[Tim Wilson]

[Bouke Vahl] “I totally disagree with Tim about being forced to monitor private messages, but that is beside the point.”

You’re right, your disagreement is beside the point, because I’m right. ???? If something inappropriate happens in a private message on a Creative COW server, Creative COW is legally responsible for the content. There is no ambiguity whatsoever on this point in US law.

It would be nice to say, “Well, we didn’t know anything about it, it was just between those two people,” but we don’t have that luxury. So our two options would be, fine, we’ll gamble that nothing inappropriate will ever be said in a private conversation — but if you saw the posts we haven’t approved over the past 20+ years, you would never even consider this option; there is some genuinely terrible stuff that people have tried to post —

— OR to say, we know for a fact from our decades of experience that this is an unreasonable risk to assume, so we will monitor all private conversations the same way we do public ones, and because we are ethical, we will fully disclose this so that people can make informed decisions.

I do understand that this may be different in Europe, but we are based in the US, and bound by US law…..AND the laws in every country we operate in. Which is something like 200 countries and territories, several of whom are every bit as strict about this, even if some are not. These are not corners that we can cut.

[Bouke Vahl] “I would immediately opt out of direct messaging on this forum. “

We have heard from some people who would be happy to receive private messages, but truly, the vast majority of people we have contacted to ask have said exactly what you have.

Thanks for your input and your support. ????

[Tim Wilson]

[ryan elder] “Does that not look real enough?”

I love the guys at Film Riot, and one reason their stuff works is that they don’t ask more of any method than it can provide.

For example, by making the model backlit and surrounded by dust, they were able to get away with a dramatically lesser level of detail. When it was on the ground, it was far away and still backlit — again, reducing the amount of detail.

You specifically mention that you’d want to have your actors exiting the vehicles….well, look again at the video at exactly the 1 minute mark. Not only is the dude already out of the helicopter, he’s already far enough away from it that he’s not interacting with the model whatsoever. He’s barely crossing through the shadow on the ground, which is easily handled with a simple mask. What you’re talking about would require a level of realism that NOBODY is doing with software alone, no matter how big the budget or the crew.

What you’re talking about would take a major crew using dedicated modeling and compositing software (not After Effects) thousands of human hours….vs a few hours of shooting a real car.

I think you’re also misunderstanding your local police force’s objections. They don’t want you to use one of their cars, and they don’t want you on the street with a car that looks like a real police car (which, uhm, is nonsense — what do you think people do to make every movie, TV show and commercial with a police car???), but it would actually be quite straightforward to just shoot a plain white car, and add on decals and lights in post. THAT’s doable.

A fire engine is a different story. The solution there: don’t try to fake it at all, or go to the extreme that the Film Riot guys did, which is to use the model in the distance, backlit and obscured.

This gets to a broader rule, which is to write only what you can shoot or persuasively fake on a feasible budget. Can’t fake it? Write around it. Take another approach.

Which is to say, it’s perfectly reasonable for you to ask, can I do this with After Effects? And the answer is, you can do SOME things with After Effects, but absolutely not ALL the things you want to do. Some of those can only be done in the real world, with real objects.

A couple of broader notes:

— Forced perspective is an interesting approach, and I strongly encourage you to watch the Lord of the Rings featurettes on this subject first. Note that Peter Jackson had to build two versions of most things that people of differing scales would interact with — but they’re built at full resolution, so to speak. No cheating with toys.

— Likewise, watch those featurettes to see how he handled minatures. He did a ton of them, and there was a traveling show going around to science museums in 2007 or so that I went to see — absolutely breathtaking. Incredibly moving, but the detail on them was staggering, and they were also a lot bigger than you’d think. In fact, Peter Jackson called them “bigatures” — Minas Tirith was 7 meters tall! (Some details here.) I was able to see some “miniatures” in the 4-foot high range myself, and I assure you, they weren’t toys.

— Here’s the thing about forced perspective, though. Jackson gave up on it. He took a very different approach as he began The Hobbit, trying to do it with green screen and models rather than building multiple sets, and the strain on Ian McKellan having to act alone on green screen stages led to him breaking down in tears, and nearly quitting acting forever on the spot. It’s quite jarring to see, and I do strongly recommend checking it out. Honestly, it’s better than almost anything in The Hobbit. (Sorry not sorry. ????)

