[Tim Wilson]

In classic Jeremy fashion, he’s staying strictly on topic rather than blowing his own horn. He wrote a GREAT article for Creative Cow Magazine on the process that he and his company went through before they bought the HPX-300, including why they spent extra money to buy the AVC-Intra board.

Note that this is not a review. He didn’t borrow the camera for one shoot and try to look like an expert. The article focuses on, again, why they spend their own big bucks, and their experiences after six months of shooting around the world. Great stuff, and I think it will shed a lot of light on this discussion.

Now, since in classic Tim Wilson fashion I WILL blow my own horn, and say that the New Visions issue of the Cow Magazine also includes an interview with Panavision’s John Galt (“The Truth about 2K, 4K, and the Future of Pixels,”), a practical look at building digital cinema, and much more. We’ll be expanding the article for the web soon, but in the meantime, check out the print version by downloading your free PDF copy.

And thanks again Jeremy for a great article.

Best,
Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine

[Tim Wilson]

Glad it helped, Tom. I absolutely understand your original question, though. There are so many people, so many posts, and FREE! GET YOURS BY CALLING NOW! 21 BANNERS ON EVERY PAGE! 🙂 It’s easy to miss the exact connections when the whole layout is not clearly spelled out.

Which I don’t often get the chance to do. I enjoyed it. It reminds me just how much I love it here.

I’m really glad you’ve found some help here too.

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Couple of notes:

1) Follow the “Sponsors” link in the upper right.

2) With something like 500,000 members of the Cow universe (site, newsletter, magazine, etc.), and over 1.2 million monthly visitors, I assure you that we have zero control over posters. We think it might be nice sometimes, but seriously, it ain’t happening.

3) One of the most distinctive elements of the Cow is that people buy their gear. For example, we recently ran a magazine with frequent poster Jeremy Garchow, extolling the virtues of Panasonic’s AVC-Intra codec and the HPX200 camera. Yes, Panasonic is a major advertiser…but so is Sony…and Jeremy paid nearly $70,000 to buy that camera and outfit it…and had already spent over $20,000 to buy the lens, which he’d used on an earlier camera. That gives him the right to say that he likes it. 🙂

And in the scheme of things, it’s reasonable to expect that people are going to say nice things about P-sonic, Sony, AJA, BMD, etc. These are companies with huge installed bases, and long-established reputations. They make good stuff.

4) Our Terms of Service state very plainly that we won’t protect advertisers from criticism. Personal attack, yes. But if they step out of line, we protect our *members* in their legitimate criticism.

Most of our sponsors get it. They understand that if they come through, the same critics will then praise them…hopefully. But believe us, we do hear from sponsors looking for protection now and again. 🙂

The bottom line is that, with so many varying perspectives, any unwarranted cheerleading in the forums will quickly get shot down. It’s why we have so few freestanding reviews — the entire herd provides real-time reports on every product, every firmware update, every workflow. Stick around for a while, and you’ll see just about everyone take their turn in the dunk tank…and in the spotlight. One of the nice things about the relative maturity of the products in our market is that most major vendors get most things right, most of the time….whether they advertise with us or not.

And if they don’t, they receive no quarter, whether they advertise with us or not.

Again, we’re proud that our sponsors get this, and are willing to face the herd with nothing more than their products and support services to protect them. They clearly identify themselves, frequently with personal email addresses and direct phone lines.

This is a full-contact peer-to-peer community. Our survival, prosperity, and good reputation depends on it.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow

[Tim Wilson]

Welcome to the Cow, Praveen!

Please tell us what you are working on. Thank you for coming!

Best,

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow

[Tim Wilson]

We’ve got plenty of people who know what ADR is. As I requested, they’ve written me directly. So far, a multiple Emmy winner, an Oscar winner (only won one Oscar so far, alas), and some indie filmmakers. The Cow is replete with production whizzes, not just software posties.

Heck, I’m even looking forward to hearing from students taking their first forays into audio production.

Again, anyone who’s got a yarn to spin, drop a line directly.

As for the rest of the class, well, they’ll be learning about ADR soon enough. 🙂

Thanks,
Tim

Creative Cowpoke

[Tim Wilson]

I highly recommend YouSendIt.com. Not FTP per se, but a secure email service that supports up to 500 MB free. Because it’s a distributed pipeline, I find that it’s much, much faster than FTP.

It’s also much easier. You don’t need to explain to the client how to use FTP, or tell them how to get to the file, or tell them passwords AGAIN, or worry about them poking into files they don’t belong in – they’ll get an email with a secure link, and once they have an account, they just click on the link.

The account just wants a name and email. You can save the names that you use most often in an address book. No spam, ever.

The free version of the service supports up to 100 downloads of a single file, and automatically deletes the file after 7 days. You can pay a few dinars extra for more features — branding, unlimited storage, etc. — but the free version RAWKS.

Even comes with plug-ins for Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Aperture, Office, etc., so you can send files for review directly out of the applications.

Seriously, this thing is off the hook. I guarantee you’ll never use FTP again.

[Tim Wilson]

So Larry, you interested in writing an article about the camera too? 😉

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow

[Tim Wilson]

[Ron Lindeboom] “Ah, you are ever the generous soul”

Well, at least conservative. As hard as it is for some people to believe I could ever be conservative, they might have found it impossible to believe my last post if I used the real numbers. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “some little cool company who makes a plug in that you can really use, that can’t afford all the big marketing”

So here’s the thing. Let’s say a small company spends $10,000 to get to a tradeshow. Even at the biggest ones, they’ll meet maybe 10,000 people. They’ll get 500 leads out of that, maybe 1000. Which by tradeshow standards, will be a steal: $10/lead is unheard of.

Or, they could take that $10,000 and buy a nicely-sized campaign at the Cow website, where they’ll reach 70,000+ per day, and over 1.1 million unique visitors per month.

Or a nice campaign. and a dedicated newsletter blast to 250,000 subscribers.

Or if they chose to advertise in the “dead” medium of print, they could buy 4 full-page ads in the Cow magazine.

Or buy the 2-page center spread of the magazine, and a dedicated newsletter blast to $250,000. Or a newsletter blast, and a year of half-page ads, and something in the site.

And sleep in their own beds every night.

Those prices are super-duper approximate, and in some cases wrong, but you get the idea. Needless to say, we can also come up with something that works for much less money. An ad in the Cow magazine starts at $500. The fact is that we come up with special programs for small vendors all the time, and we’re proud of it.

It’s not that trade shows have NO value. Of course they do. There are a number of Cow vendors who find them critical, and make back far more than they invest. We’re proud to support them in their efforts to maximize their success at tradeshows. A blanket statement like “tradeshows are dying” is like saying that print magazines are dying.

(Oops, those ARE dying unless they’re the Cow magazine. Studio Monthly has just mailed their last print edition, and we hear that another major player will ship only 3 more.)

So take a look at the articles again. Our point wasn’t that tradeshows are stupid. Just that neither Avid nor Apple (and this year, add RED) are stupid, or failing, or ignoring their customers or whatever, because they choose to spend their resources elsewhere.

And that the Cow is also a good place to find out what’s going on, including what’s happening at tradeshows, and including small vendors who get press in the Cow every day. Some of them, thanks to you!

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

You’ll find more than 50 posts an hour here. So you won’t have to be gone a real long time at all. 🙂

We’re taking a look at this site-wide, but as I said, a tool like this might provide more information than is useful. Kathlyn talked about an option that might work better for you in the thread called “Most Recent,” just before this. Take a look, see how it works for you.