Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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These are great! Thanks!
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[Shawn Miller] “[Andrew Kimery] “My partying linguistic gift “Farmok and Jalad at Tanagra””
Best Trek reference on the Cow, EVER!”
Even misspelled. ???? But yes, absolutely stellar.
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[Chris Harlan] “Thanks, man. And you too. Sorry about your mom. Its nasty stuff, but its the way of the world. Peace, brother.”
You and I and some other folks here are getting to be that age. I also dropped offline for a bit recently to help my 79 year old father wrap up moving out of the house that he and my mother had lived in for over 35 years. I realized, wow, I’m pushing 60, he’s nearly 80 and never really asked for my help with anything before. I can’t say that I’ve gained too much perspective or insight from this — I’m still an idiot, and always will be — but I think I’ve gained a little.
I’ve certainly been reminded that it’s harder than it looks to balance “real life” with “clever forum posts”. I’m all the more impressed with people who can actually pull off doing both at once!
And I do look forward to crawling back to posting more often again. Some of the threads this year have been among my favorites of 20-odd (sometimes VERY odd) years of hanging out in COW in her various incarnations, and I’m sorry to have missed on both participating in them, and properly promoting them to the outside world. My exasperation with a few posts here notwithstanding, I’m proud of what’s happening in the COW as a whole, and I remain deeply indebted to many of you for what shreds of sanity I’m able to grasp now and again.
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[Chris Harlan] “Hey, Tim. I want to apologize if I got steamy at all. My father passed away last night, so I’m doing this as sort of a diversion right now, and I have no real sense of up or down. Strange world.”
Oh my gosh, Chris! I’m so sorry to hear it! One reason I’ve been offline so much recently is because of the unexpected passing of my mother. You have my every sympathy.
I swear I wasn’t thinking of you in particular, but along with the high-minded tone in my previous post, this is a great time to remember that we’re all human, we all have bad days, we can all be too quick on the Post Direct button, and we have to leave some room for each other to be people.
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[Steve Connor] “I think this needs a picture?”
LOL I’ll work on it. It’ll have to wait, though. It’s raining here, and I’m having a TERRIBLE hair day.
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Guys, as a reader, this thread has been a gem. Some terrific insights, and a lot of great full contact debate about how best to reflect workflow priorities in UI. Love it.
As an admin, it’s been exasperating. Mixed in and among those has been some of the worst tit-for-tat personal sniping I’ve seen in this forum for years. A reminder: it is an express violation of our Terms of Service to comment directly on or at other posters, their competence, or their motivations. I don’t care if the other guy started it. I’m calling on you not to rise to it.
Which, obviously, almost all of you are doing just fine. But in addition to following up with some individuals offline who need special reminding of this, I did want to place my official Knitted Brows of Concern™ on this thread, with a reminder to please keep your hands and head inside the vehicle at all times.
It might help to remember that anything posted here is as close as the internet gets to eternal, and at a pretty high profile to boot. Around 4 million people will pass through this forum this month. It’s also easy to miss because they typically rarely post, in some cases never post, but they do talk to us offline on a regular basis about how regularly they lurk here, reading every word — studio execs, legendary artists whose work you own, product managers for every company you see represented here and many others, and in general, people who could be giving you jobs, maybe even careers.
Everybody knows that part of the reason we go online is to blow off steam, and goodness knows I’ve been able to spin being a wisenheimer into a decent living, but I’m still going to encourage you to recall the unparalleled global scope of Creative COW, and pause just for a beat before a heated reply.
Back to the fray!
Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Scott Witthaus] “Time to change the forum name again….”
Back to the name I said we’d keep because, while clumsy, was actually accurate but people kept insisting was inappropriate — THAT name?????
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[Andrew Kimery] ” there is also a pragmatic element of putting students in the best position possible upon graduation. That’s largely a localized target to hit though “
For example, at USC, they teach Avid. That’s it. Full stop. No reference to any others. It would be a disservice.
That said, I don’t think there’s literally a single other place on the planet that has a target. None. Pick one. Any one. Have a reason.
For example, being honest, as bizarrely, freakishly, and absolutely at the extreme end of enthusiasm as I’ve been for X (demonstrably further out than Bill, Robin, or anyone else, from the very beginning), ME, I’d probably lean on Premiere, because I think every editor should be at least conversant with Photoshop and After Effects.
But the fact is that even in LA, not all the work is in TV and film. Certainly the assumption is that that IS the case if you’re making the cut to get into USC, but UCLA is a pretty good school, and I get the impression is a little more catholic (lower case c) on the matter. But even in LA, the Art Institutes lean on Adobe stuff (Pro Tools for audio though).
I’m going to once again defer to Scott and Oliver, though. Let’s not get too academic on how it SHOULD work when we have academics who can tell us how it DOES work. The numbers Scott cites for job placement are surely ones that any program anywhere would be proud of, and he’s all about the X — and clearly not doing a disservice to anyone in Virginia.
That said, I think you undermine the argument for “go broad” and support my own argument for “don’t overdo ANY of these” when you conclude:
[Andrew Kimery] “Basically I knew just enough to get the edit done and not one iota more. haha!
“So yeah, fair enough, I said name me a decent program trying to cover all the bases, and you did. But the process you describe that YOU went through is what I think the RIGHT one is, which is focus on one that’s at the core of the curriculum, and teach yourself the other stuff on the side. I mean, it’s not like the ONLY movies I watched were the ones I was assigned in film appreciation class, right? I didn’t just read assigned books. I followed my curiosity.
But here’s the thing. I didn’t learn ANY NLEs, because they wouldn’t exist for another decade after my schooling. ???? The idea of owning a camera was preposterous…but the standpoint of the program was, you’ll use U-matic because that’s what here. You’ll probably use something else later, like maybe that Betacam stuff we’re seeing…but who knows. Could be anything. You’ll leave here ready for anything, but not because you’ve used everything. Because you’ve learned how to learn one thing WELL. After that, learning anything else is trivial.
Even once NLEs entered academia, there was only one class of graduates in the 20th century who could have learned much about FCP, and nobody who graduated before 2011 would have learned anything about X. Yet here are all these folks using ’em just fine. I’m convinced that the people who adapted most quickly are people who are adaptable — a personality trait, not a byproduct of specific training.
To me, the ephemeral nature of software COULD point to the value of sticking to Media Composer and Premiere as the NLEs most likely to still be around (depending on your measure of the fullness or emptiness of Avid’s corporate glass). To ME, it’s the reason to focus only on teaching enough to get the edit done and not one iota more. ????
Heck, your career is the perfect argument for my point. At the end of the day, your whizziness with buttons in any one NLE was vastly less useful than the breadth of your knowledge about a whole lot of other things, including stuff well outside the range of editing, plus your resourcefulness (ie, NOT being so tied to one set of buttons that you couldn’t function everywhere you needed to), and your general spunk. ???? Buttons can be taught on the job. Spunk cannot. ????
Not to dismiss the value of buttons altogether. An AE who doesn’t show up the first day of work ready to log (for one example) really is worse than useless, even as an intern….but honestly, aren’t the most important things about logging STILL, 150 years later, as much related to managing physical assets and reel names as anything software-related?
To take it the next step further, the one thing that every student learns that I can absolutely guarantee with one million percent certainty will at some point be obsolete, irrelevant, and potentially an obstacle to learning what they really NEED to be learning next is their NLE software. All the rest — lights, camera, action — will be useful forever.
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[Noah Kadner] “He’a actually been with Apple since last November.”
So there ya go. Hot off the presses. ????
One of the trends I’ve welcomed most over the past few years has been talking more about the role of our inner lives on our work. I’ve certainly tried to push that here in my own emphasis on our personality traits playing the largest role in our NLE choices, but even more broadly, as part of a push to expose mental health issues in the creative community, and the toll this job takes on us.
Kylee Peña got the ball rolling industry-wide with an article she wrote for us a couple of years back, “How Are You? No, really. How ARE you? Creativity & Mental Health”
The mantle was very quickly taken up by our friend Zack Arnold, founder of the Fitness in Post podcast, and who’s shared some terrific articles with us, all of which I highly recommend.
I mention this because one of the most powerful episodes of Zack’s podcasts featured Wes’s story of going from high school athlete to being hospitalized for alcohol abuse in his early 30s, and his journey back through rehab and into the world of ultramarathons. Absolutely amazing stuff.
Here’s the summary of what they speak about in their conversation:
- Wes’ early career as an offline editor at an advertising agency
- Why Wes started Automatic Duck and how they became the “Switzerland” of the app world
- How going between different apps has changed in the last 15 years (…it hasn’t)
- Wes discusses how some of the bad habits he developed early in his career helped lead him down a path to alcoholism
- The turning point in Wes’ life: Christmas of 2007
- Why he decided it was time to go to rehab
- How a combination of tracking his weight and quitting alcohol motivated him to lose 40 lbs right after rehab
There’s lots more that you’ll definitely want to check out. Here’s the link. Wes isn’t just a nice guy. He’s been through hell and lived to tell the tale.
And do check out Kylee’s original article while you’re at it. It’s fun and cute to talk about how crazy we are in this business, but it’s also dangerous as hell to pretend that it won’t do very bad things to us if we’re not paying attention.
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I had the pleasure of working directly with Wes when I was the product manager of Boris FX/Boris RED from 2000-2003. He was still at Automatic Duck at the time, and the name of the game was supporting sequences from After Effects in the standalone version of Boris RED, so we had a number of tricky problems to work through. I loved getting to see how Wes’s mind works up close, and to enjoy the company of one of the industry’s truly nice guys on a project that neither one of us was 100% certain we could pull off.
Needless to say, we did. ???? All the credit going to Wes and Boris for doing the actual work, of course, but it was certainly one of the funnest projects I ever got to manage in my years as a corporate weasel.
Frankly, because of his role as the key cross-environment workflow facilitator in our industry’s history, anyplace that Wes lands is good for everyone….but yeah, no doubt, this bodes well for anyone using X who’s also using other stuff.
Although frankly, what Wes has done before may or may not have anything to do with what he’ll be doing at Apple. ???? Nevertheless, congrats to both!
