[Tim Wilson]

Hi Sam,

I’m afraid that there’s not a specific “buyer beware” forum. Can you tell me a little more about what happened? I may be able to direct you to someplace that people will see the story.

I’m sorry that it happened, but thanks for an interest in helping others learn from your experience!

Best,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Mark,

Apologies for the delay replying. I’ve been on the move and was having trouble unzipping the images on my phone. fwiw, you can use our photo upload mechanism to embed the images in posts:

And in Chrome, you can also just copy-paste and drag or drop images. (We’d be happy to implement this in other browsers, but Chrome is currently the only one that supports it.)

ANYWAY, I now understand what you’re saying, and will escalate this to our IT team. I’m sorry for the obstacles, and I hope we can mop this up for you soon.

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Mark,

I’ve tried both of the Classifieds forums in both Firefox and Chrome, and both are behaving as expected.

Can you tell me a little more about what you’re seeing? Maybe with a screenshot? I’d love to get this working for you!

Best,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Adding a note to bump this to the top of the forum — I just now discovered this post in the Classifieds section of the COW, and moved it here to raise the discussion in a more appropriate forum. ????

Damien, do let us know if you have an update.

Everyone else, feel free to chime in!

Best regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “It is definitely worth reporting to Apple to see if they implement a fix or decide that it’s correct as is. :)”

The question is, how would we know the difference between “unfixed bug” and “intended feature”? ???? I mean, it’s like they’d have to, like, SAY something or something.

[Tim Wilson]

Simon and all the rest of you gents, I can’t thank you enough for your kind words and good wishes! They mean the world to me.

The past year…really, the past 16 months or so…have been among the hardest of my life, with death, genuinely catastrophic medical crises, a hasty long-distance move in pursuit of necessarily advanced care, and a crazy pile of other stuff that has lamentably kept me away from posting here at all in months.

I especially hate this because of how fond I’ve been of our little mini-community here — I may have posted more in this forum than the rest of the COW put together, I think — and because I’m afraid that my being away has enabled a few unfortunate imbalances to present themselves along the way. That’s a conversation for another thread that I look forward to having soon, but I’m already taking steps to restore some balance that I trust you’ll see bearing fruit soon.

[Bob Zelin] “While I love Tim Wilson, and in 2017, Creative Cow is Tim Wilson, if it were not for
Ron and Kathlyn Lindeboom, do you know where ALL of us would be ? No where –
we would be silent, under some advertisers sponsored article, that we could not criticize.
Creative Cow single handedly changed our industry”

Completely, resoundingly agreed. I wrote about Ron and Kathlyn’s contributions to the industry in an article for the COW’s 15th anniversary in 2016, and I recommend it again to anyone who doesn’t know this remarkable tale: Creative COW Turns 15! A Celebration of Being Uncool

Ron’s vision is easily visible here, and has shaped things since the community’s first iteration in 1995 — going online just after the release of Netscape Navigator, the same time as Yahoo and the first public release of PHP, and preceding the finalization of the JPEG and MP3 standards, to say nothing of preceding Google, YouTube, et al — but Kathlyn doesn’t get nearly enough credit for having the gumption to actually fire Bessie up (including coming up with the indelible name Creative COW!) and running it in the beginning. (Even though she hasn’t posted as herself in a while, she continues to manage the business operations, work with press releases, and much more). I can’t begin to recount all I’ve learned from them, and how much I owe them both.

My biggest hope for 2018 is a return to some kind of normalcy for me. “Normal” is a word I used to flee, but now, I’d be thrilled to have it for even a couple of weeks. Even that brief window will let me catch up on the many nearly-finished projects I have in the queue, including:

• the single best product overview (“review” doesn’t do it nearly justice) I’ve ever seen (for Blackmagic Fusion by Simon Ubsdell),
• a mind-boggling look at what the future might hold for VR, AR, HDR, UX, and storytelling as Kylee Peña interviews Adobe’s Director of Immersive (and longtime friend of the COW) Chris Bobotis re: Chris Nolan’s Dunkirk
• an interview I did with my old friend and mentor Boris Yamnitsky about the technological and creative leaps behind merging technology in Boris Continuum, GenArts Sapphire, and Imagineer mocha
• testing some of cinema’s most famous vintage lenses on Blackmagic’s cinema cameras
• Marco Solorio on his award-winning documentary 10/10ths (12 wins out of 13 nominations — and festival season ain’t over yet!)
• dozens of tutorials
• relaunching Reels.CreativeCOW.net to show off YOUR work

and much, much more that’s not quite as far along, including considerable infrastructure refreshing currently underway, and some advertising stuff that I honestly think is pretty dang cool, and I wouldn’t mention if I didn’t think you’ll enjoy too.

I haven’t said this in a while, but I’m grateful that you’ve made room for our sponsors in your web browsing. Yeah, I run AdBlockPro too, but here at the COW, it really is a shockingly small family business (pretty much Ron, Kathyln, and me) relying on a lot of support to keep things going. We take seriously our responsibility to not just hang ads on the wall, but to ensure that these folks are integrated in the community. We’ve taken a lot of pleasure in seeing your personal connections to folks from these companies build up at tradeshows and user groups over the years beyond just the forums, sometimes even some of you finding jobs with them. (Indeed, my job at Boris FX sprung out of my work in the COW’s predecessor community forums).

It pleases me that we’ve been able to avoid nag screens about browsing with ads enabled….although I’m not above that if the need arises…and we’ll continue to do our part to make sure that ads stay Flash-free, cleanly coded, and no tracking outside the COW. Certainly if you see any issues, I welcome hearing about them, but I’m thinking about this all the time as it has become a bigger and bigger part of my job at the COW. I won’t post an ad I’m not willing to launch inside my own browsers.

Calling my life at Creative COW a “job” doesn’t exactly reflect the sense of mission I have here, or the pride at what we’ve been able to accomplish together — “we” both in the sense of the Lindebooms and me, and “we” in the sense of us and all of our members. That’s what I’ve hated about being away. That this means something to me, and part of my own identity has been compromised by my inability to participate in the way I’d like to.

And honestly, I enjoy it, and I could use more joy in my life. That means more COW.

So I can’t promise that I’ll be back up to my desired level of engagement here right away. Some of the parts of the COW I need to re-engage with are outside the forums of course, but no kidding, one of my fondest wishes for 2018 is to be spending a lot more time with you here again soon.

Many thanks again for the season’s greetings, and for all your kindnesses to me.

Wishing you all a bit more normalcy and a lot more joy in 2018,

Best,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks for the report, Jim! We’ve had a few glitches while we’ve been updating systems here during our quietest time of the year. I’m sorry that it got in your way, but delighted to hear that things are back to working as they should for you!

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Todd Terry] “So…. just bite the bullet and buy the footage.”

All of what these guys said, with one more variation: start by just asking. Don’t assume that they’re going to charge too much. Don’t assume that they’re going to charge you ANYTHING. In fact, assume that they won’t.

Because you’re right that in the scheme of things, your usage isn’t the kind of thing that they want MONEY for per se. But they always, always, ALWAYS want CONTROL. There are people in every media organization, news or otherwise, whose job it is to remove 100% of unauthorized footage.

As folks here have noted, Fair Use will NOT prevent you from getting takedown notices. If the notice goes to YouTube or Vimeo rather than you under their blanket agreements, those hosts will simply take you down and block from trying to repost your entire project. You’ll have to go through many, many hoops to figure out which was the offending footage (or photos or music or who knows what), and have to go through a bunch more hoops to establish that you’re not a habitual violator who’s going to cost them even more time and money shutting you off again. You do not want to go down this road.

Better for you not to do this at all than to decide it’s too much trouble to ask permission first. In most cases, this can be handled with a web form.

This is really your first gut check as a documentarian. Not “How important is this story to me?”, not “how important is it for the world to hear this story?”, but “Is this story important enough to me that I’ll do my job as an ethical producer?”

Because believe us geezers who’ve been around this block many, many times. The shortcut LOOKS like “nah, no need to ask these guys,” but that could not just cost time, but money, and eventually prevent your work from ever being seen at all. Bzzzzt! Wrong answer. ????

The ACTUAL shortcut is going to rights holders FIRST. If the answer is no, or too expensive, then you haven’t wasted the time to cut it into your doc in the first place. You’ll figure out an approach you can afford, and stay in motion, and stay out of court. ALWAYS ask the rights holders.

PS. General rule of thumb for Fair Use: if the rights holder is obvious, Fair Use will not apply, and the penalties will be much higher than the rights themselves, typically triple damages (ie, not the cost of the footage if you’d just licensed it…or gotten permission to use it for free, which they often DO grant…. but triple the amount of the damage that lawyers from CNN or BBC will claim you’ve caused them) plus court costs.

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Dennis,

There are a number of possibilities. The Cinematography forum is one place to start.

You can post in one of the production forums that pertains to your endeavor. Some possibilities include Event Videographers, Field Production, and Live & Stage Events.

I hope this helps!

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “https://www.computerworld.com/article/3131906/apple-mac/ibm-says-macs-are-e…”

There’s no force I’ve yet encountered on earth, in heaven, or in hell that could make me buy anything Apple again, but there are some pretty eyebrow-raising data points in this article: