[Nick Griffin]

A few thoughts.

1) Probably best not to do business with people with whom there is so little trust as to require complex legal agreements beforehand.

2) Unless… there is a butt-load of potential pay-off involved.

3) Your post has a question best answered by an entertainment lawyer… for a smaller butt-load of cash.

4) These type of legal contracts can be difficult just across state borders within the US. When it’s across international borders little to any of what you have in a contract may stand-up.

5) So, make sure the earnings (especially the gross earnings) are controlled from your country, not theirs.

6) Please refer to #3) above. I’m NOT a lawyer but I do know how easy it is to completely ignore and violate what seem like solid contracts when they are across international borders.

[Nick Griffin]

Oh yea. and the one time I got everything hooked up and turned it on I was quickly reminded why in it’s day they had “machine rooms” separate from where one was working.

Could have spent the money to get it fully up and running, but it was more fun as an antique. That and, in thinking about it, I really didn’t want to see the stuff I was doing in the 80’s.

[Nick Griffin]

What a coincidence I just had one as an “antique” in my office when it was destroyed by fire. It went well with the old radios and Edison cylinder player. Earlier I sold an RCA 44DX ribbon microphone which had been sitting atop one of the radios when I found out I could get more than $1,000 for it. Hmmm, tough choice: a cute antique mic or a $1,000. Glad I took the money.

Here’s how a got the Sony deck: About ten years ago a friend who ran a production facility called me and said “It’s yours, if you want it and are willing to move it. Otherwise it’s going in the dumpster.” (along with a lot of other gear from that genre.)

[Nick Griffin]

Oh yeah, almost forgot: there’s nothing like friends in times of loss. I’m especially thankful for the offers of help received on and off-line. The COW truly is a family that I appreciate more than can be conveyed in words alone.

[Nick Griffin]

Well, wish it had been that simple and straightforward. Everyone said to me, “As much as you know about computers you must have had extensive back-ups.” I did. Problem was they were on bare hard drives in cases sitting BESIDE the main computer. Some still worked after the fire, most didn’t. To get the 4 drives inside my Mac tower back I used DriveSavers and can highly recommend them, but they sure aren’t cheap. Something on the order of $6,450 for one 1tb SSD and three 4tb conventional hard disks.

We had a 2tb drive kept at my partner’s house but had very remiss in keeping it current. At least I was able to use it to get started while waiting on the restoration of the SSD boot drive. Oh… and here’s something I never knew: DriveSavers recovers just data, NOT applications or system stuff. Most of that was brought back to life from a Time Machine disk which was one of the internal drives recovered by DriveSavers.

Then, still there were problems getting all of the software back and working. To my complete surprise Quark (the program we use for print work) came back to life with just a brief on-line verification. Avid was a bit more complex and finally required their tech support to remotely install and activate it. AND no one ever told me that I’d have to down-grade to the Yosemite OS on our brand new tower because it comes with El Capitan which Avid does not yet support. (Apparently they only started supporting Yosemite early last week.)

It was time to upgrade QuickBooks anyway, so I just bought a new copy. Same with MS Office. A slightly higher cost than pursuing upgrades but OHHHH so much simpler.

Now, as to Adobe, if I state the facts I believe it is not libel. We bought the very last Master Creative Suite 6 on disks before they went to the CS subscription model because I liked the idea of “owning” rather than renting software. This week I spent hours and hours in Adobe’s phone tree before finally reaching a human being and this is literally how the conversation went:

Her: “Sir can you just read me the serial # off the original disks?”
Me: “Uh… as I said the disks and their box were destroyed in a fire.”
Here: “OK, but can you read me the serial number?”

Finally, in disgust after going through another endless phone tree which gave sales as it’s only human option — a human who could ONLY sell subscriptions or put me back into the phone tree — I broke down and subscribed to Adobe CS. If there was any viable alternative to Adobe I’d switch in a heartbeat. How is it that this company isn’t in violation of anti-trust rules?

In spite of all of these hassles, we were very well insured and the home policy almost immediately moved into the final settlement phase. The business policy’s coverage is still somewhat up in the air and I may have to learn the hard way that not keeping making updates to the “scheduled” property can be costly.

BUT, no people were hurt or lost, just stuff. So lessons learned: always upgrade EVERY part of an older home’s wiring (our fire was caused by an arc in 1920’s ‘knob and tube’ style wiring in the oldest portion of the structure); Maintain OFF-SITE archives and update them frequently; deal with only the best insurance agents and companies; and someday I may be able to get back to working full time and not spending hours with inspectors, adjusters, insurance companies and realtors. Someday soon I can hope.

So from our hotel room of six weeks (so far), that’s the story to date. May this NEVER happen to any of our many Bovine buddies!

[Nick Griffin]

Thanks, Tim! It’s been a bit of a rough month but finally getting all the new stuff up and running is invigorating. (Just wish someone had told me that Avid won’t run on El Capitan and back-grading to Yosemite required professional help. And to think just 20 years ago I made a lot of money as a Mac consultant.)

A HUGE thanks to all my friends for their help, especially the COW’s Ty Ford and David Weiss!

[Nick Griffin]

Just to add to a lot of already good information, one of the most common problems in building out a studio is making the room “dead” sound-wise. Almost always builders consruct walls that are parallel and therefore prone to create a mild to serious echo / room tone.

An almost simple fix is to make one or more walls NOT square to the opposite side of the room, but built so that instead of the corner being the typical 90 degrees it’s 75. When this wall is built it can also help by putting a second layer of sheet rock on top of the first. Weight is your friend, especially for low frequencies. The COW’s Ty Ford, for example, has sheets of lead covering the small windows in his studio.

Other things that can be added rather than the typical consumer-grade acoustic tiles are thick foam panels. Sonex is one of the most popular, but there are many cheaper copy-cat versions on the markets. You should also look into, and seek professional advice on having a “bass-trap” that’s appropriate to the size of your room.

[Nick Griffin]

[Alain Dessauvage] “BMD is now Avid’s preferred hardware partner and works with Resolve”

Hmmm, good to know but talk about strange bedfellows? The new Resolve is touting itself as having NLE capabilities and, while not as powerful, MC Symphony competes with Resolve, right?

[Nick Griffin]

Wow! It came in under our typical project, but not by much. The HUGE variable that can’t be known without a script is number of shoot days and number of set-ups.

[Nick Griffin]

Then there is the whole matter of meeting the TV stations’ “standards” for format, delivery, broadcast safe levels of color and luma. Sorry to say Jimmy that it appears you’ve yet to learn what you don’t know. Your path to success will be made much smoother by first working with/for someone with practical experience in production. Just having gear and software is no where near enough.

And I wholly agree that Ned needs a hug… or a chill pill.