[Tim Wilson]

All I have to say to all of you is, “Jazz hands!”

[Tim Wilson]

[Jim Wiseman] ” If Avid can figure out a way to make money on the high end of the market (really just 2%?) they will survive.”

I don’t think anyone can say for sure, but it can’t be tons bigger than that.

Remember when Apple’s stock was in single digits? It stayed in single digits for almost all of 2003. It started picking up with iPod in 2004, then REALLY took off with iTunes for Windows, meaning that virtually the whole world could buy an iPod. Check the chart history some time. It really was nearly to the day.

Part of the reason their stock price was in the single digits is because so was their market share. People had been talking about Apple going out of business for the last ten years, too.

Me and 1000 of my closest buddies were in a keynote address and saw Steve Jobs say, paraphrasing, “Yes, our market share is 3%. But BMW’s market share is also 3%, and nobody’s talking about BMW going out of business.”

He went on to say that that’s how Apple saw themselves. Not the top of the market, but definitely a luxury brand that had found its niche, and it wasn’t going away. You can make a lot of money in a niche.

He was of course correct. Plenty of other folks on this thread have made the point that Avid’s market share in its key niche is going UP. Not going down. Going UP. Their niche is feeling well-served by Avid, and not well-enough served by others.

(Although seconding Andrew’s observation, it looks to me like Premiere is the only one besides Avid gaining any ground…but I think it’s vastly more at Apple’s expense as people look for more modern alternatives and find Premiere looking a lot more like Legend 8 than X does.)

Also seconding Oliver’s observation that while Avid is growing its market share in its key niche, the question remains whether they can make more than they spend, and ENOUGH more than they spend that their PROFIT can expand in a way that matches their growth in market share.

Apple survived after a non-stop decade of people certain they’d go out of business…and has managed to do okay in the decade since they turned the corner. I doubt that Avid has the equivalent of an iPod waiting in the wings, but then again, neither does BMW, and they seem to be in it for the long haul.

[Tim Wilson]

[Abraham Chaffin] “Okay, thanks. This one has been fixed.”

Actually, I just turned off the post altogether. It somehow slipped through our rule requiring real names for all accounts and posts. That one was clearly not.

I’ve sent a note directly, but if you know the person using the name “Thelmo Thelmo,” by all means, direct him or her to us and we’ll help update their account.

Thanks for letting us know about not seeing the reply button, though. We’re always on the lookout for issues like these!

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

[Bernard Newnham] “Of course it blocks everything, including ads on this site, which I didn’t mind at all and which were at times useful intros to equipment I didn’t know about, and which I know pay for the site. “

I use AdBlock Plus too, which is why I happen to have handy some screenshots showing how to disable it on this site. 🙂

The principle is the same for any browser – click on the AdBlock Plus icon to get to the context menu, and select disabling for this site.

For Chrome:

For Firefox:

You get the gist.

As I humbly ask you to enable ads for this site, I want to assure of you some things that I hope you’ve noticed anyway:

— We employ no tracking of any kind. The only cookies we set are client side, for things like your account profile, your forum view preferences, forums or members you’ve subscribed to, etc. We have no access to that information.

We don’t have any personal data about who’s doing what in the site, who’s clicking ads, or anything else. We can’t see your passwords or any of your preferences. Anything yours stays yours, even from us.

All of which is to say, we take your privacy seriously because we take OUR privacy seriously.

We appreciate you coming here, and wouldn’t dream of abusing your good will by supporting stalking you after you leave here.

— This is one reason why we do not employ Google ads. Not to disresprect other industry sites from major publishers..at least not any more than usual LOL…but if you DO visit them without AdBlock Plus, mouse over the ads sometime. You’ll see they’re almost all Google ads, which tells you two things.

One, it tells you that the vendor in the ad didn’t pay to place those ads on that site. Strictly an arrangement between the website and Google… so the support those sites SEEM to have from industry partners is a ruse. It just doesn’t exist.

(Which is of course another reason we don’t employ Google ads: we don’t need to. We’re fortunate to have partners who support us directly.)

Two, it tells you that you’re gonna get tracked. We don’t do that, and we don’t allow it.

So yeah, as a fan of privacy, we suggest that, if you have to visit such sites — and really, do you? LOL — you absolutely should have AdBlock Plus on…

[Bernard Newnham] “At times I was surrounded by bra ads.
“

…unless you care to be surrounded by bra ads. LOL No judgements here, my friends. No judgements.

[David Lawrence] “Anyone wondering why people use ad blockers should look at this article….

https://blog.lmorchard.com/2015/07/22/the-verge-web-sucks/“

The Lightbeam report on The Verge was pretty hideous, and definitely includes a meaningful amount of “stalkerware.”

I was also intrigued by how this stalkerware affected page load times at The Verge. Again, pretty hideous.

That said, Lightbeam casts a pretty wide net. It just reads everything on the page, whether it’s relevant to privacy or not, or whether it touches you or not.

I took a look at the COW through Lightbeam, and even though I’m not involved in that part of the site, it was pretty much as I suspected: no stalking.

In fact, none of the third parties interacting through us know any personal information about you.

I’ve pasted a screenshot of the list from Lightbeam below, and there’s actually even less there than it looks like.

For example, twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn appear on this list. It’s NOT the case that those guys are tracking you.

What happens is that those APIs load on every page so that you can SHARE content on those services….but none of those services know you’re here.

Even AFTER you use one of them to share content, they STILL don’t know that you’re here. The reason why you have to log into THOSE services before you can share COW content is BECAUSE they can’t see you at the COW.

You’ll recognize Google and Google Analytics of course, neither of whom are tracking YOU. The ones for Typekit and Akamai are loading on our side, and don’t actually touch you except to the extent that you see fonts and other content we serve.

You’ll note that two of them are creativecow.net and creativecow.com — again, as noted above, no personal information is stored on our side.

The other folks you see in the Lightbeam list are mostly click-counting platforms, and are ONLY there for our partners to track the NUMBER of clicks to verify their counts against ours, as of course they should. Different sponsors use different platforms for this, and NONE of them track WHO’s clicking. They don’t know anything about you, your activity in the COW, or your activity elsewhere. NO TRACKING.

You’ll find if you look up any unfamiliar names on the list that a couple of these have been reported elsewhere as malware, which is nonsense. None of them install anything, and they don’t collect any data. They just pass through the NUMBER of clicks, nothing else.

If you’ve searched for any topic in the media production field, you know how highly Google rates us. Google bots are actually responsible for about a quarter of the traffic on the web, so I figure it’s probably about the same here. Believe me, if Google (or Bing or anyone else) found any malware here, we’d have heard about it from THEM.

And as we celebrate 20 years of building online communities for media professionals this summer (actually the same year as Yahoo, and predating Google), it ain’t happened yet. And it ain’t gonna. Nobody watches for this more carefully than we do…

…because we use the web too, and we HATE people tracking us. We’d never violate your trust by doing anything that even vaguely approaches intrusive, abusive, or otherwise annoying.

Other than some of the posts. LOL

So, to end where I began, please do consider disabling ad blocking software here. We rigorously guard your privacy and your load times, and yeah, you’ll help keep Timmy in chocolates and nylons.

If you have AND questions about ANY of this, please ask.

Nota bene, I’m a bit underwater and not on top of the forums as thoroughly as usual, but I’ll look into anything you’d like to know and get back to you as quickly as I can.

Yours in privacy,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Respectfully Mads, I think Bob was right on the money with this.

Here’s Catherine’s question: “Do I bill for the full month including the two weeks I wasn’t technically working but waiting for their feedback or just the two and a half weeks or actual work?”

Here’s Bob’s answer: [Bob Zelin] “1) don’t be shy.

2) call the owner. Ask him (her) – what should I bill you for. Put it in their court.

So far, so good. The question is why you should ask the client/boss what you should you bill?

[Bob Zelin] “Your ultimate job is not to “screw them over” now, because you worked hard on this – your ultimate job is to get every last penny you can out of these people.

So seem like you are the most honest hard working person in the world. Get them to hire you again “

What’s wrong with that? I think it’s perfect advice.

Question: What should I bill?

Answer: Rather than guess or turn it into a fight, do what the client wants. Give yourself the opportunity to win them back.

The rest of his post is about what it takes to win clients back. And it’s very good advice. Very practical. Very achievable.

Because the thing is, nobody’s in a particular to hire a freelancer. Ever. The onus is on the freelancer to MAKE the client want to hire them. It’s a game of active marketing. This is how a freelancer markets themselves: make yourself visible, make yourself available, spend the time you’re NOT working for them to learn how they WILL want you to work for them.

And if a freelancer stopped asking for a job from every client who said no, or every former client who said “We’re looking for something different,” there’d be nobody to work for, ever.

To loosely paraphrase from the Danish, you HAVE to keep going back to duds. You HAVE to. It’s when you DON’T go back to duds that your entire career blows up in your face. LOL

As Bob says,

[Bob Zelin] “Everyone lives their lives this way – “I can find another dentist, I can find another accountant, I can find another editor, I can find another producer, I can find another cameraman” – but once you are in, and they TRUST YOU – people go crazy “oh my God – I have to have THIS PERSON, because they are the only ones that can do this job”.”

In quoting Bob’s advice about lying, my joke is that I prefer to call it marketing. I say I CAN do something before I actually can, because I know I can LEARN how to do the thing quickly enough that it looks like I knew it all along. Bob’s right. We all do this.

If we don’t do this, we should.

But you stopped before his most important line, the last one:

[Bob Zelin] “Don’t be a big shot – not yet. “

There are limits to how far you can overstate your skills. His advice to Catherine is not to overreach, which is of course what you said as well.

In context, what it also means is to accept your reality with humility. Freelancers get dismissed before the contract period is up. Freelancers get taken advantage of. They get abused.

But their response CANNOT be to “be a big shot.” They have to take each loss on the chin, and put themselves in a position to win next time.

[Tim Wilson]

[Noah Kadner] “Not everything gets it own thread. “

See my note above. This SHOULD have gotten its own thread, and while I took most of the steps to have it happen automatically, I missed one. It happens. 🙂

But this 100000% deserves it. One of the all-time classics. Again, here’s the link: https://library.creativecow.net/gash_andrew/FCPX_MEDIA-LAB/1

EDIT: It’s featured now.

And again, no kidding, everyone should check this out.

[Tim Wilson]

[Bob Zelin] “And NO ONE has commented about this on the FCP-X forums. “

I think some of it is my fault for not highlighting it better in this forum. I’ll post it at the top.

In the meantime, here’s the link, Managing FCPX Media Labs for Maximum Sanity & Minimum Chaos.

I asked the author, Andrew Gash, if he felt it was an appropriate article for people managing FCPX in ANY shared storage environment, and he said, not really. His advice is for large media labs (he has over 100 students across six periods), with people who don’t really know what they’re doing. He felt like most people in professional environments could come up with their own protocols that people would fairly reliably follow.

But as I think about it, my feeling was…nuh-uh. Most people don’t follow protocols. LOL And for many people, setting up multiple libraries and such is new territory.

So I encourage EVERYONE who works with FCPX in a shared storage environment to read this article. It’s one of my favorites, not because I do that work, but because I always enjoy people with big giant brains to figure stuff out, and the skills to articulate their findings in entertaining ways.

A rare pleasure, this article. Thanks for bringing it up, Bob.

[Tim Wilson]

[Robin S. Kurz] “I think KFP actually upstages Apple themselves, showing various great options they should have included in FCP as well.”

True, but I’m not sure that this is problem.

When I saw how, let’s say, “slenderly featured” some parts of FCPX were upon release, even as a general fan of X’s approach, I had hoped that we’d see more of this. A nimble set of core features, and a robust architecture for adding on workflows and even codecs that don’t need to be supported for mainstream development. In my imaginary world, this would free Apple to focus on those feature sets that everyone needs.

On one hand, Apple has obviously done an admirable job filling in many of those gaps.

On the other, Apple has a hideous track record for supporting third parties. The record is long and doesn’t need recounting here. At least we’re past the point where every update to iTunes breaks FCP, but my dream was predicated on Apple not regularly burning its development partners. Fat chance. LOL

I’ve been out of the game for a while of course, so I don’t have much to say about KFP other than “looks cool.” I’ll note, though, that I’ve known Matt for many years, and I have the highest, highest respect for him. I can suggest at the very least that his customers will be in good hands.

And yes, looks cool. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “I’m sure someone has completed a marathon in high heels but that doesn’t make high heels appropriate (let alone the best) tools for the job. ;)”

The shoe simile I use is “You can drive a nail with a shoe, but it’s not ideal. And if you ever need to take a nail out, it’s impossible.”

Shoes. The new cars. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Jim Wiseman] ” Was a great place to sell Avids, and to meet with production clients.”

Those two to me are the primary values. Making deals and meeting people. Both of those are 10000% legit, and can’t be done any other way.

Somebody invoked my name earlier about the dealmaking at NAB. I have no way to verify this, but my hunch is that there’s more a lot money being made in head-to-head meetings among execs in suites (ie, not group demos to users) than on the floor.

But what drives those meetings in the first place is the trade show. “We’re both gonna be there, let’s get together.” And there’s an impetus for both parties to close the deal sooner rather than later. Even if it’s not at the show, it’s “When can you come to New York?” I’ve never left a show with vague plans.

(Not wanting to suggest that I ever made any deals at Avid. Those ppl wisely kept me locked out of the room. They’d tell me the meeting was in one hotel when it was really in another hotel across town. But I knew some guys who knew some guys.)

Same thing with meeting people. Speaking respectfully to what happens inside the room at trade show user group meetings (where I presented more times than I can count), the most important part of the event is what happens in the lobby. Like the show itself, it’s a good hub to connect to a lot of people that you’d otherwise not be able to fit into the schedule.

But even for people who don’t have deals to close or a bunch of people to meet, I think that, increasingly, most people will get a lot more out of the show by spending less time on the floor. Signal to noise ratio is dialed almost entirely up to noise. Sessions, seminars, all that kind of stuff, a lot of the best of it free…with the same benefits of seeing cool gear and meeting new friends.

So yeah, there’s my NAB Pro Tip: stay the hell off the show floor. LOL THAT’s the stuff you can go back to your hotel room and stream instead of wasting your precious time on it when you’re in town. LOL