[Ron Lindeboom]

[Bryan Bush] “I don’t think Maya’s paint effects was ever sold as an AE plug-in.”

Yes, it was, back in around 2000 as I recall. We were at SIGGRAPH 2000 in New Orleans when it was being shown.

The plug-in died a quick and ugly death. It came out and had installation issues that made it a nightmare to keep activated and the company — rather than fixing the issues — seemed more predisposed to letting it die.

I had a copy once and it worked for a short while.

The Maya Paint FX installation issues were almost as big a pain in the ass as Adobe’s new licensing scheme. (Kathlyn and I each bought the Master Collection and neither of us has access to all of the tools. Neither of us can load Encore DVD — which is why we bought the thing in the first place — and Kathlyn’s license tells her that she isn’t authorized to use Acrobat either.)

Maybe the Maya Paint FX team wrote the new Adobe installer and licensing system protocols.

That may be a likely bet…

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

[John Huff] “Thanks for your replies. Shane, I’m afraid I didn’t understand any of your post. If I understood what all those numbers and letters meant I’m sure I wouldn’t be asking this question.”

If you would use the search engine here in the COW or even Google, you could quickly and easily find out that the model numbers and information that Shane has given you is useful and directly applicable.

Here at the COW we do not guarantee that we will do tomes of information in-depth to explain to you all the ramifications, in detail, of why the answers you are given are applicable. We expect that people who come here are willing to do *some* of the work themselves.

Our leaders and others volunteer their help. They are not paid consultants. They are giving you good information and if you feel it incomplete, then hire a consultant to do the research work for you.

You slammed Shane with some far nastier comments than he ever leveled at you — yes, Shane got short with you himself but we’ll cut him slack as he has literally helped thousands here and we believe that everyone is entitled to a bad day — but I have turned off some of your nastier comments and replies and would tell you: Don’t come here asking questions if you are too lazy to follow up and search out what people tell you here.

That’s our bottom line in all this…

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Jerry Hofmann] “I was honored to talk to the RED user group at NAB, and to introduce Ted Schilowitz at the FCP Supermeet in front of (count ’em) 1500+ FCP users. Apple announced over a MILLION FCP registered FCP users. Man, at the first of these meets I think there was about 50 people… LOL, we’ve come a long way baby!”

Yes, it is funny how things have changed over the years, Jerry. I can remember when the FCP forum here at the COW (and before that when we ran the WWUG) was a small peripheral community on the fringes of what our site was then all about. If we got a few hundred people in a month (back in the days of the WWUG), we were doing fine. With the COW, it grew to thousands but was still very much a peripheral forum.

Today, the COW’s Final Cut forum alone does well over 120,000 totally unique users a month (of our monthly 750,000+ totally unique users, according to Google Analytics).

In fact, we just had to add three more servers — one, another quad Opteron, along with two spanking new Xserve servers on Leopard OSX — to handle the traffic increases which just keep going up and up. In fact, we hit the 750,000 monthly uniques marker just about a month and a half ago, and we are already well onto our way towards breaking the 800,000 total monthly uniques marker shortly.

A large part of our growth has been right here in FCP, which is now the Number One forum in the COW, even slightly ahead of our After Effects forum (which as many know has been the cornerstone of our site since we started it back in 2001).

It’s good to see FC grow with things like the new Final Cut Server, something that many users have been waiting for and which will add value to the FC ecosystem. With FC’s RED capabilities, the ecosystem is expanded even further and the number and experiential breadth of users using Final Cut will no doubt continue to accelerate in the days ahead. (And we’ll have to buy even more servers to help support that growth.) ;o)

Thanks for your contributions here, Jerry, and for your report. This has been a fascinating read to hear of your experience and what you have learned. Very interesting comments and perspective.

You are the man, man! ;o)

Best always,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

[eric pautsch] “Call local production companies and compete with them on price levels.”

While Eric is right that you can do this (to a point), in many cases this simply will not work as most seasoned pros do not post rates, per se.

You are not likely to find prices on many web sites and if you ask me for a PDF or my rates, I will start asking you a bunch of questions. Questions like: What type of project are you working on? What is your budget? What are the input and output/delivery formats and what are your distribution channels? There will be many others before I ever get you to the point of giving you even a cursory “price.”

The way many established pros work, you are likely to find yourself more akin to playing “nail them to their project and get it defined” than getting any idea of what to charge based on what they charge.

The forum here is full of discussions about rates and if you use the search engine, you will find many. If you don’t, then you can call around and see what your competition charges and undercut them. It’s a recipe for failure as it ignores the fact that you would not have considered your costs and many other factors that we have discussed in many past “rates” discussions, but it will also have you undercutting the ones who do post rates — which are usually new low-baller businesses. (Not always, but often.)

Sure, there are exceptions to the rules but in most cases and in all the people I know that work in this industry, I know of only a couple that actually post their rates.

Ron Lindeboom

[Ron Lindeboom]

Let’s put it this way: The boys at Revision FX won an Academy Award for the optical flow technology that is at the heart of their plug-in, if my memory serves me well.

For example, you can do some really rudimentary roto work in Final Cut also but I wouldn’t want to try to use it for a real job.

Revision FX’s retimer is a whole other level of tool than the one that ships with Final Cut, which is not a bad tool — it’s just that the retimer is a great tool.

Another way to say it is like I always tell Kathlyn: Women can have one of those young, good looking guys or they can refuse to settle for that and get one of us — er, um, well seasoned and softened (yeah, that’s it!) adonises. (Well okay, a really older brother of Adonis.)

Some tools are worth paying for if you need them.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

I know them and they have always been a legitimate company. Let me look into it for you and see what I can find out.

If you have a receipt number or any other information that you can send me at ron@creativecow.net I will be happy to assist you.

Give me a day or two because they are based in Europe and I am in California, so linking up may take a day or so.

Sorry to hear of this issue and we’ll help you sort it out.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

As David Roth Weiss mentioned, tapeonline.com supports the COW and they are also very great people to deal with — as Walter points out as well. They have been great supporters of Creative COW and we are grateful for their sponsorship of the COW. We just added another quad-Opteron (on Linux) and two new Xserve servers (on Leopard Server) to the COW’s server farm to support our ever increasing traffic levels. Without companies like TapeOnline.com, we just couldn’t afford to support a site like this, which now does well over 3/4s-of-a-million unique users a month. Wow. How did *that* happen? ;o)

I am sure that if you call them and are willing to fax them your proof of being a student, they will have some program for students.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

[walter biscardi] “we’re allowed one day off every third month during the full moon.”

Except that Walter is being docked for the next two three-month periods and will have to work straight through them.

This is due to him stealing Cowdog’s bowl of kibble and beer when Walter was last out here. (Walter said that the mixture of Samuel Adams beer and the Kibbles N’ Bits makes for quite a satisfying cap to the end of an edit session!)

Cowdog the Merciless said that he wanted to insure that Walter got the point. Bad Cowdog.

Ron Lindeboom

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Nick Griffin] “And THAT boys and girls is why Ron is one of the smartest people any of us know. Brilliant, Ron.”

Boy, I am embarrassed and find this actually discomforting as I know that you, Nick, and many of the other far smarter voices than me are the real mental powerhouses around here.

And most importantly, I am honored to know you all and count you among my friends.

I learn from you constantly.

Ron Lindeboom

[Ron Lindeboom]

We have found another way to make school donations, because as Mark pointed out, we have learned that the schools do not want to make themselves a support nightmare by having a bunch of disparate systems hodge-podged together.

So what we do is we ask to speak with one of the teachers that we have worked with and we ask them: “Which student needs and deserves a computer that doesn’t have one — either because the parents are too poor or their parents don’t have the vision to understand just how important it is to know computers? We don’t want to give it to someone who could otherwise buy a computer but we are looking for someone who really wants one but whose prospects are non-existent under the circumstances.”

There is always a very deserving candidate and one year when we did this, the family was so appreciative that we would give their child such an expensive gift that they called and asked if they could visit and thank us personally. We said okay. When they showed up, the Mom had baked a bunch of baked goods for us and brought over food. It was a fantastic afternoon and the student ran into us a couple years later at the store and told us just all they had been doing with the machine.

This may not get you the tax write-off of a “legal” donation to a school — or even the change in your pocket you will get from an eBay sale — but to think that our aging but still quite powerful machines find new life like this in the lives of others, is far more fun.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom