[Tim Wilson]

Aharon made a wonderful DVD on the integration of particleIllusion and After Effects, called particleIllusionFusion, as part of the Creative Cow Master Series. As you’d expect, it’s fast, thorough, and very funny along the way.

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

He mentions that it’s by no means complete, but be sure to check out Jeremy’s experience with the bugs in FCP 6. Definitely something to have in mind as you consider upgrading….

[Tim Wilson]

One might choose to punt Prince or Madonna for a variety of reasons, but those are the real first names of Mr. P. Rogers Nelson, and Ms. M.L.V. Ciccone. (Her baptism name is Veronica.)

Cher, as everyone knows, was born Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPierre.

My costumes have indeed included Madonna..1984..although most people thought I was Boy George…born George Alan O’Dowd -same middle name as mine!!

But my favorite costume as a woman was the year before:

[Tim Wilson]

But this is now like a huge world city. It is so universal throughout the video community worldwide that the person next to you in the other edit/graphic work station is quite possibly logging on to the same discussion.

Which is exactly why the heavy hitters I mentioned above are happy to identify themselves in the Cow. Everybody needs help. Nobody’s above that.

For the most part thats fine. Just not all the time. Particularly as once something is on the net, it never leaves.

Again, this is where I’m not getting it. If you ask for help and say thank you when you receive it, what’s the problem?

To me this continues to assume that somebody is looking for you and folks who don’t want to post are afraid of either a) being perceived as somebody who’s still learning in a rapidly evolving field; or b) will make fun of you, refuse to do business with you or something along those lines.

Any possibilities I’m missing, besides “well I just don’t want to?” I’m not making fun of that position, btw. I’m just trying to summarize.

<1>I feel this could be the case particularly with people just starting out and learning the ropes and having your name up there could be intimidating and therefore would be reluctant to contribute.

This to me is the slam dunk, “Nellie bar the door” point — in favor of our position.

We’re getting scores, sometimes well into the hundreds, of new accounts every single business day.

And not one single peep from any of them. None. Our rates of registration are rising at exactly the same curve since we’ve instituted this, as have the number of overall posts.

Also, most new members post within minutes of joining, suggesting to me that the reason they join is to make that particular post.

You’re the second person to raise this concern to us, so we assume that you represent more. One hundred people each? One thousand? If you represent 10,000 people each, it’s still a minute fraction of our audience.

We can live minute fractions…especially because we don’t believe that your position stands in for 10,000 people.

Oh, and that other person to raise the objection – a member of the Cow even longer than you’ve been.

In other words, this simply isn’t an issue for newbies of any age. It’s not an issue for Emmy winners, high-ranking crew for Oscar-winning features, lifetime achievement award winners for cinematography, and tens of thousands of others.

That’s not to say that there aren’t valid reasons. Have I heard one and missed it?

Still talking, 🙂

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

I can certainly see where your coming from, but it seems a little presumptuous to assume that all of us agree to that…

When the Cow started, the ONLY accounts were real names — thousands and thousands of them in a shockingly short span. There was never any thought to articulating a rule requiring real names. They WERE the rule. The only exception we can think of was a guy who included his real name, real place of employment and the town where he lives in every post.

If there had been any notion of how quickly the Cow grew, the real name policy absolutely would have been in place much earlier.

We are hardly the first to take this position by the way. As much as we justly pride our industry leadership, this is an area where we’re late.

If there are a handful of people — you are the second we’ve heard from with this policy in place for over a week now — choose not to associate their names with what they’re willing to otherwise say, that’s certainly their prerogative.

..it is simply not wanting to identify ourselves for our own reasons what ever they may be. And that should be respected.

I’m not sure why you think that. We think that standing by what you say is the most distinctive characteristic of accountability.

Yes, in the world of political discourse, I personally feel that anonymous speech is one of the rights we have to defend most vigorously. But that’s in the context of fighting forces that have the power to crush us.

Here, we’re a community dedicated to solving practical problems in a tightly defined space. We vigorously defend people’s right to ask silly questions. This community was started because WE had basic questions whose answers simply weren’t available anyplace else.

Finally, we take the issue of consent very seriously. But I hope you can understand that with Oscar and Emmy winners, and others at the highest level of accomplishment in our industry willing to post with real names, it’s hard for us to support objections to having your name associated with what you say in public based on pride or bashfulness. We’ve also firmly demonstrated that we defend the newest of newbies.

So if we’ve demonstrated that there’s no basis for fear, and shown that the biggest of wigs agree that there’s no basis for shame, what’s left?

Not that I feel that you have to justify your reasons to me or anyone else. I’m just saying that we feel that we’ve established such a level of trust that it’s reasonable to ask for the same in return.

What am I missing?

Don’t worry about continuing this conversation as Seamus, a name that would make tears of pride well up in my Irish father’s eyes (and a name I’m fond of myself). You started a good-faith conversation, and I’m happy to continue it, honestly. I wouldn’t consider ending it before you’re ready, and you’re the one who’ll enable your real name by editing your profile.

[Tim Wilson]

Your new user name will have the old screen name in parentheses, ensuring continuity and searchability of old posts.

Please don’t worry about asking questions. Why else would other industry folks be here if THEY didn’t have questions? They’re sure not coming here to humiliate anyone ELSE asking questions.

Besides, here are some people who I can think of who come to Cow to get help:

–Many, many Emmy winners

–a winner of a best documentary award at Sundance (picked up for major studio distribution). Sean Fine even provided a blurb for us saying how crucial the Cow is for his work, even asking questions from Uganda while on location

–Two DPs for major films and TV series including Friday Night Lights, X-Files, the recent Tin Man mini-series for Sci-Fi, The Green Mile…Those would be Todd McMullen and Tom Burstyn, both of whom have written whole articles that included mention of the help they’ve gotten from the Cow

–The winner of a lifetime achievement award from the cinematographer’s guild

–The creator of the Max Headroom ad campaign for Coca Cola, also created the original Saturn launch campaign among others, Arthur Vibert

–a director of the original Star Trek among scores of others (Alan J.Levy, another guy who’s provided a blurb)

–one compositor who’s worked on Stranger Than Fiction and the new Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium with Dustin Hoffman (Pete O’Connel);

–another compositor for Ray, Traffic and others (Steve Wright, yet ANOTHER public blurber describing how useful the Cow has been for him)

–The winner of a technology Oscar (Pete Litwinowicz)
–and the assistant director for half a dozen Oscar-winning features in a 43 film career so far (David McGiffert)

Now that I’ve written those, I’m thinking of many others…if you want, I can reel off some more…but you get the idea. ALL of those guys have identified themselves publicly, and have been quite specific about the help they’ve received.

Not to be a weenie, but I’m asking anyway: are your credits bigger than theirs?

None of THOSE guys are embarrassed to be seen in the Cow, so you shouldn’t be either.

And again, nobody reads all of our up to **1000** daily posts looking for people to hassle. People come here for help.

They also come for the community that’s been built here, and is fostered by real names. We’d actually seen a dramatically upward trend in real names, and so have followed their lead.

I hope that addresses your concerns. If not, please write me following the link below.

Regards,
Tim Wilson
Creative Cow

Tim Wilson, Creative Cow
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[Tim Wilson]

Back in the day, we all knew each other, and we all used real names. There have always been some along the way, but as we approach 1.5 million posts, we felt strongly about requiring real names for 2 related reasons: the credibility of the Cow, and the accountability of its posters.

We’re far from the first to require this, of course. As Ron has said to me several times, he and Kathlyn might have implemented this earlier if they’d known that the Cow was going to grow this big so fast. 🙂

Two unexpected pleasures have also come out of this. One was that we’ve confirmed our belief that women make up a large percentage of our membership, and growing.

The other is that it’s much easier to see the international makeup of the cow. Not geography as much as culture, since of course names have nothing to do with where people live more often than not.

Both of these bring out the third reason why we’re requiring real names: that exact visibility. We want to foster connections between real humans who know each others’ names.

It feels good to US to be doing this, and we’re gratified to hear from so many people like you that you feel the same.

Best,
Tim

Tim Wilson, Creative Cow
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[Tim Wilson]

I also had some of those “not at liberty to change the color scenarios,” and they were a nightmare.

What worked best for me was combining two techniques here — a black border, and red that looked downright pink on the computer screen, but looked close enough to red on the broadcast monitor that I never had a client think twice.

So use a broadcast monitor so you won’t go astray. Even better, output to your delivery format and check THAT on a broadcast monitor. Tweak to taste.

Don’t forget to use black at no more than 16. I never trusted clipping filters.

Note about red-screen compositing — it’s frequently used for claymation and other non-human elements. It also works great for underwater shots where blue and green are the order of the day. I’ve also found that there are some ranges of dark skin, especially very dark skin, that reach almost into the blue spectrum, where red works better.

