party synch and backup utils too. I’ve also started playing with ADrive too – 50GB free! I kinda like free.

In a way, Apple has been moving into the clouds for a while. Out goes Macintosh. (It’s Mac.) Out goes computer. (It’s Apple.) Now have you noticed how hard it is to find “OS” at apple.com? TRY to find it, and tell me how many clicks it takes. What OS does the iPhone run? As far as most customers are concerned, it only runs apps. Nobody asks “Is it compatible with Windows?” – even though the staggering majority of iPhone users primarily run Windows. It’s irrelevant.

Apple is more than happy to rule your world through devices. Netbook, thy name is iPhone, and iPod, and whatever the tablet thing is going to be called. They want to sell computers for as long as anyone is buying computers, but the real money’s in the cloud.

Google is going further, faster, because they have no stake in sales or support of either hardware or software. They’ll let you run the Chrome OS on a modified version of your high school ring.

That little movie has it nailed, though – the “click click click COME ON ALREADY” response is really for getting online. Every other aspect of the OS, every individual application, takes a back seat.

I’m still a little skeptical about full-scale applications online….although I’m wavering. At this point, the only REAL limitation of Google Docs for the word processing I do every day is that it doesn’t support Word’s Track Changes feature – still, by far the best on the planet.

(One man’s bloat is another man’s “there’s no point even trying to do my job without this feature.” MSFT isn’t evil or stupid. It’s relentless, and has to carry the weight of 97% of the world on its shoulders.)

I could definitely do pretty much all of my photo editing on the web. The big issue is that none of the online editing applications do much with CMYK or non-screen resolutions. If they did, I’d be done with Photoshop in a minute. I live for the day.

(I complain about P-shop being bloated, but in fairness, the same thing I said about Office is true here – there are so many people who need THAT ONE feature that it has to carry the weight.

In both cases, I could easily run a local version of a web-hosted seat. Run the app offline for X days, reconnect to sync files and reinitialize the license. Subscription-based MP3 players have been doing this for a decade. (Thirty days is the typical max time you can go without getting back online to renew the license.)

The logjam there is the actual license. Having gone through a bunch of reinstalls of late, Adobe has taken a long lead in the activation annoyance race. When did they start having longer serial numbers than Msft? That is of course not the REAL problem, which is another story.

Anyway….

I used to thing that video editing would be one of the big things that wouldn’t transfer to the web. I’m obviously already wrong about that. With just a few more tweaks to existing tools, we could easily step into a world where the bulk of “offline” editing is done online, and the bulk of “online” editing is done offline! Rough cut on the web, send a link to the equivalent of an EDL, finish on a desktop system.

We’re certainly already in a world where the heaviest-duty editing and finishing is done on dedicated workstations – I’m just talking about steps in that direction that are already being taken. Editing finishing boxes will return from whence they came – very focused. You can buy a tractor with a GPS in it, but if you only need GPS, the tractor is pretty much dispensable, right?

In practice, thin clients can be a pain. But compared to the decade that it took for nonlinear editing to evolve onto desktops, those problems are being solved at a lightning pace.

The true horizon: your iTunes library. Once you can access the entire thing from every web-enabled device, NOW we’re talking.

Wait – you can do that now! Poke around. You can use Shared Folders on your main iTunes box, log in via the standard IP and folder hierarchy, and use free software like Simplifymedia to stream music and movies from your home Mac or PC into any web-enabled device (iPhone, Blackberry, high school ring).

NOW we’re talking! I love the cloud. The cloud loves me.

Yr pal,
Timmy

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine!

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

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!

[Tim Wilson]

If you have a fat pipe and can open a 6MB PDF in your browser, check it out. Here it is zipped for your downloading pleasure.

Thanks for mentioning page 22, Bob. I admit that I wrestled with that section during the edit. It was so personal that I wasn’t sure it belonged there, but, like you, I found it so moving that I couldn’t imagine the article without it. It may be my favorite single page in the whole issue. Not just inspiring for business – inspiring for life, too.

Hey kids! Want to know what we’re talking about? Seriously, follow the link above, read the article, and let’s talk about it. In fact, pretty much the entire issue is devoted to hardcore business topics – which you might guess from the title of the issue:

THINK BIG: Bold Moves to Get Ahead in the New Economy.

If you’re serious about business, about THIS business, you need to read this.

PS. No matter how good your monitor is, you have no freaking idea just how beautiful this magazine is unless you’re subscribing. Heavy paper, super-saturated colors…oh yeah, and inspiring stories like the one Bob mentions…

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine!

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

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!

[Tim Wilson]

“And here I thought, foolish me, that it was about telling a good story well.”

Wow, you guys are cynical! It IS about telling stories well. People who get this wrong get fired. Their projects fail. But as long as movies cost money to make, somebody has to take responsibility for keeping thousands of workers employed.

Here is the key sentence:

“There is clearly a public appetite for new stories taking favourite characters on new adventures.”

It’s true. Franchises die when people stop going to see them. People stop going when they stop getting what they want.

In the 1990s the second film in the Austin Powers series grossed nearly five times the box-office take of the first one.

So they were not being predators by making a third Austin Powers movie. They were IDIOTS if they DIDN’T.

Hardly anybody liked the third one, and there’s been barely a whisper about number four, because nobody has said aloud that they’re willing to finance it. Or see it. If the third one had been good enough for somebody, ANYBODY to care? We’ll never know.

…the revival of the Star Trek franchise this summer, saw JJ Abrams’s new film gross £21m in UK cinemas, which is more than double the return of any of the previous 10 Star Trek feature films.

You saw this one, right? Well, it really WAS twice as good as any of the last 10 Star Trek pictures. Earned every dime. The reason why anybody (say for the sake of argument, ME) went to see yet another Star Trek picture is because these stories have been part of my life for over 40 years, and I LIKE ’em. If you think you have a good Star Trek story, let’s hear it.

But the reason why there are no more Star Trek series being made for TV is because nobody wants to see them. And until JJ Abrams came forward with a script and a team, there were no more Star Trek pictures in development. Paramount knew that that side of the business was dead…except, wow, it’s not anywhere near dead. That was a wonderful movie, and I’ll be that twice as many people will see the next one. And not because studios are cynical or audiences are stupid.

All the time.

I’m of the “glass half full” persuasion. I fear that more and more people are becoming of the “Glass? What glass? I DON’T SEE ANY DANG GLASS!!!!” school.

Relax. There will always be stories with ledes that are meant to get you wound up, but as you keep reading, the rest of it doesn’t sound so bad. There just aren’t all that many people in the movie business more venal than anywhere else – and most people aren’t especially venal.

Wow, I’ve spent most of my adult life as a prince (lower case) of darkness. People use to hum the Darth Vader theme around me, and they weren’t kidding. I was an evil, angry dude. These days I’m feeling like Little Bo Peep. Am I the only one who mostly likes the movies and TV I watch? Who assumes that the people in charge are just trying to make a living, and mostly doing okay at it? Who assumes that people pay to watch what they want, and DON’T pay for what they DON’T want?

And hey, does it count as a rant if I’m telling you to relax and cheer up?

[Tim Wilson]

Couple of quick notes:

1) One reason why the platform war is over for Avid customers is that you can run it on both a Mac and a PC…or both. I used Avids so often on both platforms, even in the same project, that I kept forgetting where I was.

2) Avid began as a Mac-only company in 1987, and shipped its first product in 1989, the Mac-only Avid Film Composer. Film Composer changed the film business so completely that it was awarded an Oscar in 1998 – while it was still a Mac-only product from a company whose tools (including Pro Tools) were only available on Mac.

This was of course before Macromedia developed Key Grip, eventually named Final Cut – on a PC!!!

3) Avid products made their way to PCs when massive waves of creatives using PCs kept banging on the door, trying to give Avid big bags of money. You hear about this now because — who knew? — there really are massive waves of creatives using PCs.

Not that there was no bet-hedging for Avid (and Adobe, whose products were also originally Mac-only) in moving to the PC. I’m just saying that, for a publicly traded company, there is no comfort without money. Neither Avid nor Adobe would have done it in a million years if there were no waves of PC-using creatives with big bags of money. And once they saw the money was there, they would have made the move regardless of what Apple did.

4) All of which is to echo the advice above – use whichever OS you like. Or both. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Richard Cooper] “Agreed, and you can cover your FirstCom costs by charging $125 per track used to the client.”

One of the reasons that I love project pricing is that I was able to get away with charging a LOT more than $125 per track. 🙂

tw

[Tim Wilson]

[Nick Griffin] “[Jack Gray] “At the lowest end, cost will win, so even the most generic stock music will do.”

Yes, but. There are some producers who are looking for something better than generic crap”

I spent serious money for licensing the FirstCom library, and I have to tell you, it made up for itself many, many times over. Literally. I paid several thousand dollars a year for one of the lower-end packages, and in bid after bid, I had clients say, “I’m looking at a lot of good reels, but the music in yours stands out so far ahead of the others that I know you’ll make MY projects stand out the same way.”

Each job I won where the client specifically called out my music paid for my entire year’s music license 5, 6, sometimes 20 times over – every single time.

Tip: unless your clients expect your clients to use something like this themselves, don’t slam your reel together with the same electronica that everyone else does. I used snippets of video, edited to the ACTUAL MUSIC I used – when the said that my “music sounded better” – well, it DID. But it was also USED better.

The moral of the story: seriously, use music that will make the client feel good about themselves. The smart ones will care, and will apply their feelings about your music to their own needs – and they’ll pay the bills for the dullard clients. This is always the case of course.

(BTW, big fan of Killer Tracks. They weren’t as good a match for what I was doing at the time, but now that they’re owned by the Universal Music Group, their music is anything but generic. Want Chuck D to record your hip hop beats? Done.)

[Nick Griffin] “And why are you limiting yourself to spots? Maybe it’s because we’re in the corporate/industrial business, but there’s a lot more out there than spots and I avoid anything that only comes in 60, 30 and 10 second lengths.

One of my favorite things about the FirstCom library was an entire category of music called Underscores. Classical music is great, but the dynamic range is intentionally too wide to talk over. They offered recordings of recognizable pieces by “brand-name” world-class orchestras specifically recorded to be narrated over.

They did the same for other genres too. My point is support Nick’s point that you need to think more broadly about music, and pay now for more than what you need now. Every investment should be made with the expectation that you will grow. Otherwise, why make it?

“Good production music is produced in such a way that editors can cut and overlap it to get what they want. They’re the ones who customize, not you.”

Cleverly cut and fade, ride levels, and you can do what you need to do, almost every time. Add some software that will change pitch or match beats as needed – lots of very affordable examples – and as you develop even a few skills, you can stick the landing every time.

Clients will notice. They’ll pay you for it.

The beat goes on,
Tim

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine!

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

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!

[Tim Wilson]

I’m going to make some specific observations to speak to the general observation: the demographics are changing faster than you’re watching. There’s no hand biting here. Money talks.

It’s not just greed talking, either. Audiences grow when they get what they want.

[Mark Suszko] “racing each other towards mediocrity in pursuit of market share”

Market share is bad? This is a business forum for criminy’s sake. I would think that you guys would understand business better.

So let’s talk business. If you’re selling something with your name on it, you better have the rights to that name. There is no combination of Sci and Fi and Science and Fiction that they were able to trademark. No legal name with ANY of those things in it. There’s not enough money to make that problem go away. Enter Plan B. A goofy name that sounds the same, and can be protected.

And I will say as a company whose trademark has been a big part of how people feel about it, it’s worth getting this right.

You may not like the new branding, but the money has spoken: Q3 09 was the channel’s best quarter ever. (Do you people not read?)

I’m also not sure why you guys are complaining about the lack of science fiction programming on the channel. We can have that conversation another time, but Warehouse 13 and Stargate Universe have been setting records. The latter is outdrawing sci-fi god Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse on Fox – that’s right, science fiction on SyFy is beating science fiction on Fox in the same timeslot. But the premiere of SGU brought the highest ratings since BSG’s premiere in 2005.

(Note that the show BEGAN in 2004. It only started airing on Sci-Fi in 2005.)

Whether you guys like it is beside the point. Eureka, Warehouse 13, Sanctuary, Stargate, original sci-fi movies every Saturday night – you’re watching these, right? There’s plenty of sci-fi on Syfy.

Three quick issues related to biting this particular hand.
1) Top rated show for H2 09? Warehouse 13. For the first half? Ghost Hunters. You might not like it, but the audience does. Place the blame where you may. Syfy can’t hear you because the money is talking to them.

2) Sci-fi/Syfy/Psi Fye/etc has never been the only, or even entirely the best source for science fiction tv. I’ll point to Fringe and The Seeker for now, but there are other examples.

Here’s a favorite: MST3K originated on Comedy Central, and aired there for 7 of the show’s 10 years. There’s a certain extent to which you guys are longing for a very, very selectively-viewed past…if indeed it ever existed.

2a) The reason it went away wasn’t ratings. It was that the cost of licensing was too high, and that the show was ultimately a victim of its own success. There weren’t THAT many bad movies to mock, and as they started to spread the net wider, the studios wouldn’t play along. And why should they? The show had a shelf life, which it passed.

3) A little rant about viagra. I don’t know much about the drug, but I know demographics. The world has shifted under your feet, and you have missed why Syfy may be the highest-impact target buy that Pfizer makes.

First, Viagra’s fastest growing demo is in their 40s, and the number has been trending down for years. (Down? Ha ha. Okay, enough giggling. This is real money.) Viagra gained traction among the kids in the rave days, when it was commonly mixed with ecstacy. Some of this was to counteract one of the side effects of e, but some of it is that sex-on-demand on e is so intense that people can die from it. The kids think this is a good thing. And some of THAT is related to all dilation, all the time.

This is around the time that Viagra started sponsoring Major League Baseball and Cialis tied to the NFL. Any thoughts on the dates? Corresponded with the widespread use of steroids, whose side effects include a condition treated with those drugs.

The NFL ended the relationship with Cialis when they found that — all giggling about performance enhancing aside – it made for such a demonstrably positive effect on on-field performance that the NFL has banned it. Dilation is GOOD, people. So good that it created unfair advantages.

A more widespread cause of erectile dysfunction is stress, which is insanely on the rise of course, and it comes from every direction. Not making any political observations, but McCain supporters’ testorone plummeted after the election, and the result was most pronounced among young men.

How does Syfy fit in? It’s the #10 station among 18-54 year olds. Note that the key demo is trending upward – it was 49 just a few years ago. Combine that with the fact that folks at the upper range have more money to spend on pharm, and go to the doctor more often, and that ED drugs are targeted at ALL men, not just older ones, and you have in Syfy the best match outside of the sports networks. Better than the news channels. Why would they NOT be advertising there?

Guys, money talks. Pfizer has billions to spend, but will only spend them where they find ROI.

Pay attention: Syfy, Pie Guy, Sigh Fye, whatever = Viagra/Cialis/Levitra’s target demo.

++++
A separate rant on people missing the point on MTV.

Without the ability to aggregate viewers, they were losing them, and with them, advertisers. The first attempts to create SHOWS were music-oriented – 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps were the first biggest ones. They were ultimately victims of their own success, as alternative music and hip-hop became ubiquitous.

First truly transformative ratings: The Real World, which had a bigger social impact than Survivor did when it was the top-rated show in the land. It was a big deal for MTV because it provided them their first laser-focused, post hip-hop audience, and it was huge. Massive, massive money.

Their biggest ratings in the past 5 years? The MTV Movie Awards, up a staggering 74% from last year. That’s MOVIE awards, and NOT music awards.

++++
One of my favorite non-music shows on MTV: The Jon Stewart Show. (He also did the very funny You Wrote It, You Watch It.) The ratings were so high that Paramount (related to MTV through parent Viacom) created a syndicated version, and tweaked the format more toward a straight talk show that ran in the late-night strip opposite The Tonight Show, Nightline, etc.

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re: the popularity of the Movie Awards on MTV, movies have everything to do with music marketing to youngsters, and have since Rock Around the Clock, if not earlier. Recent licensing to movies, TV and commercials has had a (again) transformative effect on the business – greater control of presentation, bigger bang for buck, EVERY placement is a prestige placement, multiple ways to use artists (remember when Aimee Mann played The Bronze on Buffy? She brushed past Spike and said “I hate playing vampire towns”), andlegal ways to collect direct pay-for-play — except that they’re not PAYING, they’re GETTING paid. It’s win-win.

That said, radio continues to play its role, especially in the teen market where radio has always had its biggest effect. Big, big BIG in urban areas in particular.

Guys? You’re not teens anymore. Radio isn’t for you.

+++++

Alan Freed first found Little Richard and Chuck Berry through live performances. He didn’t do much with The Beatles until after Ed Sullivan did. (That said, The Beatles heard Freed playing Richard and Chuck on Radio Luxembourg.)

