Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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On behalf of all of us at The Cow Mothership, we’re delighted to have you with us, Neil.
For the rest of the group, I encourage you to take a look at Neil’s profile if you haven’t. Please note that he’s being characteristically humble – his profile doesn’t mention that he’s one of the most respected film and video professionals in Bollywood and beyond. The entire region’s production community is growing of course, and is perhaps the fastest-growing community here within the Cow. This is a great time to be working together.
And a note for Rafael, Andy and Neil – don’t forget our boy Jiggy Gaton in Nepal.
Again, Neil, thanks for being part of the Cow!
Best,
Tim Wilson
Creative COW -
[Rob Jackson] “Sometimes people just don’t know what to include, so they include nothing.”
I think that this might still be the right thing to do.
We had an epidemic last year of people dumping EVERYTHING about their computers – motherboard, MAC address (no kidding), etc. – and then pasting an ENTIRE error message into their post. In some cases, these went on for pages. We wound up deleting a ton of those because it made the pages too hard to read.
Not only that, the answer was usually something along the lines of, “Set your render to progressive frames.” I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one of those laundry lists of specs lead to the solution. Those extra details can actually get in the way of the answer.
If there’s a missing detail or two in the original post, a follow-up question or two will get that information, and the solution follows after that. It works well for finding the answer, and I find that it engages people. Bring ’em back into the conversation, and they can find themselves moving from reading the Cow to posting in the Cow.
So it may seem on the surface that troubleshooting is faster when frontloading the details, but my experience is it doesn’t work that way in practice. There are more benefits to letting things evolve on their own than trying to shape them too much at the start.
tw
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[Ron Lindeboom] “This presupposes that anyone will care or even read what we will write.”
If people read FAQs, or manuals, or anything else that might reduce the number of questions they asked…well, where the fun be in THAT?
Tim Wilson
Associate Director, CreativeCow.net
Associate Publisher, Creative Cow Magazine! -
[Ron Lindeboom] “We have a pipe that is as big as General Motors”
And unlike them, are in outstanding financial shape. We aren’t going anywhere. 🙂
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Oh, for the love of peat! (And Bessie does love her peat!)
Here’s the one I recommend:
- Free hosting
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Immediate HD streaming (actually, up to 900 pixels wide for now, with 1080 coming soon)
- No recompression if you follow super-basic formatting (H.264, etc.)
- Embed code
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- Extremely well-established presence (not going out of business)
- Extremely reliable network
- Secure
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Did I mention free, unlimited-bandwidth, HD with no recompression, embeddable, no reuse or unexplained disappearance, fully secure, on a reliable network owned by a reliable business that offers free support?
Allow me to introduce reels.creativecow.net. It provides
- Free hosting
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Immediate HD streaming
- No recompression
- Embed code
- No reuse
- No disappearing
- 14 years in business
- Less downtime than Google email!
- Highly responsive to customer input
- Secure
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Did I mention free, unlimited bandwidth, non-recompressed HD, immediate streaming, guaranteed no reuse or unexplained disappearance, a secure, reliable network from an established company with free support?
That’s right folks, reels.creativecow.net.
Reels.creativecow.net is your home for gorgeous HD streaming, fully embeddable, from one of the industry’s most established companies and most reliable networks. Best of all, you maintain complete control of your clips! No recompression in most cases, and guaranteed no reuse at any time.
What’s that you say? You’d like to post more than your reel? No problem! Reels.creativecow.net has sections for short films, trailers, commercials, music videos and more.
You can even tie these directly to a profile that includes your full contact information, resume, and publicly-posted industry expertise.
All of this is provided with free support, and active solicitation for improvements to serve you even better!
How can you find reels.creativecow.net? JUST LOOK UP. IT’S THERE IN THE FREAKING ORANGE BAR AT THE TOP OF EVERY PAGE!!! RIGHT THERE IN THE MIDDLE!! WHERE IT SAYS REELS!!!
Don’t forget! That’s reels.creativecow.net. Keep your work beautiful. Keep it free. Keep it safe. Keep it YOURS.
Reels.creativecow.net.
Are we through here?
(Any of you copywriters feel free to punch this up. This is off the top of my head, which is fuzzier than usual this morning.)
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Pitched my client who was pliant, but the pitch didn’t fly — brilliant. There were a whole lot of wonderful things in there! I’d love to find an efficient way to get clients to understand even a few of these ideas…
…of course, I’m still wrapping my head around some of them myself! It just happens that I’m much smarter than most of my clients. (To any of my clients reading this: I’m not talking about YOU.)
Great stuff, man!
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[Ben Holmes] “I was not aware that Apple did not allow upgrades from edu products”
1) Don’t blame Apple — I’m not aware of anyone who offers upgrades of edu software. It doesn’t make sense from a business perspective. Selling one copy as a seed makes a bunch of sense, which is why so many vendors are so aggressive with edu pricing. But once you’ve decided you’re in it deeply enough to upgrade, the seed has taken root, so to speak.
I just checked, and the Final Cut Studio pricing is down a bit, now to $499. So, at that price, paying twice still puts you a couple of hundred bucks ahead of buying commercial and then upgrading…but once again, if you’re into it for $1000 at that point…and still can’t upgrade, and can’t use it commercially either during school or after…you’re now way WAY behind, because you spent $500 the first time, and STILL have to pay the $1150 (Amazon’s price right now) to get a pro copy.
2)I get the idea of being a student, and being hard up. I worked 2 full time jobs WHILE I was taking classes. My last year, I wasn’t even taking any classes — I was just working to pay down as much of my bill as possible before the student loan kicked in. I worked every angle I possibly could to get free food at receptions — you’d be surprised at how far you can go on a handful of cheese cubes and some raw cauliflower.
So what? If you’re in this for more than a hobby, start planning to pay retails for your software.
The good news is that the gap between the edu and commercial pricing is $550. Knock that out in a job or two…which you CAN do with a commercial license, and CAN’T with an edu license…at least not if you’re playing by the rules….which is good habit to get into. 🙂
[Ben Holmes] “I would be tempted to delay any purchases as long as possible”
3) Another very good habit to get into. 🙂 I recommend never upgrading ANY software — OS, QuickTime, browsers — until you absolutely, absolutely HAVE TO. Don’t do it unless it really truly solves a problem that you have RIGHT NOW. Because, as you read on these forums every time QuickTime or Safari or something gets a new rev, FCS breaks.
(Again, don’t blame Apple. That’s just the way the world works.)
I love software. I love new stuff. Twenty-plus years later, I vividly recall the pain of being ridiculously short of money. But if you have to spend anything, spend wisely. If you think you may be tempted to upgrade at ANY point, and if you think you may want to earn a few shekels at ANY point, do the smart thing and buy retail the first time.
On a credit card. 🙂
4) And having said ALL THAT, if the point is just to keep up in class, I stand by my first recommendation: never fall out of step with school, never get ahead.
Also, don’t worry if there’s a new version this year. Most schools have already committed their software buys, and aren’t in any hurry to upgrade major suites for exactly the reasons that NOBODY should be in any hurry to upgrade major suites.
FWIW, IMO, from the cheapest b**tard you may ever meet….which is why I heartily advocate buying right the first time. LOL
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Regardless of anything else, always, always always stick with the version your school has. Otherwise, you’re in for project management nightmares that you can read all about if you search posts in this forum. You have enough going on – no need to add this to the list of things to worry about it, when the problem is so easy to avoid.
That said…
You’re also right about not being able to upgrade an educational license, Chris. This used to work out just fine…and still does for software that costs less than half the price of the full version…but if there’s even a vague possibility that you’ll use FCP outside of school at some point down the line, you’ll be way ahead of the game to just buy a commercial license.
Note that, fwiw, you’re not supposed to be using an edu license for ANY commercial work, including paying work done while still in school. So yeah, the commercial license costs a bit more, but it’s a whole lot less than buying an edu license twice…and you’d have to buy a full license down the road anyway.
This will also offer a chance for you to learn a little about managing your credit card debt. 🙂
Tim
PS. I would never, ever suggest this INSTEAD of FCP, but I recommend that any student learning FCP also pick up an edu copy of Avid Media Composer for $295. (Not a typo.) All the features are fully enabled, and Avid will convert it to a full, commercial license when you finish school.
[Two notes: don’t buy that Avid = Anti-Mac hype. Media Composer was designed on the Mac, for the Mac, and works great on Mac. Also, the edu version doesn’t include all the third-party software that comes with the commercial version…which most people live without just fine. :-)]
Keep your love and attention on Final Cut Pro if that’s where your devotion lies…but for a few hundred bucks, you can cover a whoooole lot of bases.
But you should look closely at starting with the full version of FCP. That’s almost certainly going to be the way to go.
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[Greg Smalfelt] “Lacking the ability to post a visual…”
Greg, note that you can post both still images and movies by clicking the two buttons to the right of the floppy disk icon. (That icon is for uploading files.)
HTH,
Tim Wilson
Creative COW -
I have no idea what happened, Alan. We show you as a member in fine standing after over 1000 posts. You’re good to go, now.
Thanks for drawing this to our attention, and thanks for being part of the Cow for all these years!
Best,
Tim Wilson
Creative COW