[Mark Suszko]

Brett FX makes this effect but I think it is also now in the standard FCP effects catalog as well. Thanks for replying.

[Mark Suszko]

This does sound like a drive failure to me; can you confirm if the project and backup files were in a different partition than the last recovery version from July?

Don’t empty your trash folder. Go check it but don’t empty it.

I think what has happened to you is that the part of the files that is sort of a “table of contents” has become corrupted. Your data is there but is now invisible to the system.

Just in case you didn’t think about it, did you try the drive repair utility in your Mac to scan for damage to your RAID? Sometimes just the scanning seems to clear things up, if you tell it to repair the drive, you are rolling the dice on if it fixes your issue or makes it worse by losing something else critical to restoring the files. If this was happening to me, I’d lay off any remaining very critical files to an external backup drive before proceeding with anything.

I have seen demonstration videos of a drive repair tech fixing such a thing as corrupted headers and if you can afford the service that’s your next step.

I have used Premiere on both mac and pc and personally always found it somewhat squirrel-y, and that led to me exporting backup renders of critical files in h.264 renders every day to an external archive drive as insurance against just this kind of thing, for my own peace of mind.

99 times out of a hundred, pulling out a thumb drive on my mac in a hurry without ejecting it first didn’t hurt anything but yeah, that one time it did, everything on that drive became inaccessible, the same way it has for you. The data is still there, you just lost the map or index to it. This is what I think happened to your RAID.

[Mark Suszko]

A closer detail shot…

[Mark Suszko]

A clue has emerged: on one of my older iMacs, this effect still exists but I can’t find a way to publish or export the effect out. This is a green grab of part of it; does it help any of you to figure out how it was originally created?

[Mark Suszko]

A link to those samples would be useful.

[Mark Suszko]

One other thing to check is in the Inspector controls, go to the bottom and look for the checkbox: “Spacial Conform” and be sure it’s set to “none”. This little thing used to bite my partner in the butt many times. He’d complain that scaling up the image was losing too much resolution, and what was happening was the inspector defaulted to filling the frame with the shot when doing the automatic spacial conform, instead of leaving it at it’s native size. He’d tell me my footage was “bad” or “low rez” until I unclicked the spacial conform for him.

[Mark Suszko]

It’s definitely a balancing act to juggle between sponsored content, and the revenue it brings in, and non-sponsored content that’s not there to sell you anything, but just to add knowledge and solve a problem and create a community. I think the two can co-exist. But then you will be stretched for revenue unless you get aggressive with the ads. In space navigation they call that a “three-body problem”, I think, and the centroid of where those three things overlap is constantly moving around.

The Cow Youtube channel has some great training on it but most of what training I saw wasn’t all that recent. I’m sure that’s partly pandemic-related. Curating a YT channel is a very demanding, full-time job, to make it as responsive as it needs to be. That means posting something at least daily. Actually more than one “something”, daily. That’s hard.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m a bit peeved that the original content I created for this site (“Save This Script!” with Mark Suszko and John Morley) was purged without any notice to me. That’s happened to other long time COW hands I’ve heard from, who also put up content from way back, lots of it… and found it was all purged, no notice. They’re irked about it.

But that’s not why I haven’t been around as much. I still like the site and I’m still full of opinions and very happy to help wherever I can with whatever I know or have experienced… It’s just that many of the forums I spend the most time in around here haven’t shown me much, if any, new traffic for weeks or months, so I check in less and less often.

I think it’s a case of a paradigm shift away from “sticky content” to a fast-food self-service model that YouTube is delivering to people better than the COW, by simple dint of the weight of numbers. YT may or may not have superior -quality- answers to a quick question, it doesn’t even attempt to directly answer your question, but it has so very much more content overall, that’s *related* to your question, refreshed, not just daily, but hourly, in quantities that no other site can match it, that you’re likely to find your answer in two clicks. maybe not a complete answer, but close enough to figure out the rest.

More than that, once you ask YT your question, its algorithm will keep pushing more and more of that related content at you every day, like a firehose, until you tell it to stop. Whereas, the COW sits there and waits for you to come to it. And though your answers will come from live people, and be exactly related to your specific issue, they may not answer immediately. If you’re on deadline, that wait may be too long.

Basically the same thing is happening to the COW as what happened to brick and mortar mom and pop bookstores when Amazon changed the game.

If I was in a position to give advice, I’d say the only option for survival and continued relevance for the COW is not trying to beat YouTube at their own game. Because nobody can.

I’d say, look at the brick bookstores that still survived after Amazon, and you see they are niche places that curate to serve a smaller select crowd, and that suggests to me the answer is to go back to making a “sticky” web site of branded sources, known leaders in their fields, and timely, factual content that has enough quality and quantity to attract, engage, and hold new people and make them want to come back again and again to learn more. To become their online school. And since the content creators on the COW are not paid, (at least, I wasn’t) you’re asking for industry-leading volunteers to take time from making a living to make that content for free; people who see it as a calling, a mission, a legacy. Basically, and ironically, the very people who’s stuff was abandoned in the server changeover to save a buck. That’s a big ask.

[Mark Suszko]

Getting everything at the same color temp will make life easier. Sometimes we want a particular aesthetic, like the rainy day or day for night scenes, where we want it bluer on purpose… or to make certain items in a scene “pop” and so sometimes a lighting director or DOP deliberately doesn’t correct one or more sources, or tricks the balance with a shader card… but that’s more advanced kind of lighting design; you might want to work up to that later.

The other important thing for you right now besides color temp is to balance contrast ratios – the relative brightness of things in the scene – to direct the eye where you want it. Everything at the same average brightness level is boring. You use cutters, barn doors, negative fill boards or curtains, bounce cards/reflectors, and layers of diffusion to shape the light you have on the scene. You might make the light a little stronger and harder on one side of a face, the key light side to help give its shape more definition. Then you add some softer light on the opposite “fill” side, to moderate it. Your back light or rim light acts to help cut the talent apart from the background and give a more 3-d feel to a scene. Lowell lighting used to have an interactive demo studio online to show you how the scene changes with placement and intensity of lights. Here’s a link to a non-interactive grab from it, if you can find the actual interactive site, post the link here as well, please.

https://tiffen.reamaze.com/kb/lowel-guides/components-of-interview-lighting

[Mark Suszko]

Maybe what you really need is kinetic typography, which adds animation effects to type and mixes it with objects and images. Done well, it’s very effective. There are tons of examples out there, and most of the work can be done with your existing editing and image apps… here’s a random sample https://www.webdew.com/blog/kinetic-typography