But what he did in the end was turn to rotoscoping! Just shoot everybody in the room at the same time, mask ’em up, and shrink ’em or grow ’em as necessary. There was still much attention to be paid to sight lines and lighting, and there was lots of cleanup involved…but it also meant that once again, the one shortcut he couldn’t take was in the building of the objects. He had to actually build them.

Now, nobody is thinking that you’re making the Lord of the Rings, or even The Hobbit ???? but the same principles apply.

And for THAT, I highly recommend listening to the commentary track and features that go with the DVD of El Mariachi, by Robert Rodriguez. The key to making a movie for $7000 is that NONE of it was done in software. Admittedly, software was expensive at the time, but the point is that he was able to persuasively fake things in one take that would have taken days to work out in After Effects, even with Video Copilot providing the blood spatters.

Start with the Wikipedia entry to get an idea of some specifics. My favorite: actors simply spilling empty bullet casings out of their hands while they pretended to shoot the machine guns. This was easier than worrying about working with blanks (notoriously prone to jamming), and was done while filming, so NO effort in post whatsoever. It also allowed them to avoid having to rent or buy guns that could fire blanks in the first place. Any guns they couldn’t borrow, they just used toys, and let the bouncing shell casings and sound effects sell the effect.

Again, not criticizing you in the least for bringing this up in an After Effects forum. If you want to take a Film Riot-style approach, you certainly can, but do what they did: backlit distance shots, nothing close, nothing that requires high detail or complicated masking. Forget about having people enter or exit the vehicles.

Otherwise, follow the principle that filmmakers at every level of budget use as their bedrock: borrowing or building stuff is almost always cheaper than post, and if you can’t borrow or build it, don’t write it.

[Tim Wilson]

[greg janza] “…a major hindrance here on these forums is the inability to direct message individuals. Will that be a feature in the new design?”

We’ll acknowledge that this has been a request, and I’ll tell you what we’re thinking, but I’m going to gently disagree with the characterization of “major hindrance.” People who want to be reached in the COW can make themselves reachable, as indeed you’ve done with your COW profile page. Someone who wanted to get in touch with you could do so via your LinkedIn profile, for example. A quick Google search on your name brings up lots of other alternatives.

Some folks include their phone numbers in their sigs, and we have over 10,000 service listings for our members. People who want to be found are making themselves findable, plus Google…so it’s highly unlikely to me that there’s no way to track down someone you want to track down with just a couple of extra clicks to say, their Facebook or Twitter profiles as well, which they’re probably already used to watching for messages.

In fact, one of the things holding us back is how accessible people already are through their real names and COW profiles. We’ve had a number of high-profile folks scale back their participation here because they were getting phone calls at home about questions that really should have been asked on the forums.

This one was reported to me as a direct quote from an editor on Oscar-nominated features: “Hey, I’m sorry to bug you at home, but I didn’t want to ask this in the forum. I really like Final Cut Pro, but everybody is telling me that more movies use Media Composer. Which do you think I should learn?” — and he said he got bunches of these kinds of calls. At home.

By the way, I assume you understand that I’m not suggesting that you would be doing any of this nonsense. I’m speaking generally, and giving you some insight from what we’ve heard after over 20 years of operating forums in this industry.

We’ve heard from other folks they’re getting unannounced office visits. People just dropping by because they know the person’s name from the COW. I don’t think that private messaging at the COW would reduce this sort of thing, but might become yet another avenue for the noise of excess access.

The larger issue for me on the admin side is that this is all directed by code, right? Software. The problem is that most of the off-the-shelf software we’ve looked at conceals private interactions between members from administrators, which is unacceptable to us. We’re entirely liable for everything that goes on through our infrastructure, including interactions that we can’t see, and we really can’t risk that. Besides, we’re looking at off-the-shelf solutions because we’d like to get a little further away from the custom code business so that we can focus on building communities.

