[Ron Lindeboom]

David Johnson, you are awesome. 😉

Your 3rd paragraph is EXACTLY what some people are missing in this conversation. People will be able to set their personal way of viewing the site. They can elect to not see newbie stuff or they can see it, it’s their call.

Why people should think that every advanced user should be automatically forced to deal with issues of a simple nature, is beyond me.

Many will elect to assist with newbie questions. Many will not.

But the real point that is a KEY to making this workable, is that some miss the point that there are 1.7 million people that regularly come to this site every month. If every upper-intermediate-to-advanced user were to opt out of the process, HALF of the site will still see every newbie question.

The questions will get answered.

Why some people think that they must be answered by the most advanced users is beyond me. The answer is important, not who answers.

We DO know what we are doing (thank you for noting that, David) and we have spent years crafting the mechanisms that will pull this all off fluidly, simply, respecting various levels of users, and allowing for questions to be answered quickly.

It is important for ALL levels of users to be respected.

We have absolutely nothing but respect for nearly all of our users (oh, there’s a few whose abuse of the spirit of the site makes it hard to always guarantee that everyone’s questions will be met with respect).

Maybe I need to set a rule in the site to flag me whenever someone says RTFM or whenever the word manual is used. That way, I can see how people are treating others.

We do NOT want to chase off newer users, but we DO want them to understand that this was born out of 16 years of building online communities for media professionals and if we are going to succeed in the days to come, we cannot water this site down with everyone thinking that their questions MUST be answered by the highest person available or they haven’t got the “real” answer.

If the people in the middle can assist the ones just starting out, that makes sense to me. If the ones at the top are fine-tuning the people whose expertise is growing and who need to be guided to the next level — that too makes sense to me.

But having people think that everyone should automatically “walk into the corporation’s boardroom and ask the board where the soda machine is,” is not very realistic or workable in the real world.

Part of what we are teaching newer users here is that this is a business and if they are going to succeed in business, there are protocols and conventions that must be respected if one is going to build a career.

That too is a cornerstone of the COW and it is why we launched a business and marketing forum early on, and why we built Creative COW Magazine.

There is far more to this industry than technical questions getting answered and if we are going to remain relevant, we too need to address many things or we will find ourselves outside the very industry we have supported for many years now.

Again, thank you David for the vote of confidence. It is appreciated and Bessie says you get three glasses of chocolate milk for saying it.

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine

Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.

“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen

[Ron Lindeboom]

One of the things we have been engineering (which will soon be a part of the COW) is the ability to “auto-compartmentalize” the truly newbie posts from the more experienced and complex matters. This will allow us to have varying degrees of users on the same forum and while it is one community, newer users will earn their way up the ladder to gain access to the highest level users. The higher level users here will not see the newbie posts unless they elect to. Newer to intermediate users can assist the total newbie users, while the more experienced users can focus on the more complex issues.

While this solution may not appeal to the “T-Ball Contingent” here at the COW, there really does need to be a solution to the problem of those who come to the COW and want everyone else to do all their work for them.

It is something we have been kicking around for the last year or so and we believe that it will both simplify the COW, while making it far more useful to both newer and more experienced users.

All of us are newbies on something, and have been total newbies at times. We respect both levels of our audience and think that we have finally come up with a way to serve both in a way that allows both to function appropriately and get the answers they need — whether those answers are complex or more basic.

Thank you both, Davids 1 & 2, for your kind words and feedback. We truly appreciate the time you took to give us your viewpoints.

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine

Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.

“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen

[Ron Lindeboom]

Thank you for your feedback, Dave.

You like it one way, but someone else likes it another. For those who prefer the threaded view, we have things set to their style of preference. For those who like topical views as their default, we have it set another.

Now that you know the way you like it, you can set it exactly the way you prefer. That is the point of our mechanism.

But it seems to me that # of replies, and date of last reply are pretty obvious (and maybe even of no consequence?) when we are addressing the subject of unanswered posts.

Thank you for being a part of the COW, Dave.

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine

Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.

“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen

[Ron Lindeboom]

Yes, Jason, we kept getting the “Hey! Your videos don’t work!$#@!” complaint, when they did. The viewer just didn’t have the latest version of their playback software, or something else wrong on their system that kept it from working.

Now, by making the high-rez the default version and offering the original version (as uploaded) a choice, it has brought the complaints to near nil.

Thank you for your understanding, Jason.

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine

Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.

“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen

[Ron Lindeboom]

Hello Ellen,

We have tried to launch a ToonBoom forum more than once and each time the forum has drawn no traffic and no posts. So we turned them off. We do not like to keep forums active that are not meeting our minimum standard for inclusion in Creative COW.

We have a Motion Graphics forum and maybe it’s time to set a rollover link from 2D Animation to that forum. The Motion Graphics forum is the one that I think you are most likely to find some discussion on the topic you seek.

In the meantime, here are the references I found to ToonBoom by using our search engine here in Creative COW…

https://forums.creativecow.net/search.php?q=toonboom

I hope that helps.

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine

Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.

“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen

[Ron Lindeboom]

Hello Martin,

I saw your post and went in and read your posts and it looks like a case of one of our admins being in too much of a hurry and not really reading your question carefully.

Our apologies, we get really busy sometimes and in an effort to keep signal high and noise low, sometimes we just make the wrong call.

Our apologies and your post is active. (Although I did turn off one of the two duplicate posts you made in the Premiere Pro forum.)

Thank you for the kind words about the forum. We try but do not always get everything perfect. Thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine

Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.

“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Todd Terry] “The COW, of course, has an excellent mobi version of creativecow.net.”

You are too kind, Todd. No seriously, you are being WAY TOO kind, Todd. ;o)

The MOBI version sucks and we are quite aware of it and it’s part of what we’ve been doing is getting everything in our systems done for our next iteration of both our web version and our mobile versions. I had hoped to have it all done before now but there are just so many things to do and projects that make up the COW.

Just today we introduced our new Creative COW Career Center at jobs.creativecow.net and it is one of the best additions to the COW since, well, the magazine came along.

It isn’t just a Job Center but also has a powerful Services Listing for COW members which is sorted by geography, category, etc., and if you explore it, you will see that it is perfect for one of the next Creative COW mobile apps. Look up services you need and in very few keystrokes, there they are…

Not to nag on people, but it always amazes me how few of the most respected people in this very forum take advantage of free resources like this one. If it were 20 years ago and I said to people that I would give you free worldwide exposure in a powerful categorized database that was sorted by categories and by countries, regions, etc. — people would be lining up in droves. But many people have gotten jaded because there is just so much free stuff on the web today.

If you get a minute, Todd, check out the new Career Center, now I’d love to get your honest comments on that one…

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom

PS: In this market iPads are running wild and we get a LOT of traffic from them, and it is why even today’s launch of the Career Center is designed to work on an iPad. It took a little extra work but it now meets the screen concerns of the iPad. We haven’t yet tried it on an iPhone or a Droid. I am too scared of what it will look like. But we will get to it very soon as both iPhones and Droids are hugely popular here in the COW and we get a lot of traffic from them. iPhones and Droids require far simpler pages with few things on them, it is a whole other way of thinking and developing, Todd. Simple, straightforward, cleaner, bigger, with few things to get in the way. Most interfaces I have seen for Smartphones are very linear.

[Ron Lindeboom]

A while back I had a RAM issue, Aaron, and the RAM tested fine — but it wasn’t. ;o)

One of the safest things to do is buy all your RAM for all the slots you are going to use and make sure it’s Certified RAM. That way, it’s all from the same batch and the micro-variances in speed won’t be there (hopefully) between the chips. They will all be theoretically processing at the exact same speed.

Usually, when RAM is bad, that is what is wrong, the speeds are not syncing and so the ship is sinking instead. (Drum roll and half-hearted cymbal crash for the joke, please.)

When I replaced the RAM in that machine, the whole world got prettier, birds were chirping, Bambi and Bambi’s mother were flitting through the woods — after a week of what felt like caffeine overload on the nerves, and too many B-movie blood and gore flicks.

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine

Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.

“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Aaron Berg] “My main problem with Windows 7 64 bit is during Multicam editing. I can’t get more than 1 minute playing the timeline before Vegas stops responding. If I wait about 5 minutes Vegas will come back, but then stop responding again about 1 minute later. It does it randomly through any and all SD .AVI video files. The AVI files are standard which were captured from an SD Mini DV camera using VidCap. So there shouldn’t be an issue there.

If I swap hard drives over to Windows XP Pro SP3 on the same PC and use Sony Vegas Pro 10 32 bit, it’s flawless. I never have a crash, lock, or responding issue with Sony Vegas Pro 10.e on Windows XP Pro Sp3. I can’t remember when the last time was I got a crash or had an issue. But using Sony Vegas Pro 10 with my Windows 7 64 bit OS, is completely out of the question. It’s totally usable.”

Boy, this sounds like a hardware issue with your machine — and I say that after 16 years of building forums sites for people in video.

My guess, I’d start with RAM. The intermittent nature of your issues makes me want to look there first.

If the issue were in the codebase of Vegas, it would be the same all the time. After all, the code is not going to rewrite itself dynamically and change what it’s doing. It is being influenced by something transitory in your machine. I’d guess RAM.

It could also be an issue with one or more of your drives. I have seen that do things like you are describing.

But as I said elsewhere: Sony Vegas is really rock solid and considering that this week it sits in the #2 most trafficked forum spot, I’d say that were it Vegas at fault (which you claim) then this forum would be full of people wailing on the Sony Team in Madison Wisconsin.

You asked me to look at your posts, so I did. And that is what I suspect is the issue.

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine

Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.

“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen

[Ron Lindeboom]

It was interesting, Andy. And his point about Apple dragging the market where they want it to go, rather than programming for standards that Apple views as counterproductive and therefore worth gambling on that they can come up with a better idea and not lose most of their audience in doing so — was worth considering.

But I couldn’t shake the cold slap of reality that kept hitting me as he talked and it became markedly clearer with each word that he had no idea whatsoever as to how professional workflows and workgroups function — and why.

Thank you for adding the viewpoint, Andy.

Best regards,

Ronald Lindeboom
CEO, Creative COW LLC
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine

Creativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.

“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen