[Tim Wilson]

Actually, I remembered another aspect of this. I know a venture capitalist who’s a very, very frequent user of the COW. His first degree is in communications, but his second is finance, and he’s a big, big wig (whig?) in the London community. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him post a job listing here, simply because he knows from experience that the COW is full of all kinds of unlikely experts.

Not that he has any job openings I know of. My guess is that jobs are pretty tight in that sector.

Insert wry observation/ironic punchline here.

tw

[Tim Wilson]

Now that we’re closing in on 1.5 million unique visitors each monthly, you’d also be amazed at what The COW now encompasses.

Even if it’s not what looks like an exact match, it’s (presumably) a match in audience; that is, no matter what kind of job it is, they’re looking for the kind of applicant who reads The COW.

Couple of examples. One of the web’s highest-rated general interest podcasts is about knitting. The folks who produce it are active in The COW.

To DRW’s example, the most ardent woodworker I’ve ever met is John Galt, Panavision’s Senior Vice President of Advanced Digital Imaging.

The job that I held the longest between my film degree and starting my own production company was as a childcare worker (mostly with 4 and 5 year olds). I saw that job posting EXACTLY where I was looking for work in film, and thought it would be fun. It was more than fun. I loved it. In some ways the most rewarding job I’ll ever have. I just found that I was tired of having a runny nose 10 months a year, and that $11,000 for a full-time job was hard to live on for long in Boston. (DRW can tell you about that too.)

(And David, managing kids is no harder than managing clients. Pretty much the same job, minus the runny nose. If you can take care of the screaming in one job, you can do it in the other.)

I also know of two guys who left this business (one after working at LucasArts) to get into organic farming. (I’m more surprised that I know two organic farmers AT ALL than that they both worked in this business.) Another followed his lifelong dream out of video to a company that makes wooden boats. These guys still (barely) dabble in this business, but it’s not what they DO. You just never know where a job will take you.

So, in general, if it’s a polite post for a legal job, we’ll take it.

That said, we’re always on the lookout for jobs that are mislabeled. It’s definitely a problem to have a low-paying, or no-paying, job listed in the high-paying forum.

But if the listing you saw was actually for a high-paying job in woodworking, I know a guy at Panavision who might be interested.

Happy hunting!

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

[Todd Terry] “A fair number of commercial directors have moved from selling soap straight into big-budget feature directing”

Also, Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, and, David Fincher. The website for Oscar-winner Errol Morris has hundreds of commercials he’s done — including an entire series of spots he made that never aired! He still does tons of commercials.

[Todd Terry] “You might have a killer reel, but if you don’t have something similar to their business, some of them just can’t see it.”

I’ll second the suggestion that others have made: if the kind of work you want to do isn’t already on your reel, PUT it there.

This starts to get into a whole other discussion, but I think it can be a serious mistake to make your reel and your resume look too much alike. That’s fine for your website, so that people can see a broad idea of your work…but you’re pitching to people who care less about what you’ve DONE than about what you can do for THEM. This is why it’s quite common for people to have multiple reels for the different kinds of work they do on their own websites.

I built 2 different “Parade of Homes” style TV shows from a pitch video I made using my own house. I cut a different version for each of the brokers I pitched it to, with very specific tweaks (graphics, etc.) that left NOTHING to the imagination.

You’re presumably casting your net wider than 4 realtors, but the point is the same. Whatever kind of work you want to do, put THAT in your reel.

Okay, I’m going to stop calling it a reel in this context, and flip it another way. It’s a commercial for yourself.

Every brand has more than one message, and it uses different spots to underscore that — Budweiser is hip and fun, synonymous with sports, and the prestigious symbol of core American values like farming, ingenuity, and immigrants building a heritage of business success in the new world. You can probably think of half a dozen Bud spots to put into each of those categories, probably come up with some more categories.

So if you want to generate a lot of new, cruiser-class business, tell the story that you can do this work by DOING it.

You’ve asked a bunch of great questions, but that’s my answer to this one.

[Tim Wilson]

[Ron Lindeboom] “I was there when it was made and I heard it with my own ears. And I worked with some mighty highly placed Avid VPs and the like for something that never happened.”

My ambiguity. Of course a guy said it. The thing that never happened was the company establishing this as an official policy. The fella who said that it was was very quickly no longer with the company. History has shown Mac’s continuous importance to Avid’s overall strategy, beginning with hiring you for damage control.

At that point, the customer base was still virtually entirely Mac…especially in the markets that mattered most to Avid, like Hollywood, which remains overwhelmingly Mac…ironically enough, because of Avid back in the day! If you wanted to hop the non-linear train early, the one on the fast track, it was Avid on Mac or nothing.

Again, yes, the words were definitely spoken. They just didn’t reflect a widespread, official policy.

Although the timing certainly didn’t help anything, the addition of Windows to the product line had nothing to do with any love lost between the two companies. Windows had come on strong as a fully equal, and in some ways superior, platform for media creation. There was a long line of potential customers with big bags of money. If video products were to remain their core business — which they are — they HAD to follow the money. Broadcast remains to this day overwhelmingly Windows, as does government — especially the military, by far the world’s biggest broadcast network — large sectors of education, etc. Adding Windows was the right plan.

But yes, the damage was done, and yet to be wholly recovered from ten years later. People at Avid are still talking about it, even more than folks outside the company. Although the majority of the NLE community has established itself long after those events, Avid still feels the aftershocks.

[Tim Wilson]

[Rick Wise] “why does FCP continue to grip the market so tightly….”

Some of that is because it’s on a Mac. Period. There’s a heritage of fanaticism that — sez me — has its roots in the feeling of abandonment by Apple in the BS years (Between Steve). The feeling was that Apple was so out-of-touch with its customers, if not outright hostile, that it wouldn’t take much to topple the whole thang…but it was going to happen “over my dead body.”

These folks came to fight not only Windows, but Apple itself. While Apple is now the good guys, that culture carries on, morphing from underdoggedness to triumphalism: no threat of defeat. Instead, the bone-deep KNOWLEDGE of Apple’s inevitable victory.

As for FCP itself, well, sometimes features DO matter. Regardless of what anybody, including Vegas, does TODAY, FCP was the first to unequivocally stick the landing of the meaningfully combining editing and compositing in one place.

Throw in the rapid arrival of shockingly inexpensive third-party hardware, with the first meaningful support of DV right after that, plus a company committed to marketing, and a user base who had been desperately looking for something to get excited about…and already used to blowing the horn…well, there you go.

If that’s enough answer for you, then time to move along and ignore the rest. But for folks who’ve enjoyed the history chat so far, here’s another vein to mine.

Mac was there first. Avid was Mac-only up through its Technical Achievement Oscar for Film Composer in 1998, as was its sister company Digidesign. (While Media Composer is more evenly split, Pro Tools is still overwhelmingly Mac.) Even good ol’ Premiere, along with Radius Videovision…even Photoshop and After Effects…and other key software: all Mac, only Mac.

Still, Avid was primarily an offline company at the time. Media 100 offered the first finish-quality NLE, and at a fraction of the cost. From there, it all takes off.

Avid created the Xpress product line because Media 100 was wreaking such havoc. This is not speculation. On top of bleeding off sales, and Media 100 had “Avid Sucks” in HUGE letters on its home page. This was full-contact competition, and the judges had scored a few rounds to The Evil Eye. (More fun history behind Media 100, it’s “Kill the Editor” campaign — no kidding — and its Evil Eye logo.)

Xpress was still a hardware-dependent product family because Media 100 was too.

Between DV and a multi-tier hardware ecosystem — ALL of it cheaper than Media 100 or Avid Xpress — FCP’s first “victim” was Media 100. Xpress was able to hold off FCP because the latter was…ahem, unfinished…but so was Xpress! Neither one played for keeps before version 3 (sez me), at which time the gloves were off. With the Windows fight way, way on the backburner, FCP now had a new target: big bad Avid.

Ironically, Apple is of course the far larger company, with a far larger installed Pro Apps base…which isn’t quite yet as widespread at the top of the production chain for historical reasons that deserve their own discussion. But the mix of “we have to win” and “we’ve already won” is working for those folks.

Sony Media Software has neither dynamic. More broadly featured? Absolutely. I can’t imagine anybody at Apple arguing. Even the partisan users who see Vegas agree. I’ve witnessed this again and again.

But the other pieces to create a perfect storm are missing. No “wronged” user base looking to be delivered to the promised land. No missing hardware options. The landscape has in fact changed: very little cluelessness among major vendors. Most of the products are mature. Even if vendors themselves don’t offer much support, the Cow does. There’s no more bleeding. Nothing is on fire.

The only fire was lit under the community that, bless ’em, is still fanning it.

The lighting round:
a) Pro Apps is huge business. Start with over 1 million customers (the real number) paying $1000 or more, and you get to the first billion dollars. The number grows quickly from there. Nobody walks away from a billion dollar business with a positive, and growing, cash flow.

b) Avid said it was leaving Mac? Never happened. The guy who said that thing was left for dead by Avid soon after. I have no idea if anybody knows where he is these days.

Strong Mac customer base to this day, especially in Hollywood. Most Avid employees I knew were radical Mac-ites. Many of them started working there BECAUSE Avid made the coolest Mac products. Most used Macs at home. Many a jolly roger hanging from ceilings and cubicle walls in the office.

Anybody remember the history of the jolly roger in Mac lore?

c) The Avid RUMOR was enough. I hear it repeated, adamantly, as truth to this very day. Avid didn’t help, though, for still other historical reasons.

d) My semi-educated guess is that Premiere may be being taught more than Avid or FCP. Cheap edu pricing, compelling bundling (PS, AE), easy to teach and learn without sacrificing much power, etc. etc. I have no idea if this is still true…but even if not now, I really think it was true quite recently.

e) Sorry for the long post! But hey kids, is history fun or WHAT? 🙂

Yr cranky uncle,
Timmy

[Tim Wilson]

[Tim Wilson]

[Stephen Smith] “An address book that updates itself. What a great idea.”

You originally asked about groups — this is my favorite use of LinkedIn as an individual.

A close second is keeping up with people in my friends’ networks who wouldn’t be in my own direct network.

(Although some people pack up their networks more like a phone book than an address book. A perfectly valid strategy, but not one that I have the attention span for.)

I routinely turn down requests to join other networking platforms, though. They all seem reasonable enough, and I joined a couple…but I quit them all but LinkedIn. That is really all that my pea brain can handle at one time.

PS. Swung by your updated website. Nice before and after examples from Color! Feel free to whip up some tutorials in that direction too….

[Tim Wilson]

Just a few off the top of my head:

–The combination of groups you belong to gives a more complete picture of you than your resume alone. I intentionally joined some groups waaaay outside my business interests, that tell you things like I’m from New York City, work in Boston, from home (the group name for that one is Pajama Nation – love it!), that I like watching “Lost” (in the running for best TV show ever), olive oil and da Vinci. I’m glad that people know all of that about me before we start to talk.

–Job recruiters use groups. You’d be amazed how many headhunters are in the Cow group. Several joined the group AFTER they’d placed people from job listings in the Cow. I’ve also been contacted directly by several headhunters, including one with a job I’d actually have interviewed for if I didn’t already have the best gig on the planet.

–Once you’re a member of a group, you can search it. For example, I can see that there are at least a dozen people in the Cow group from your home state of Utah – and one of them is named Steve Smith! Maybe he’s hiring. 🙂 In any case, searching groups is a great way to make new, useful connections using the criteria that matter to YOU. Going back to the first reason, I’ve heard from media people working in Boston, Avid alumni, and people producing video for non-profit agencies (which I used to do).

It’s allllll about making connections. I have no idea if I’ll actually use them for anything…but how many of your friends, acquaintances, or colleagues do you “use” in that sense? Hardly any, right? Maybe none. We make the connections to expand ourselves as we expand our circle.

There are other reasons, but that’s the gist.

Any thoughts in reply?

I’ve got one — join the Cow group already! 🙂 And get your pals to join. There are surely more than a dozen Cows from Utah.

[Tim Wilson]

[Travis Petty] “…The price affected the perceived value and sometimes that made all the difference. Same product (in our case, same service or product), but pricing it higher made it sell better.”

That’s a big part of it right there, Travis. Think of setting your price as one aspect of marketing. You’re telling potential customers exactly what they should think about you.

To begin, I came in under the most expensive guy in town, but still stay in the top half of the market. I’d rather have gone back to retail — which I enjoyed just fine, thanks — than try to build a business chasing the LOWEST prices the market can bear. Turns out that the market will be perfectly happy for you to starve.

Then after I felt my work was good enough to stand up to that top guy with a straight face, I started charging more. I had real work to show to back it up, great word of mouth, and a smooth pitch. Sounds easy, right?

There was admittedly a gap while this new plan took off…but once it did, I had more work than ever, from clients that I enjoyed working with more. I didn’t wind up making exactly twice as much money – the combination of available hours in a day, plus taking time to breathe a little easier, plus spending more on gear – but it was *some* more, and sure a nicer way to work.

I also found a HUGE benefit. When lowballers called, I did a little gentle weeding. If the caller sounded like a grinder, I sent ’em to the Yellow Pages. But if they sounded like an upright citizen, just with a small budget, I passed them to the people in town I felt could do ’em right on that budget. It didn’t take long before my lower-priced “competitors” started adapting parts of their business to work more closely with me. One of them in particular became my go-to guy for second camera, or underwater b-roll for my topside interviews, etc. — but there became three other guys who could count on me for recommendations, and among whom we could reasonably expect to share gear in emergencies.

I’m summarizing, but you get the idea. Yeah, you can probably build this kind of network anyway, and should probably try — but it’s a lot easier when you’re pushing jobs their way that THEY WANT, and you DON’T. That was the cool thing — I made more money, and THEY made more money because I could funnel work their way without feeling like I was potentially undermining myself.

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Acutally it was the HPX-2000, but I know what you meant. ;)”

Dude, I EDIT the articles. You don’t expect me to READ them do you? 🙂

So it turns out that the article is even more relevant than I thought wrt the “one size does NOT fit all” part of the thread…