And even if we found the administrative toolset we were looking for, imagine if we were to disclose something like, “100% of your private interactions will be monitored and archived, and if we feel that you’re making an inappropriate inquiry, we not only won’t send it through, but in some cases will close your account and alert the authorities” — well, you can guess how well that would go over. We’d certainly not be inclined to debate it. That’s the only responsible position to take, but I can imagine for a lot of folks that this would make private messages a non-starter…so why go through all that trouble for us on the development and admin sides?

It’s different for something like Facebook, where it’s well understood that you’re being watched at all times, and they have thousands of staffers doing the watching.

Which frames up the overall issue for us, that we have over 300,000 members, not all of whom we’d WANT to have private access to other members, and we lack the staffing to provide the kind of monitoring that is otherwise very easily provided for public posts.

And yes, of course, we’d set up standards (receiving messages would be turned off by default and you’d have to enable it, people wanting to send private messages would need to have complete public profiles including xxx number of posts, etc.)….but it’s still a lot of work for limited benefits that can already be derived via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or contact information already provided in sigs and service listings, vs. a considerable new set of administrative tasks and potential liabilities.

So this is not to say, “we’ve decided that the answer is no”, but to give you some insight into the conversations that we’ve had about this over the years. The folks we regularly turn to for advice in the COW have also tended to respond negatively to the idea.

We do see some benefit to going the other way altogether, and allowing people to set up private groups, where they themselves have their hands on the dials to adjust the signal-to-noise ratio by excluding “noisy” people in the first place. fwiw, we do have some variation of that with the “Ignore” button on people’s profiles, so that their original posts are invisible to you if you’re so inclined…but we’d be no less responsible for the interactions there than we are in the public forums. There are limits to how many new jobs we can create for ourselves.

I think it’d be different if we had a forum with a few hundred or even a few thousand members, but it really is well north of 330,000 current members, with over 12 million visitors a year. One of the ways we’ve managed this volume with a small admin team is by keeping conversations corralled within the forums, and not spilling over into an unknown number of additional channels.

Anyway, this is probably more answer than you were looking for, but we’re spending more hours than most reasonable people would imagine poring over every aspect of interfaces, approaches, and toolsets, and we’re not taking any request lightly, or lightly brushing them aside. Everything is open for discussion, including this.

Thanks as always!

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Hello Maria,

We have a couple of administrative posts on this subject at the top of this forum’s index page. The short version is “it varies”, with details provided there.

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

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “Treat every frame like you’re handling evidence”

[Mark Suszko] “No “bloopers”. No re-takes. “

[Mark Suszko] “You may have to witness very personal activities and moments, things that most people will find embarrassing”

[Mark Suszko] “If you mess up one time, you’re done.”

So much good stuff here, but I did want to pull out a couple of bullet points.

I’ll also add my one and only experience with this, as I observe that the videographer in this case really is like a court reporter — discretion, invisibility, professionalism, and zero mistakes are the MINIMUM expected of you — with the additional dimension that Mark mentions, that if you leave the slightest opening for it, one team of lawyers will come after you, guns blazing.

Mess up badly enough, and you’ll be the subject of a lawsuit yourself, when the other team of lawyers sues you for malpractice that blew up their client’s defense.

The big thing for me was that it can be draining to be in the room for these. There are almost never any happy people in the room, and some of them can be in considerable physical or emotional pain.

I was hired for one of these at the recommendation a professional acquaintance — hardly a friend, but we were both in the Rotary and Chamber of Commerce, had some friends in common, etc., and I had a reputation for taking my work seriously (not a common thing for craftsfolk in this part of the world), so he had his lawyer call me. They knew that the other side was hiring a videographer, so he wanted “one of his own” to make sure that there was no monkey business.

I think he thought his case was a slam dunk, but the other side’s lawyer eviscerated his professional standing before they even got to the merits. Eviscerated.

I was doing my level best not to listen to the details. Foremost, it was none of my business, and I was sweating bullets to make sure that nothing went wrong with my recording, which I knew was going to be evaluated not only against the other videographer, but also a court reporter — yep, two court reporters and a videographer. That’s how high the temperature was running in the room. I didn’t get the sense that there was world-record money on the line — nothing like the cases Mark was talking about — as much as the sense of people being seriously, seriously upset.

But really, I didn’t want to know. I didn’t know this guy all that well, and this was surely one of the worst days of his career. One can only hope for this fellow and his clients that it was the worst day of his career. It was that bad.

So I honestly don’t have any idea if my acquaintance was the plaintiff or the defendant, and I sure don’t know how it was resolved, but man, he didn’t exactly look me in the eye when he thanked me for coming, and I wasn’t thrilled about sending the guy a bill for documenting his getting chewed up and spit out so thoroughly…but of course I did, and of course he paid it the same day, and of course we consciously maintained exactly the same level of relationship forever and ever after, no more intimate and no less cordial, because of course, it was just business, and it was a small town, and sometimes you see things you’d rather not, and sometimes people see you in positions you’d rather not be seen in, but whaddya gonna do, amirite?

(I’m keeping this vague on purpose of course, but you should know that it was a professional matter, and nothing that involved the kinds of improprieties one hears about these days. I can also easily imagine having to record testimony vastly more distressing than anything I saw, which really does have to enter into your consideration of whether or not this work you care to undertake on a regular basis.)

Even if I didn’t know the guy, and even at that ultimately minor amount of trauma, I never wanted to be in a room of that temperature again. Huge amount of adrenaline in there. It was super easy money for me, and somebody’s gonna make that dough doing perfectly honorable work, but that was my last time doing it.

My guy’s attorney was pleased with my work, my price, and my comportment (which, underscoring Mark’s point again, MATTERS A LOT), and tried to engage me for other gigs. After the second offer, I told him no need to ask again. I’ve got a lot of respect for anyone with the fortitude to do this work, but I was reminded once again what a delicate flower I am. LOL

So that would be my additional advice. Be ready to stand in a room for hours on the worst day of people’s lives, at best watching them reliving the worst day of their lives in front of hostile strangers, and do your job flawlessly, while keeping your empathy to yourself.

That said, there need to be people out there doing the job with gravity and dignity, who can also do it perfectly, every time. If that’s you, go for it. You just have to be the videographer you’d want pointing a camera at you on the second worst day of your life.

Piece of cake, right? ????

[Tim Wilson]

[Ronald Lindeboom] “When I first came up with our version of forums, it was what I still feel is a superior idea…”

I wrote at length about the technological context of what Ron created back in 1995 in article on the COW’s 15th anniversary — and we’ve just passed our 18th anniversary!!! — that’s worth summarizing below this reminder of that article.

Creative COW Turns 15! A Celebration of Being Uncool

There were no off-the-shelf PHP forums when the WWUG launched. It launched before the first public spec for PHP did! “Forums in a box” were years away, and as Ron notes, were many more years after that before they could sustain our traffic levels of over one million visitors a month, and our database of many millions of posts…plus articles, jobs, and much more. There was no other way to do it than by doing it himself.

(We’ll also note that many PHP “forum in a box” systems explicitly forbid advertising in their licenses. That’s fine if you’re independently wealthy or running a forum as a hobby, or a sideline to some other source of revenue, but this IS our business. Adopting a platform that explicitly forbids monetizing itself would have been redonkulous.)

The WWUG was also founded before the final release of the JPEG and MP3 specifications. Back in the days when computing power was still growing by leaps and bounds with each new turn of the crank, it wasn’t until the end of that year that the first computers could encode and play back an MP3 in real time.

Aldus still owned After Effects.

Most notably, there were no search engines. Yahoo was an index, not a search engine, and was released in the months leading up to the WWUG’s launch. It didn’t crawl anything or push anything to the top of the list or a single basic behavior that we associate with actual search — other than that it was a list, and you could search it.

(To be precise, the text-only Lycos crawler had also been released just before the WWUG opened, but raise your hand if you ever found anything useful with it. Yeah, I thought so.)

Google came along 3 years later with the idea that you could buy your way to the top of their listings, which we of course had no interest in doing. And even before Google, developers had been gaming search by hacking keywords, but our feeling was, we have enough pages with enough of the ACTUAL keywords being generated organically that there was really no need to game that system either. I confess that we tried it with some keywords like “free tutorials”, but found the site overrun with the wrong kind of traffic, so we turned them off.

(Google of course saw the same kinds of chicanery and no longer looks at meta tags at all, except as a way to weed out spammers. “Loading up the keywords in your metas? You’re surely up to no good, so we’re not recommending your page at all.” So in this case, our one experiment notwithstanding, Ron was once again well ahead of the curve.)

I’m laying all this out to underscore a simple but critical point: nothing about our original architecture was developed with search engines in mind.

What’s astounding about that to me is that what Ron developed was so robust that not only does it support our 15 million+ people a year coming through the doors, tens of millions of pages viewed, and hundreds of millions of posts, images, videos, and more — all of those 15 million+ people are finding us entirely organically. No SEO whatsoever. Not even the basics.

There’s actually a lot involved in the basics, including things like human-readable URLs. For a dynamically-generated site like ours, there’s a lot more to that than a lookup table and some rollovers. We have a potentially infinite number of pages, and mapping all this will take its own server.

That’s all on the backside of course, and could take place in more or less any wrapper, but there’s a lot of mediating code that sits in between what you see and what the pages do. That’s the part that needs more maintenance than it’s practical to keep doing. All software needs to be refreshed, including the software that runs websites.

Fortunately, “forum in a box” systems have gotten much more robust. They can carry our weight, they’re not limited by the constraints of PHP alone, and they allow advertising. ???? And their code is clean and modern, so we accomplish a lot of things at once.

That includes the second major component, which is robust, extensible device responsiveness. We’d tried to do a mobile interface, but we’d had to hard code everything because we tried it before “responsive code” was a thing. And as part of our new goals of SEO friendliness, Google has made very clear that they downgrade sites without genuinely responsive mobile presentations too. Well, new code is gonna get us there.

Third is that, yeah, we were way, way ahead of the curve with forums. (By “we” I mean nothing in which I was even vaguely involved. LOL I mean “Ron”, but I say “we” in the context of the COW, of which I’ve been a part for 12 years next month.) But forums are now pretty common, and most people go to a lot of them — not just industry forums like, say, reduser or the forums at the “A” companies, Blackmagic, et al, but also forums for cars, music, whatever. And they all behave a certain way.

We’ve made some efforts to offer those behaviors as our default (topic view, with posts with new entries automatically floating to the top)…but we get a ton of mail from folks who aren’t exactly young — 30s, even early 40s — who have a dozen years or more of going to lots of forums that all act the same way, that have certain baseline standards for text entry, photo support, etc — that we admittedly lack once you get past the front door.

So we now have the opportunity to raise our technology game, organically boost SEO, provide device-sensitive responsiveness, and meet the state of the art for text and formatting in one fell swoop.

Which happens to be taking a whole lot of people working around the clock for a lot of months. ????

The first step of the rollout will take care of all of those. Gotta get the bones right. The second step of the rollout over the months after that will flesh it out and dress it up. We’ve made a few stabs at prettying things up around here over the years, for sure, but we’ve found that that too is a much bigger task than we can maintain, because of how many pieces there are in our old, fixed architecture. Newer architectures are made to be customized, and in time, so we shall.

We have other things related to this that will roll out in time, too, including more modern job boards, an updated reels section — btw, did you know that we had over 10,000 reels posted before we had to pull the plug on it? Easily the biggest repository of reels outside of YouTube (founded 10 years after the WWUG) and Vimeo (9 years). That was because we were getting inundated with copyright claims for embedded reels, even if they were coming from YouTube. Well, YouTube has started paying royalties on all that stuff, so we have a chance to rebuild, and we can do it better than before.

Ron will have perspectives that are different than mine because he’s the actual architect, building the tools behind the tools for both admins and members. From here with one foot on each side of the bridge between administrative usefulness and a pleasing member experience, those are the three big issues that are very, very pressing for us to address, with some glimpse of the related issues that cascade out from there.

????

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Isn’t this what NewTek TriCaster is all about? You can rent one and have it shipped pre-configured for under $200/day.

Not to derail this thread, but I do wonder more broadly — does TriCaster figure into anyone’s live streaming workflows?

[Tim Wilson]

I’ll start by observing that one of the most frequent topics here has been the inappropriateness of the name of this forum. The current name is the fifth, I think, with as much room for improvement as any of the others have had.

Some broader thoughts:

[Steve Connor] “But shouldn’t us actual FCPX users start having discussions on the Apple FCPX Forum (formerly the techniques forum) I think that splitting the forums has chased away people that actually want to talk about FCPX and that forum is now seen as just a place for people looking for solutions, not discussion.

We used to do that that on the old FCP “Legacy” forum, in fact it’s the thing that led me to the COW in the first place.
“

I agree that virtually every conversation about FCPX taking place here could just as easily be taking place in the FCPX forum.

It’s not that we split the forums, though, not exactly.

We were at home during NAB 2011, when our system blew up with notifications of new posts going up in the FCP forum (the only one we had at the time). Hundreds of them an hour, so we assumed that it was spam that somehow got through our walls, but no, it was real-time response to the presentation, and virtually all of it negative.

Whatever anyone tells you about the happy happy temperature of the room at the time, fine, whatever. Look around the internet, though. Nearly EVERYONE motivated to post outbound from the event, on social media, on their blogs, on forums by no means limited to the COW — was unhappy with what they were seeing. This is easily verified, and very much lines up with what we heard from people who’d seen previews once they were released from their NDAs.

So as part of our effort to preserve signal in the FCP forum, we at that moment created an FCPX or Not: The Debate forum. We didn’t think too long about the name. We were drowning with posts to the FCP forum, that were getting in the way of actual conversations about actual FCP, and went with the first thing that came to mind.

It really did seem to be the crux of the biscuit, though — are you down with this new direction, or not?

Our decision to create a separate forum for this was quickly verified as the right call, as the volume (both in number of posts and the vociferousness of their content) skyrocketed over the coming months.

Why no forum for the USE of FCPX out of the gate? Well, we DID have one out of the gate. As soon as there was a product that people were using. Later. For months, debating was the only thing we COULD do.

Obviously, the debate continued for some time after the release. Debates over issues like, Apple’s decision to end official support for Legacy, their decision to intentionally ship the product “wet” with an accompanying roadmap of when mission-critical features would be arriving, followed later by debates over whether Apple’s idea of mission-critical matched one’s own.

No need to rehash any of that now, of course. Much of it is moot. The features are there or they’re not. You care or you don’t.

But in the meantime, the traffic in the Forum for the Using of FCPX (whose name underwent a tweak or two of course) continued to climb as well, but as is the nature of such things, more quietly. Nobody was yelling. They were there to work.

A number of early and frustrating ironies abounded along the way. One is that the COW itself was branded as having a negative disposition toward X, when nothing could be further from the truth. Not one of you — not Bill, not Robin, NONE of you — was as bullish on Apple’s approach to X as me in particular. To review:

— I supported, and still support, Apple’s rollout plan as exemplary in every jot and tittle. I was lacerated for this in the forum at the time, and still am now and again.

— I boldly predicted 10 million seats by the end of the first year. I regularly get mocked (mostly playfully) for this, along with my contention that anything less should be considered a failure, and my statement that if it were Timmy Wilson were in charge rather than Timmy Cook, I’d have had many heads rolling if that goal weren’t achieved.

— I predicted that this would be the Apple NLE release that finally moved the needle in Hollywood, because it provided obvious workflow advantages where Legacy presented obstacles.

— In my interview on the making of Whisky Tango Foxtrot with director Glen Ficarra (and a lengthy sidebar with First Assistant Editor Kevin Bailey) predicted that X would change not only the way movies are edited, but would change the nature of VFX production, AND the way that movies are financed.

With the notable exception of anything Ronny Courtens was involved with, I still think it stands up as well as anything ever written on the topic by anyone (else).

Apple FCPX and The Making of Whisky Tango Foxtrot

Honestly, though, as a corporate position, we don’t favor or disfavor any particular toolsets, whether or not their developers advertise with us. We’re fans of the entire industry, and we have every intent of getting everyone in here eventually, one way or another. We’re here to help everyone win, regardless of their toolsets.

Which is why, at its best, this particular forum has been one of my favorite things to be involved during the over 30 years I’ve been involved with one form or another of online communities, since long before people used words like “online communities”.

The next unfortunate irony is that in helping this particular forum become the best version of itself, it became exactly the kind of forum we didn’t want to have on any other topic. I’ve done both the COW and the industry as a whole a disservice by providing a platform for attitudes and energies that we’ve thrown out of other forums here.

So while our Forum For The Using of FCPX continued (and continues) to thrive for the kind of no-nonsense, “professionals-helping-professionals and aspiring professionals” information that continues to draw over 1 million people a month, the internet at large barely acknowledges that it exists. We STILL have people insisting that this is “the COW’s FCPX forum”.

On the one hand, we can’t be expected to overcome people’s willful ignorance, or challenge every instance of warping easily demonstrable inaccuracies to fit the narrative of their outrage. But we do in fact live in an age of willful ignorance and contrived outrage, and we have to take some responsibility for allowing this forum to in any way become the tail wagging the COW.

Ron mentioned the complete absence of women here, and that’s definitely an issue that we’ll continue to address at length in this forum and others. But I’ll underscore an observation that many of you have observed over the last couple of years, that some of the most thoughtful, engaging voices from our earliest days are almost entirely gone.

*edit
[Ronny Courtens] “The fact that many brilliant contributors have stopped coming here seems to prove this point.”

[I edited my post to add the above quote from Ronny, whose post went up while I was writing mine. Sorry I missed it, Ronny! Obvs many points there that I echo here.]
*edit

With deepest respect to the folks who’ve stuck it out, and apologies for my own long absences, a few too-rarely-seen friends and foils off the top of my head include David Lawrence, Simon Ubsdell, Franz Bieberkopf, Charlie Austin, Aindreas O’Gallchoir, and others who I’m sure you’d add to your own lists. I feel like their leaving had a lot to do with my own failures as a moderator, to shape a forum whose energy was as thoughtful as theirs was.

Not that I think that they represent the sum total of our best and brightest. On the contrary, many of the folks who’d I’d put at the top of my own list have been here all along, including on this very thread.

I recognize that those other folks left at different times for different reasons, and pop back in in varying degrees, and again, feel that I’ve failed the rest of you no less than I failed them. Cows are gentle spirits, and I didn’t take proper care to preserve an appropriately bovine gentleness here.

So, yes, in years past, it felt critical to me to maintain FCPX in the forum name, to recognize that this forum wouldn’t exist without What Happened With X….but most of the threads that you’re engaging most with don’t have all that much to do with FCPX. Sometimes nothing at all. You can see this for yourself by just looking at the number of replies to threads on the forum index page.

Over time, we need to get rid of some of the worst of the old threads, as indeed we’ve begun to. There are some things we just don’t want to have as part of our heritage.

I’ve wondered what to do with some of the other, more productive threads, and wondered about how to insert them more into mainstream conversations, and Steve, the quote from your post alllll the way at the top of this one may have the answer: just move some of the more FCPX-specific threads out of this forum and into that one. Maybe. Maybe not, but I hadn’t thought of it before.

And yes, I’d previously said that Debate needed to be in the title of this forum, but as the world has turned since we last aired out that topic, the word “debate” has become debased past the point of usefulness. What passes for “debate” these days is people hardening their own calcifications at each other as loudly as possible, making any kind of reflection impossible.

Thankfully, we’ve rarely gone that far here, but have come close enough, often enough, that we behind the COW are not interested in encouraging anything that might take us down that road any more. We’re certainly not interested in associating ourselves with how debased that word has become, and don’t have the energy or resources to fight upstream against the forces of the decay of civility.

In fact, our larger challenge is repositioning this forum in the context of our larger mission of being helpful, being inclusive, being smart, being professional, being fans, and having fun. We’re tired of people googling something about FCPX and having the first page be full of nasty threads from this forum that don’t reflect who we (AND YOU) actually are, or what people can typically expect from the COW when they ask for help.

