[Tim Wilson]

[Jason Cunliffe] “same bug here
Until it’s fixed try this sequence

In your browser do this:

F12 = “open DevTools”
Ctrl+Shift+C = “Select an element on the page to inspect it”

now hover you mouse over the offending full black box div bug on the Cow page
and click once so it is selected in DevTools

type “h” = > to HIDE the offending div
et voila

NOTE: I am using Google Chrome browser on Win10 but similar applies for Firefox et alia]”

Hi Jason,

Great tip! Here’s a mousier approach, too:

— Right click on the banner, click Inspect.
— This opens the code in a fly-out window to the right, with the element highlighted. Next to the highlighted “div style”, you’ll see three dots. Click those.
— A drop-down menu appears: click “Hide Element”. Done!

Except it has to be done for each page. Yikes!

This is a roundabout way of acknowledging that yes, this is broken. As you may have noticed from the many new pages around the COW (starting with our home page, creativecow.net), we’re doing a lot of work to make updates, with a few breakages along the way.

Both this and the image upload are actually related to changes in Javascript on the AWS side. (Any of you dealing with Amazon hosting know that this sort of thing happens with appalling regularity.) We’re going pedal to the metal to get the new pages up, which will take care of these problems of course, but I’m going to see if I can’t at least get that banner turned off for now.

Stay tuned for more updates!

Regards,
Tim

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Roger that, Jim. 🙂

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Shane: Odd…I can’t “QUOTE” anything.

Yes, definitely broken. I hope you may have noticed that we’re doing some major renovation at the COW right now. Look for something considerably grander than just fixing the quote mechanism, coming soon!

Shane: Are TVs not durable anymore?

In general, no, they’re not. We were not even vaguely in the market for a new TV, but our old one was losing vertical lines. Instead of responsive sets of pixels, it’d just be a column of blue, next to a column of red, green, etc. A few more vertical bands of solid color would appear every few days. When about a quarter of the screen wasn’t viewable any longer, we thought, hmmm, next sale, let’s hop on something.

So our thinking was, if we’re gonna keep this for as long as we possibly can, it’s silly NOT to get 4K and HDR, especially for $400-ish. If we get similar mileage out of this one that we got out of the last one, that’ll take us to 2025-ish, when all this stuff will be old news, and 8K will have become all but ubiquitous.

We’re at an inflection point like we were for HD at the turn of the century. There were screens showing the right number of pixels, but they didn’t actually look BETTER than a super-clean composite video signal path on a true broadcast monitor (to say nothing of SDI). Just wider pictures. I can’t even tell you the number of people who came into my office, saw our pristine U-matic or laser disk images showing letterboxed content and said, “Wow! That HD is incredible!” Nope, just good old NTSC done right.

And getting HD was kind of hard, and it wasn’t all very good-looking, but then it got easy, and looked a lot better. It didn’t take long, but it was definitely a process.

The logjam was less the pipe per se than compression technology. We’re pretty well on top of that these days.

In the meantime, not all 4K sources are created equal, but Netflix’s 4K HDR programming is pretty jaw-dropping. Most of Amazon’s originals are in 4K and look terrific. In fact, here’s a list of originals on each of those channels, updated earlier this month.

https://www.trustedreviews.com/how-to/find-netflix-amazon-hdr-content-2942413 (Sorry for the busted link! We’re working on it!)

There’s a bunch more channels that I haven’t attached myself to, but both Apple and Disney+ are going for it in a big way, too.

(By the way, go to D23.com, sign up for a free Disney fan account and get Disney+ for $3.92/mo locked in for 3 years. Total no-brainer, AND unlike Netflix, they’re not charging extra for 4K….but only until Sept 2!)

And yeah, I feel like 8K is where we’re going to land for a good long while. The Olympics have something to do with that, but I feel like there’s also a three axis curve where price, picture quality, and screen size line up.

I actually DID go in for 3D TV (a vastly superior experience at home than in any theater I ever visited) and can tell you categorically this isn’t anything similar to that. It’s much more like HD. 4K and HDR aren’t a fad, nothing you buy will become obsolete any more than your NTSC or 1920/720 HD.

But really, the main thing is, like I said, we’re planning on keeping this for as long as we can, and if the next format is already available for a few hundred bucks all in, it’s silly not to. We’d have saved maybe $75 going HD-only. That would have made no sense at all.

[Tim Wilson]

[Doug Metz] “Given that they’re introducing this as a settings option next year, and 65s are almost down to that price already, I’d say… Christmas 2020.

