[Ron Lindeboom]

[Jay Blanchard] “Just a question though–do you typically send a warning before “banning” someone from CC? I guess I could see Michael’s POV if he wrote some harsh words about Panasonic and suddenly was booted from the Cow: that he was censored.”

This is not the first time that Michael and I have run afoul of one another, as I have removed things of his before. He knows our policies as they have not changed in ten years of building communities. Michael has seen me remove some of his posts and he still wishes to repost them. If Michael wishes to call me a liar he is more than welcome to and he will not be the first nor probably the last person to do so.

But that said, I will say that what he put up on his website is grossly misleading and written with a callous disregard for the truth. He was quite aware of the real reasons as I had written him and explained our reasoning (which he conveniently chose to disregard in his “Michael’s march to martyrdom” post he added to the intro of his article). But truth is far less titillating than stirring up a “controversy of martyrdom” and so he chose to disregard the truth in his parade of self promotion.

[Jay Blanchard] “The last thing anybody wants is a censored forum, as it would be completely antithetical to what these discourses are all about.”

Jay: We have always moderated and censored these boards — have since Day One back in 1995. If we didn’t, then the outcome would be the four or five most aggressive personalities shouting down anyone without their level of testosterone. No thanks! We like the fact that (on most forums, at least), women feel free to post in the Cow as themselves and not as James Wilson and Robert Wood. Oddly, though, the HDV forum and the Panasonic P2 forums are largely devoid of any female posts — other than Jan Crittenden Livingston of Panasonic. So that, in part, is one of the reasons that we censor posts, remove certain threads and other steps to try to send a message to our members of the fairer sex that we’d like them to participate, as well. I like women and I love working with my wife. I consider it one of the great things in my life that Kathlyn and I get to work together and it is one of the reasons that I am cognizant of the fact that testosterone-fueled ego matches and the typical male “I’m the hallowed professor at the lecturn and so I will grace you peasants with my superior knowledge” ego pontifications is something that we’ve always grown weary of here, quite quickly.

We call it “flutter,” and when flutter happens, we move to quell it quickly if it doesn’t die down on its own. In most forums here in the Cow, we do not have to do a thing as the communities have developed their own sense of balance and are thankfully very good at self-correction.

In most forums of the Cow, I never pull a single post or ban a single user in the course of a year. But the HDV forum’s past nastiness and snide rudeness has been the usual one-forum-a-year-goes-ape exception and I have ridden that forum hard to insure that, in time, it joins the rest of the Cow as a usefull and productive community. Having four or five big mouths in there is not what I call community. So we have worked to correct it. We have never wanted all the traffic and if we end up with 20% of what others have, that is quite okay with us as long as those that remain understand that this is not an arm-wrestling contest and that power is often best used in restraint.

Those that do not understand our point are quite free to criticize the way we do things. I never expect that everyone is going to like me, nor should they. I do not suffer from such a profound sense of self-fixation that I believe that everyone should understand me. They won’t. But when I look at the vast number of people who “get” the point of the Cow and are comfortable with the site and its policies, then I will accept that as a testament that we must be doing at least something right.

And as I have said many times over the years, those who do not like the way we do things are free to start their own sites and build their own communities in their own vision. But as for the Cow’s founders, we’ve been a stubborn couple for the last decade and I doubt that we’ll be changing our outlook on how we build this thing anytime soon.

For those who want to call us liars and worse, we won’t worry enough to go into the various assorted hornet’s nests on the net to bother defending ourselves. Over the last ten years of doing this, we’ve survived the loss of our past site, which cost us nearly five years and over $130,000 spent building it. Over the last ten years, we’ve also survived the loss of one or two massive egotists who said that they had built these forums and left in a huff saying that they’d bury us — we therefore affectionately refer to them as “Nikita’s Twins” because of their obvious Nikita Khruschchev fixation.

And just to make one thing clear, if we were simply in this for the money, we’d not have created the “Creative Cow Master Series” DVD training series which we just introduced at NAB — and in which we pick up all the manufacturing costs, the marketing and the promotion but EVERY DIME goes to the authors. We do not keep one red cent. We built Creative Cow Publishing for our leaders. They helped us build the Cow and now we are helping them build value into what is basically an “artist owned” publishing venture — we do not even charge back the production costs but write it all off as an advertising expense.

Everyone has their critics, we can live with ours…

Ron Lindeboom

[Ron Lindeboom]

Michael was not banned from Creative Cow for posting the article. Michael Pappas’s account was closed because he kept on repeatedly reposting things of this type and we work way too hard building the Cow to have anyone copy-and-paste the same stuff that they’ve placed everywhere else across the Net.

We want to protect the uniqueness of the Cow and always have worked hard to do that. We do not want it to look like the same arguments that are going on everywhere else across the Net.

Personally, I do not like to repost things written in private but since Michael never bothered to respond to my private email and wishes to make the issue public, then I feel safe in reposting what I wrote him regarding the topic — especially since he said that it was somehow due to Noah Kadner, which it wasn’t:

Hello Michael,

We appreciate your kind words about the Cow and want you to understand why it is that we have elected to turn off your account. It has nothing to do with you personally and we do not dislike you. What it has to do with is that we work very hard to try to build a site which is unique and reflects the highest possible signal-to-noise ratio that we are capable of producing. It doesn’t always work and we are far from perfect in always accomplishing this goal, but we do try hard. When people cross-post the same thing which they have posted across many other forums, it makes the Cow look like just another set of ‘same-ole, same-ole’ forums. Gone is the character of the Cow and in its place is just a repeat of what can be found across many other sites on the Net. We work far too hard for it to end up like this. Therefore, we turned off your account as it is imperative that the Cow develop into a community that is based on its own character, not that of a television rerun of everything else that is found across the Net. The Cow never has been about free speech and we do not advocate it as one of our principles. The Cow is about community and when the goals of free speech and building community collide, community wins every time at the Cow. As I have said many times over the years, we are not talking about issues of conscience, politics or religion here, it is merely digital video and we do not feel that free speech at all costs is imperative at the Cow. These are hardly the “heady” issues of conscience we are discussing and so we must remain faithful to the vision we have for Creative Cow.

I hope that that explains our policies and why we have turned off your account. It had nothing to do with Noah and everything to do with not wanting to be a repeat of every other site out on the Net.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom

People are quite welcome to disagree but we won’t be changing our policies in this regard.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

Is this one of those trick questions like “If my Dad had been a woman, I could have called him ‘Mom,’ but he wasn’t and so I get to call him, ‘Dad'” kinda thingies, Paul???

;o)

The chip set on this design got locked in its engineering design long before we added this forum. Any debate as to the merits of bigger chips will have to await another camera altogether. This, as the smaller chips are the domain of the AG-HVX200.

If you want the bigger chips in a Panasonic camera in 2005, then you will need to consider the Varicam.

Boomer

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Barry Green] “Sure wish we could edit posts here!”

We have debated long and hard on the merits of adding an edit function to the board.

It looks as if we will be adding it shortly but with limits — as we do not want people to “stir the pot” and get things going, get proved wrong and then go back and edit their words. (Which would then make the replies look quite stupid and out of sync.)

So, it looks as if our edit function will only allow an user to modify their post for:

• The first 30 minutes, or
• Until someone replies to the post.

Once someone replies, even in the first 30 minutes, then the post is locked. We want people to think about what they say and in some sites, they allow editing functionality even after replies are made and it really makes the threads turn into rhetorical garbage.

So, stay tuned — the edit function is coming.

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

Congratulations on another successful SEMAFX event, Scott Paul. The Detroit area is fortunate to have a great group like SEMAFX. You guys are a top-flite group.

If you want some Creative Cow mousepads to give out at a future metting, please let Kathlyn know and we will get some printed for you guys to use as prizes or something.

Best always,

Ron Lindeboom
Proud Friend & Feeder of Cowdog

[Ron Lindeboom]

Hi Peter,

I never suspected that *everyone* works the same way and I had little doubt that someone reading my comments would speak up. ;o)

I have never met any product or format that was perfect and a “one-size-fits-all” in this industry. This format, in its first roll-out at least, is not likely to find long-form shooters fighting to get to the front of the buyers line.

I see the format as first appealing to the ENG world, which is where Panasonic has targeted its first generation P2, and then fanning out from there. Long-form shooters are, as expected, further down in the “prospect pile.”

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

Thanks, Toke, for making adding some common sense to this whole matter. ;o)

A friend of mine and I walked around NAB together for a while and he brought up some of the same tired arguments against P2 that I have seen here on this forum. He went on and on about the storage capacity and the length of recording time. I let him dig his hole real deep before asking him: “When was the last time you shot more than a minute or two in a scene? I don’t know about your work habits but I do not shoot for an hour straight with my finger on the trigger…”

He looked at me and was silent.

He had even less to say when I told him that the (to quote his words) “high priced harddrive from Panasonic” could dump the seven minutes at 5x realtime (from what I remember hearing) and that in less than a-minute-and-a-half, I could be ready for the next shot. “How fast are your actors?” I asked him.

Again, he was pretty quiet.

Personally, I like both the Z1 from Sony and the P2 from Panasonic. Let ’em duke it out, me says. ;o)

In the end, it will be the market that is the real winner when two giants scramble with ideas and solutions like these…

Thanks again, Toke. Nice to read your comments.

Greetings to Finland.

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[Ron Lindeboom]

When I explored the Algolith booth offerings, I was told the same as Jonathan. In fact, Jonathan, I’d like to work with you to turn your post into an article — credited to you, of course — as I think it would be of interest to our readers. Are you interested???

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom

[Ron Lindeboom]

Yes, you will find a lot of discussion about it in the Cow’s HDV Format forum. Click the “Change Forum” button at left to find it.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom

[Ron Lindeboom]

Wow! — massages, a spa and champagne?#@!?

Now I know why Kathlyn and Barend would never let Alan Bell or me up to the second floor of the booth. They kept us down on the ground floor level where we were made to row like old Roman galley slaves.

Gee, and back rubs too, eh??? Now I am *really* jealous. All Alan and I got was a chance to watch that cow animation on the Christie booth’s giant screen directly across from our booth. What a perfect animation, we couldn’t have paid for such a serendipitous animation as that of a cow landing on a rodent and flattening it. Too funny.

Gotta love them cows.

;o)

It was great to have you swing by and introduce yourself, RBG. We appreciated the chance to say hello.

Ron Lindeboom