They think, wow, I’m looking for help, and came to the COW to find a fight — which makes perfect sense if you’re coming in through the forum page, see THIS forum listed AFTER the FCPX forum, and wonder what the debate is about. But that’s now it happens most often. Most often, Google sees “FCPX”, sees the staggering amount of traffic here, assumes that the Fight thread is super relevant based on machine reading that misses the context of Help that someone is looking for, then those people come here once and are turned off forever — which wouldn’t happen if they’d been directed to The Forum For the Using Of FCPX in the first place.

Which is why we’re going to be telling Google to stop showing people those kinds of results when people ask about FCPX, which is also why we’re going to be getting FCPX out of the name of the forum.

To acknowledge an observation upthread that I haven’t filled all of you in on the backstory behind this internal conversation, you’re correct of course, but you also instinctively know that what I’ve said is generally true. (Except for my enthusiasm for X, which has been demonstrated as being far beyond the bounds of reality.) I know this, because I’ve observed many of you saying similar things over the years.

Ron, Kathlyn, and I have an opportunity (and a responsibility I think) to realign ourselves with our own goals — but we’re doing things the way we always have. With transparency, accountability, and one thing I can also definitely promise — a degree of clumsiness. You would expect nothing less. Cows are gentle, but grace is rarely ascribed as one of their virtues.

For example, in retrospect, it might have been more prudent to present “Apple Talk” as a proposal, rather than announcing it as the final decision. I’ll take some blame for that one. When Ron suggested the name, I ADORED it, and told him we should just do it, regardless of how you lot reacted. LOL Sorry. I argued that position as recently as last night, but Ron told me how you’ve talked him out of it altogether, and after reading the whole thread again, I’m persuaded too. (I have some ideas that I’ll save for another post.)

But to echo Ron’s reply upthread, we’re not trying to change anything specific about the forum, as much as we’re trying to reflect what it has actually become (where, by post count, Apple Talk is far and away the most relevant name…which yes, you’ve talked us out of, BUT STILL), lightly leavened with a reflection of the kind of community we want ALL our forums to be.

Not debates, heated or otherwise. Instead, ruminations. Shared observations.

We’ve had hundreds, if not thousands of threads reflect this of course. We want to encourage them ALL to, though.

So while I have no doubt that our eventual solution will displease some of you, hey, we’ve fumbled before and kept moving. Nothing is final. We’ll stay transparent and accountable, and hopefully eventually land on something that suits you better, both as a name for the forum, and as a gently nudged refinement more in keeping with OUR mission, and with the way that most of YOU conduct yourselves when you’re not here. LOL

In the end, this community is not a democracy. It’s a business. There’s a certain kind of decorum we prefer to have in our office, and a certain kind of vibe we want to feel when we walk in, as I know you all aspire to for your own businesses. I don’t think that there’s any conflict whatsoever in our commitment to a robust community for both our members and our sponsors, and our broader goals of having engaging conversations. I think we’ve been doing that pretty well. Just not well enough to satisfy our own desire to keep doing better.

And really, if you don’t want to keep doing better, why bother doing what you’re doing at all?

I want to end by again thanking the many, many of you who’ve made vastly more significant contributions to the ongoing life of this forum than I have. I regret having to be away as much as I have over the past year-and-some, for reasons I’ll also save for another post, but I hope to get back to being in the thick of things soon. I’ve spent the entire time since I’ve been away with a rotating set of at least half a dozen tabs open with half-finished replies, and have a long list of threads I’d like to start.

In the meantime, that’s a little more of what we’re thinking. I look forward to ruminating on it some more with you all.

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Ray,

Your post went up a few minutes after you made it. You can find it here: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/344/51765

I’m sorry there’s not an answer yet! Most people attempting a job as complex as the one you’re describing would be doing it in Adobe After Effects, I think, which may be the reason that the Final Cut crowd hasn’t weighed in yet.

For what it’s worth, your account is cleared for posting now. Any posts that you make after this should go up right away. Please let me know if you have any issues with this!

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Todd Terry] “”How come those other guys are so much cheaper?”

Well, “Because they’re worth it.””

???????????? I’ll definitely use that!

Greg, I’m sorry to hear it though. I started to wish you better luck, but actually, I wish you better clients. ????????