Markertek sells a kit of Rosco keying gear that includes red paint and tape along with green and blue. (In addition to tape, Markertek even sells mic and other cables in blue and green.)

Rose Brand has a remarkable array of keying fabric, including orange and magenta — don’t forget the object of the game is to use the opposite color of the foreground.

As you can tell, I’m a big fan or red keys for special purposes.

And I believe that red text on black backgrounds is a pain, but you can do it.

Tim Wilson, Creative Cow
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[Tim Wilson]

Herb: Is anyone running Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion and successfully running AE and Photoshop on a FCP Mac. If so, what are your impressions?

Honest? This is the most fun I’ve had on a Mac….and I’m one of those grimy old b*st*rds who got mine in 1984. (Okay, it was my girlfriend…and we got married in 1985, so there you go.)

zrb …utilize the entire power of the computer whereas emulators will not.

Not as much of a factor as you might think. There’s about a 5% processing penalty in emulation, at least with Fusion — about 3 minutes on a 60 minute render, about 30 seconds on a 10 minute render. About one second on a 20 second render.

I can spare that much time.

shiloh Parallels uses a lot of memory, gives you no access to firewire and doesn’t seem to make use of multi processors properly.

True re: fw. No emulators on any platform have access to firewire…but all my FW drives have USB 2 interfaces. Since I’m not capturing to them, I’ve found the *real world* performance difference to be negligible. Your mileage will vary.

For the rest, I suggest the free trial version of Fusion. It has a very small memory footprint, and is just plain faster for the basic operations — open, close, etc. You’ll feel right away how muscular it is. These guys have been doing emulation on multiple platforms (dozens) for a long time. This is all they do, and they’re really good at it.

While it doesn’t take advantage of every processor, Fusion takes the first 2, rather than the 1 that Parallels does.

If you go to the VMware site, there are instructions for how to use your Parallels installation with Fusion, which is awesome –super-easy conversion means no need to reformat and reinstall.

Some other thoughts…

–Even as a Mac guy who started using Windows under extreme duress, running Vista under Boot Camp is a joy. I take perverse pleasure out of running Windows and nothing but Windows on my MacBook Pro. The Vista logo sits maybe 3 inches from the MBP engraving at the bottom of the screen. Sweet!

Performance is outrageous, too — muuuch faster than my desktop running XP with twice as much RAM.

–Best reason NOT to go with Mac versions of software for your FCP machine: no reason to under Fusion. I have a ton of PC software. No need at all to buy the Mac versions when I can drag a PC psd file into an FCP bin.

(That’s another thing I like about Fusion, btw — Windows apps float in their own windows, each able to come forward or not as selected….instead of all the Windows windows coming to the foreground when one is selected. Fusion makes dragging between the platforms easier.)

Having said all that, of COURSE you’re going to want to go with one OS or the other when you’re doing your heaviest lifting. But seriously, try it. Unless you’re capturing ProRes, there’s very little CPU involved…although it might be fun to try capturing with Windows up. Maybe not with a client watching, but it’s now officially on my list of things to try some time.

My point here is that, how likely is it that you’re going to be doing 2 processor-intensive tasks in both OSes at the same time? Not very.

So overall, for the work that most people do most of the time, having both is a gas. Highly recommended.

Did I mention that your mileage will vary? It will.

But my new favorite Mac accessory is Windows. 🙂

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

The 2 gig file limit is a problem with Windows… drives formated for PC’s cannot deal with file sizes larger than that. so my guess is that until this problem is addressed…

It was addressed in 1993, with the introduction of the NTFS formatting. (The N and T refer to the File System introduced in Windows NT.)

Although FAT32 disks are indeed limited to 2GB file sizes, the maximum file size on an NTFS formatted drive is 16TB minus 64KB.

That was true of the Mac OS as well until OS 10.4, when the maximum file size was raised to just under 8EB (exabytes), or around 8 million terabytes.

So, while it ain’t no 8 million TB, it isn’t 2 either.

BTW, you can read an NTFS volume on Mac easily enough, and now there are a couple of ways to write to one as well. One is MacFuse, a free tool developed by a Google engineer in his free time. The other is Paragon NTFS, which’ll set you back 30 simoleons, which is equivalent to $30 minus 5 cents.

PS. If the target drive is formatted FAT32, you’re hosed…but that’s not because of any inherent limits in Windows itself. You’d be limited to that same 2GB if you were writing from the Mac OS.

Moral of the story: unless it’s for a thumb drive or something similarly tiny, avoid FAT32 on either platform.

Tim Wilson, Creative Cow
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