At the end of the day, movies and TV have had a bigger, longer-lasting effect on breaking music than radio – always. Right, Elvis?

++++

Anyway, The Weather Channel has found itself in the same position as MTV, but worse. They originally tried to keep personalities off the air, because “weather” was the star. They were idiots. Weatherpeople have always been successful because of their personalities, even when they’re not being clowns. While TWC eventually let presenters have identities (stay tuned for THIS PERSON), they still had a problem: nobody had any reason to watch for more than a minute or two except when they were being affected.

Same process as MTV: start with “shows” (local on the 8s), then go a little broader (Killer Twisters or whatever), then a little broader still. People WILL watch movies even when there’s no threatening weather. I don’t think that weather will ever go away from TWC, and I think that they’ll drop movies like a stone when there’s a big storm, but they need to draw a crowd.

This is the OPPOSITE of biting the hand. They’ve got their hand out.

++++
Race to the bottom? Gray, bland programming? We’re in television’s greatest golden age. The crest of the crest might have been with The Sopranos, but seriously, the dreck we will always have with us. But the only reason I can imagine why somebody can be missing just how good so much TV is these days is that they’re pining for a past that doesn’t exist the way they remember it.

Kind of like the one where MST3K is a Sci-Fi show. 🙂

I could go on like this for a long, long time, but I feel much better now.

[Tim Wilson]

Asking to talk about editing without mentioning other movies is like trying to talk about music without mentioning any music.

It’s like trying to talk about language without being able to talk about any specific words.

Asking “where and when to cut” is like asking “what and how to cook.” Until you can answer the question, what do you want at the end, you can’t know if you’re getting rib roast or rhubarb pie.

Now, having said that, “Good Eats” is a wonderful show about the science of cooking. Once you have that under your belt, a lot of the recipes take care of themselves.

For something generally analogous, try taking a look at “Cinematic Storytelling: The 100 Most Powerful Film Conventions Every Filmmaker Must Know,” by Jennifer van Sijll. I think this will be perfect for you. She covers each example of absolutely critical, foundational-level visual language in two pages. That’s it. Two pages. I think that the most fidgety reader can stand two pages. Lots of pictures too.

I’m kind of kidding with you…except for the part about NEEDING to know history. A hyper-spazz skaterb0i video and an uber-elegant drama both have a visual language, with more elements in common than you might think. Gotta learn to talk before you can say anything.

Start with Jennifer’s book.

Tim

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine!

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

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!

[Tim Wilson]

Generally speaking, the iMac doesn’t add any issues. The limitations will be the same as with any other system. There are small ones, like processing speed for formats like HDV and H.264 – but the big question will always be drive speed. If your drives themselves can spin fast enough, your iMac should be fine.

[Tim Wilson]

My policy was always, no pro bono work ever, for any reason.

We had two stock answers at the ready. The first was that our client base was virtually all non-profit organizations. If we gave away our work for good causes, we’d have no work.

That’s probably not true for you, so I offer my other stock answer to you: inviting them to observe that virtually nobody else that they dealt with – not electric companies, phone companies, grocery stores, banks, post office, gas stations, veterinarians, barbers, restaurants – was giving them freebies because they were a good cause. Most weren’t even discounting.

This was an especially easy reply if the person making the pitch to us was a volunteer – hey Mr. Realtor/Banker/Hotelier, you ain’t donating your WORK products, and I won’t either.

There were times that we gave free professional advice, sometimes about very complicated problems that took a lot of time to deal with. We helped people write and place press releases. We helped them get speaking gigs with other community groups (chambers of commerce, rotary, etc.), where they often showed our videos as part of the presentation.

But video work itself? Never ever ever for free. Not shooting, editing, duplication, nothing. We got paid for work. Period.

We gave away lots of other things to causes we believed in. We gave them money, bought them equipment, brought in food for the staff, served on boards, made phone calls, stuffed envelopes, recruited others, hosted fundraisers, donated stuff to raffle…but even the stuff we donated for raffle was never our WORK.

We found that having them pay for our work gave them pride of ownership in the finished project, and validated their belief that their efforts were worth being funded.

It also helped them to remember to actually USE our work. 🙂

And, working in a small town, it ensured that our commercial clients never saw us giving away our work. It helped them respect us as peers, because they weren’t giving their work away, either.

Time, money, sweat, blood, love — you can have all that and more for free.

Pay for my work.