Indeed, we had a 7 year old 60″ LG meet its demise recently, so I picked up a 65″ LG , 4K HDR for just over $400.

And yeah, it’s the not same HDR that you get on a $2000 TV, but you know what? It’s freaking outstanding.

So I’m going to peg it at CES (Jan 2020) at the latest. LG is also pushing software updates once a week or so these days, so if it’s just a setting, it might show up even sooner for web-connected TVs.

[Tim Wilson]

I hear that the kids are all about DMs (direct messages). Maybe his social media profiles are listed on his website and you can reach him that way? There are many, many people that I primarily speak to this way. Definitely feels a little odd, but in some cases I have no alternatives….

[Tim Wilson]

Okay, so it looks like we may have figured it out. LOL Be sure to let me know if you have any more problems!

Thanks,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Chris,

I had actually just sent you a note to your address of record, so I’m glad you’re asking here — but all of your posts this morning have come through as blank. Not a word in ’em. Because they were blank, I wondered if there was some unintentional clicking on the post button, which happens to us all sometimes.

We’re seeing plenty of other posts come through normally this morning, so I’m relatively sure that it’s not on our end…but you know what? You never know. So look for that email from me, or reply here, and maybe we can figure something out.

Best,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

I use Temi sometimes, and I do like editing the text in the cloud. The player integration is quite slick.

But for heavy lifting, I pay the extra dough for Scribie. I was one of their first customers (just by accident — I had no idea), and was thrilled to see them add pretty much every suggestion I ever made.

What I like best about them is that they use real humans, and will scale exactitude to your specification. That is, it starts at 80 cents for 99% accuracy with a 36 hour turnaround, but if you want 100% accuracy, it’s another 50 cents. There are other upcharges for bad recordings or heavily accented speakers, or for them to output to an SRT/VTT file, but you know what, the difference between them and other services is STAGGERING.

I don’t mind confessing it here because I’m among friends, but I’ve had Scribie transcriptions so startling in their accuracy — things like them looking up model numbers in technical interviews and getting weird product capitalizations EXACTLY right — that I was able to copy-paste paragraph after paragraph directly into articles I’ve written with NO additional editing. As many interviews as I’ve done, I can’t even count how many hours Scribie has saved me — thousands, for sure.

You won’t need this level of finesse for every interview, and yeah, no doubt, the price can add up, but when you need it done 100% right, Scribie is who you need to use.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “where are the young users on this forum for questions like this ?”

Not as many as we’d like, but the reasons for that are somewhat organic. The heritage of this forum was the entrepreneurial nature of the early desktop video revolution. Guys like us who were in our 30s and even 40s when this thing hit, because we were the ones who could gather the resources for “cheap” Media 100s and Avid Xpress systems at $30,000 for just the card, plus another five figures for storage, plus $10K each for a UVW camera and deck — we were into these “cheap” systems for $50-100,000!

The whole business has shifted in-house. Our educated-ish guess is that something like 80% of million-ish monthly uniques who come here are working for someone else, and may have little to no say in the tools and technologies being used at work.

We’re certainly hopeful to see the conversations in this forum (forever and always one of my favorites) adapt to the new demographic realities. That was my hope in adding “Career” to the “Business & Career Building” name of the forum. Not many people need to build a business anymore, but we ALL need to build careers.

That’s a conversation beyond the scope of this thread, but I think about this a lot, and agree with you Bob — this is another question that’s ideally answered by folks young enough to be our kids!

Best,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

This year’s NAB was very strange in a lot of ways. It began earlier than ever (we started receiving pre-NAB press releases in mid-January!!!!), and ended almost instantly. There’s been no “tail” this year, which is highly unusual.

I wonder if it’s because NAB landed so squarely before Easter, which rarely happens. It’s like, people got home from the show and then took off. Thousands of people never hit the office for a couple of weeks straight, and virtually all of our posts come when people are at work.

As others have noted, I’m seeing this elsewhere online. The social media conversations shifted instantly from NAB to some combination of Game of Thrones, Marvel, and a bunch of TV shows back from hiatus or starting mid-season — which actually contributed to dozens of people I think of as core “usual suspects” at the show not attending this year. Stuck in the edit suite.

The irony is that I’m really excited by some of these releases, more so than in many a year, as I’ve written elsewhere.

Sitewide, our traffic is very much up post-show, as it tends to be, but there’s no question that conversation is down, and not just in this forum.

Very, very odd year spring so far.

Interesting stuff coming, though, so stay tuned….but I’d be interested to hear other folks’ thoughts on the tail-less-ness of NAB this year, and the dynamics contributing to it.