[Tim Wilson]

@ericsantiago2 wrote

Will it really be obsolete in 3 years?
Lets talk in 3 years

I’m not sure that there’s such a thing as obsolete anymore. There are plenty of pre-trashcan Mac Pros still running, still making people money. Heck, Bryan’s own previous box ran for 10 years, right?

Yeah, there comes a time when you can’t upgrade this or that component, or maybe it gets stuck with an older OS or version of FCPX — but are those really happening inside three year windows anymore?

@bryanroberts wrote

while the dust settles on the transition to ARM

Wellll, there may be a new monkey thrown into the wrench. Announced Sunday: NVIDIA is in talks to acquire ARM for $40 billion! Details here. This is going to come under acres of scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic. I have no doubt that both NVIDIA and ARM want the deal to go through smooth as silk, and surely part of the value of ARM to NVIDIA is the value of ARM’s pending contracts. But I can’t imagine that this will have ZERO effect on the transition. Although hey, why not, right? Maybe nobody but me and The Verge (home of the link above) will care.

If anything, this says don’t think of ARM as factoring in one way or the other. There’s certainly nothing wrong with another $4K in your pocket, but not putting yourself through any more annoyances to set up a new system any more often than you absolutely have to is worth something too, right?

[Tim Wilson]

I definitely saw it in the feed, but once again, looking good here!

Can you tell me your browser and OS?

Anybody else seeing this?

[Tim Wilson]

And to finish answering the question about uploading video, you can of course use your favorite hosting service to uplaod the video to, and then embed it in the COW. I’m using imgur more and more these days, but your mileage will vary…

[Tim Wilson]

Hi @grahambernard

I had seen that that markup redraw issue in the main feed preview, but when I came to look at it here, it’s gone. Try reloading the page, and let me know if you see it looking right now too.

Maybe a passing error where the page loaded before the code had finished parsing? I’ll keep watching it.

(btw, have y’all tried the @ feature? It’s not complete yet, so we haven’t been tooting the horn about it, but people get notified if you “@” them, which makes it easier to track replies. Kinda slick, but as I mentioned, we’re still building that out….

thx,

tw

[Tim Wilson]

For the record, you haven’t been able to upload video in the old COW for years, either. We ended the feature when we were swamped with lawyers insisting that WE pay for all the unlicensed music in the clips we were hosting, mostly in the reels. (I’m not pointing any fingers. LOL) We didn’t have the money for that, and we barely had time to comply with all the takedown notices, so we simply stopped hosting video.

That said, licensing has changed, and as Graham has noted, returning video upload to our feature set is on our Q4 roadmap for sure.

Along with that will come the reopening of our video reels gallery, which had over 10,000 clips in it before most people knew how to spell the word “Vimeo”. LOL We’d forgotten that most of those clips were encoded in Flash, which was then the state of the art, and now more or less banned from sites of good reputation. 🙂 Including ours. We don’t have Flash anywhere anymore. So we have some additional work to undertake on the encoding front.

Anyway, it has been the case for a while that we have asked folks to host video on the platform of their choosing. imgur has become my favorite by far — free, easy, nimble, widely distributed, etc. — but yeah, we’ll have video uploading again soon.

Thanks,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

PS. Sigs are coming back too! Our first priority was just to get the thing launched so that we could move on the next phase, which includes bringing back in some features like these, and some shiny new ones too! Thanks for your patience while we work this all out.

[Tim Wilson]

@grahamquince wrote:

Slightly different note, my company runs it’s own conference each year and we moved this one online and ran it as a live, 4-hour broadcast. We had guest speakers, comment areas, published the schedule etc… No one needed to travel, pay for hotel rooms or in some cases, miss work. And as a result we had much better attendance than recent years. I don’t think we’ll be moving back to physical conferences.

This is the Tsunami Moment in a nutshell. We could have gone fully virtual a little bit ago if we’d been motivated. Not that there aren’t kinks to work out — I’d hate to think that what we’ve seen so far from most people is the best we’ll be able to do — but now we have the motivation, and just as with the transition to tapeless, for every short term disadvantage, there are unique advantages galore, opportunities that we could never have other otherwise taken.

At the very least, I hope that people in the physical conferences keep getting much, much better at virtual events, and use this opportunity to build new audiences, new markets, and other things that are completely new.

That is, one reason why I think that virtual NAB and IBC have fallen flat is that they’re trying to recreate an experience spread across a million square feet (the former) or across the entirety of one of the world’s great cities (the latter). (And having mentioned how much I enjoyed going to Vegas, I LOVE LOVE LOVE Amsterdam. It really is a wall-to-wall miracle.) Instead of trying to cram all of that into a computer screen (if not a phone), do something NEW.

The folks who run those shows aren’t necessarily creatives themselves. No disrespect intended. Trade shows are a brutal business that I’m glad to be out of. But they KNOW creative people, by the boatload, so how about working to design something so compelling that nobody in their right mind would skip it? Rather than almost exactly the opposite.

it’s not quite the same if you can’t pick up a camera/tripod/light

I get why some people care about this kind of thing, especially if you’re a shooter who travels. You need to know if feels in your hand.

But to Mark’s point earlier, most moderately sized cities have dealers for this, if not rental houses where you can take it out. In the US, there are bunches of rental houses that will ship cameras and lights overnight via FedEx for a tenth the price of a plane ticked to Las Vegas. This stuff is imminently available.

And companies like Amazon, Broadfield, and B&H that will ship you the products you decide to buy will all take returns.

I’m speaking from experience here. I bought a Sony Beta SP camera for $10,000 and a Canon ENG lens for $12,000 back when that represented a good part of an annual salary. Not that I was making a salary. I took out a second mortgage to kit out my video production business (and yes, I know that having a mortgage in my early 30s dates me too, but it was a $50,000 house in Florida when you could live there cheap). I didn’t need to fly all the way across the country to wrestle my way through a scrum in the desert just to hold it. I was on a small island, but UPS got it to me from New York in a couple of days. I knew about what I was getting, and that’s what I got.

And if I didn’t like it, I’d have sent it back and been out maybe $100 for shipping.

I admit that most people will want to visit a dealer or rental house first, in which case, check into it. Don’t assume that there’s not one near you, because so many rental houses will ship to you. And honestly, there are better uses of your time. Read another review, talk to some people in the COW, and trust yourself.

I think that’s exactly what’s happening. Look at all the companies releasing new cameras this year!!! From the INSANE Blackmagic 12K to new mirrorless cameras from Sony that are blowing my mind, and a whole lot of other stuff. Developers aren’t waiting. Why would YOU? If you want it, you can get it.

I can’t say that I studied epidemiology, but I took some classes, mostly because my advisor was an epidemiologist, and I thought he was one of the coolest, smartest guys I’ve ever met. (Which I still think.) We spent a LOT of time looking at the “1918” flu, which actually went over two full years — from the spring of 1918 to the fall of 2020.

(Did you know that Babe Ruth got it twice, and nearly died the second time? A week with a fever of 104, went into a coma that doctors assume he’d never come out of. Both times he caught it: during an exhibition game “for the troops.”)

Which means that right now, we’re still kinda scratching our heads. We don’t know exactly how we’re going to do stuff. And yeah, at a certain point a lot of things WILL come back. But other things may not come back in the same way because the change had already been underway.

And I do get that people needed to SEE the RED camera in 2005, because the hype was unbelievable. Literally. But seeing is believing. Now, they don’t need to prove themselves. Who really does? If you’re a DP who needs to do a shootout for your project, you were never doing that at NAB anyway. You were doing that through your local rental house.

I also remember when this was true for hard drives. Manufacturers were lying through their teeth about arrays capable of playing multiple streams of this or that…although it turns out that many were lying in the booths too! They were playing video off tape decks in artfully composed demos, where the boxes on the desk were EMPTY except for the flashing lights giving the illusion that the drives were reading and writing! So in the case, yet another reminder that there’s point to travel hundreds or thousands of miles to be lied to, when you get lied to at home. Few people have anything left to learn from a drive demo anymore.

There’s been a transition for broadcast gear, too. You used to need to travel to a trade show to see what a digital, automated newsroom looks like…but who needs that now? I saw this changing even when I was still in the game back in 2006. People got the gist. Better to make the vendors fly to you, map out your workflow, and make a specific proposal. I saw pitches from Avid’s broadcast team that were pages and pages of full-size blueprints. Don’t tell me that you can make my workflow better. SHOW me, on paper, EXACTLY what you’re going to do, and how. THAT’s what they needed.

NEED is a funny word. There are things we want, things we enjoy because we enjoy them, but the one thing we’ve established is that nobody NEEDS things to “go back”. The only people benefitting from that are the ones with a financial stake in the old ways. We ALL benefit if we can get creative about going forward.

[Tim Wilson]

But one reason I like NAB in Vegas is to rent a Harley and do some riding.

I am by no means a Vegas hater. Quite the contrary. My wife used to come in on Wednesday and spend some time walking around the show, because it really is kind of cool. ESPECIALLY the hardcore broadcast stuff. (For my money, the South Hall stopped being all that compelling at exactly the moment it left The Sands.)

Then we’d stay through the weekend at someplace nice like Bellagio or The Venetian when they were new (which tells you how long ago this was) and see a bunch of Cirque de Soleil and comedy, and eat like crazy people. (Forget the buffets. Vegas has more proper world-class restaurants per square mile than all but a few places on earth.)

Heck, one year we flew in my parents and took them to O and the art museum at the Bellagio. Steve Wynn has one of the world’s elite private art collections and has done a fantastic job sharing it with the public. Every billionaire maniac should be so open minded.

I also like the idea of trade shows as providing a way for end users to meet each other, without respect to the vendors. I think we should be doing more of THAT regionally, too.

But I feel like people’s fondness for their own experiences adjacent to these events is preventing us from having the conversations we need to have, starting with, who is it benefitting that so many end users are so eager to line the pockets of lobbyists for oligarchs who are driving the industry in exactly the wrong direction? I’d say it’s benefitting the lobbyists driving the industry in exactly the wrong direction and their clients FAR more than its benefitting you, me, or our favorite companies, or the industry as a whole.

I’d rather see us come up with some ways to draw ourselves together that actually help people who need helping. Regional events are a great start.

[Tim Wilson]

another case of “cure by Cow”

This is the best thing I have ever heard! We will definitely figure out a way to use it!

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Jeremy wrote:

I think there are a lot of things that are experiencing a Sony Tsunami moment.

What a great observation! I think it’s worth exploring in a separate thread that I think I’ll start. Movie theaters come immediately to mind as another.

We are speccing shoots are there will be zero client and agent on set, but rather they will be in video village at their respective homes while we stream the set back to them. We are speccing out shoots where none of us will be there, and all of us will be viewing remote while we direct talent who is also setting up the lights, camera, and audio that we have shipped them.

I’ve seen photos of sets like this, and it really is remarkable. Properly set up interviews with people in different rooms, rather than just screencaps of crappy Zoom calls. I think that we really are moving very quickly into something different, and we’re all going to have to learn a lot about processes and tools to make this possible.

[Tim Wilson]

Ron wrote:

Some companies have already been eschewing the timeworn “April/September release mantra.” The pandemic is going to escalate that phenomenon.

Blackmagic and Apple are among the companies who’ve operated strictly on their own cycles for years, and I think that we will be seeing more of this. We should! It’s the right thing to do!

Part of what I find so galling about NAB’s “acknowledgement” that they are responsible for driving spending and innovation is the reality that nothing creates a greater drain on productivity, and does more to prevent stable launches, than the stranglehold that they have artificially and arbitrarily created.

(I was going to say, “and have now just as arbitrarily moved”, but of course we know that it wasn’t arbitrary at all. To quote one of the people on that excellent LinkedIn thread you link, they have parked their tanks on IBC’s lawn.).

Here’s the problem. Products have a development cycle that takes as long as it takes. Maybe it fits into NAB’s calendar, maybe it doesn’t. Mostly it doesn’t. This is the root of vaporware. I call it fearware. People are desperate to show SOMETHING because NAB has convinced them that they will die if they do not.

So people twist themselves into knots for weeks or months before the show, working crazy hours that wreck their immune systems at exactly the wrong time. They rush announcements, then rush releases, and customers are stuck waiting for the “fix” that SHOULD have been the actual release in the first place. Everyone has wasted time, and the amount of money that developers have wasted getting to the show is colossal. They would have made more money, had happier customers, and gotten through the year in better health if they’d just kept a reasonable pace and released the products when they were ready.

Then there’s the drain on productivity across the industry as people leave work, get sick or hung over, come back needing a vacation, and work like zombies until they can take a break.

Look, if it’s fun for you, good. I know that companies make plenty money during the show, but largely because customers have been trained to wait. It’s not BECAUSE of the show.

We’re not going to get anywhere with assessing how to create a better way forward until we’re honest about how unhealthy this has been for our entire industry. The one group that has benefitted from this is a tiny cabal of Washington DC lobbyists who are fighting for the exact future that not one of us really wants, where billionaire terrestrial broadcasters are calling all the shots for media production and distribution.