#Editcave

1. 35mm Film Projectors Weren’t Replaced Out Of Necessity Or Something Better, It Was Because It Was Cheaper.          

“Because, even though it’s a file, fast forwarding reminds us of a reliable medium, like tape.”

Yes, we all have been in the theatre when the film reel for “The Matrix Reloaded” suddenly derailed in the middle of the fight scene with 200 Agent Smith’s. Some of you possibly cheered and/or proceeded to sneak into a different movie; but, more likely, you thought, “huh, that’s odd” and mused with your significant other about the one or two other times that’s ever happened to you in a theatre. A few flashes and audio pops later, management apologized and it was fixed.

35mm distribution was well refined and it worked; but, it came at a price, both in materials and paid bodies. The film stock was an investment—it had to physically be moved from place to place, couldn’t easily be duplicated, and required someone with actual skills to babysit it while it rolled. It was only a matter of time until the right person in the right position finally decided that the dollar signs that could be saved was worth a little technical malfunctioning here and there, worth using equipment that isn’t as reliable and isn’t going to last as long, and worth the risk that “going to the movies” might become a less popular thing to do as a result.

2. They Chopped Off One Of Their Last Legs: Mystique               

19 year old monitoring all 8 projectors at once: “Oh, shit. Damn’t, shit!”

Wait, that looks like.. Oh my! Is it? Windows??

Specifically, Windows 2000, if I’m not mistaken. Maybe XP. At best.

So… let’s get this straight. We replaced our trusty, analog, beloved, accepted, widely preferred method of projection with something built on yesterday’s technology and the world’s most unreliable platform? Fantastic work, everyone, job well done.

More importantly and in all seriousness: now everyone in the audience realizes that we’re all dumbos sitting there watching something that we (a) consider inferior to the phone in our pocket, (b) could also do at our homes, and (c) are familiar with from errors on our PC’s from a decade ago. Even worse than the decision to rely on Windows 2000 for something that shouldn’t ever go down, is the the decision to run “cinema” on something that would ever, ever show this screen or a screen similar to this.

Which ties nicely into:

3. Television in Public

Quentin isn’t alone in his love affair with 35mm, with the organic, with analog—see: Christopher Nolan interviewed in detail. Tarantino is just the only big hitter so far willing (or able to) come out and pit his career against it.

If the people who produce the content for your business to work don’t really like the change you are enforcing… you have to wonder about the state of the industry as a whole and perhaps just how desperate these companies are to find ways to increase profit in their ever-loosening death grip on entertainment distribution.

4. They Just Don’t Make ‘Em Like They Used To.

What you may not remember about that time The Matrix Reloaded broke down, is that you were at the cheap theatre that didn’t really maintain their 60 year old, got-it-used 35mm projector because you got in the door for a dollar. 

These beasts weren’t built on capitalism and competitive markets; they were built to be as reliable, long lasting, and high quality as possible. Many of them are decades old and still work, “like the day it was installed brand new”.

How will the brand new 4k digital projection system you saw Iron Man 3 break down on look in 5 years? 10 years? 30 years? Do they even warranty them past 2 or 3 years, or is it just another disposable item at that point?

One of the big selling points on digital is that, “copies of your film are just data now! It’ll now look exactly same everywhere!” I think this is idealistic over-simplification, manufactured to get everyone on board with the change. When is the last time you saw two monitors on set or in the edit room that the image looked identical on? These sparkly new digital projectors may look decent now, but my guess is as their bulbs and other components age, they’ll introduce a plethora of ‘digital issues’ including inconsistent color, brightness, levels, softness/sharpness, et cetera that can be left uncalibrated just as easily as not properly maintaining the moving parts of a 35mm projector.

4. The Theatres No Longer Value The Experience

And we’re not just talking about explosions per minute.

The last time I went to the cinema, and this is one of the big chains that traditionally bring in tons of film goers and all the box office dollars, the entire facility appeared to be running by only 1 employee. The ticket office was “closed”, we stood in the refreshments line inside, and the kid who sold the popcorn also sold us our tickets (err, should I say, receipts), and then simply told us where to go instead of someone else taking stubs.

I guess it’s fair to say the days of “excessive jobs” like “selling tickets” and “showing guests to their seats” are headed the way of Old Yeller.

Once in the theatre, my assumption is that the advertisements, previews, and feature film, were probably programmed weeks prior, and probably came on automatically via timer. All of this, to me, feels like Hollywood shooting itself in the foot. It blatantly undervalues the customers, the movie goers, and it short sells the business of “presenting” movies. What little was left of the “experience” (there wasn’t much) is almost entirely gone if the only human presence I perceive when I go to the movies is with a single, pimple-faced, nervous worker bee who’s being paid $8/h to do anything that can’t run itself.

Now, there was probably a manager or two in the building. Fine. But it doesn’t mean they haven’t cut out at least eight jobs at this place during regular operation hours, and that the people that are there give a shit about the business beyond working their shift and getting home. This is a big problem to me, and it shows: besides seeing the film itself, the overall experience of going to a film is usually somewhere between ‘mediocre’ and ‘I should have spent that time doing ‘X”. And it’s why I’ll support an independently owned theatre whenever I can over the big chains that have become buy-out side businesses of millionaire businessmen.

SPECIAL BONUS ROUND: Assigned Seating Reminds Us Of High School

So, wait, what’s the deal with all the grey seats then?

Going to the movies should be a freeing escape from conformity and people telling us what to do all day. Every time I’ve had to deal with assigned seating, it’s been a huge turn off to ever come to a movie that will have a full or nearly full crowd ever again.

If people want specific seats, let them put in the effort to earn that spot by spending their time showing up early and waiting for those seats. If people show up late, those people get to deal with breaking apart their ten-person group into single-person seats, for being bastards and not being on time.

On nearly every occasion that there’s been a packed house at films I’ve seen recently, there’s always somebody in someone else’s seat and an employee and flash lights and cell phones out with people trying to figure out seating while the damn movie is starting, because some schmucks showed up late to find that someone else took their seats.

This happening either to you or in front of you while the movie is starting is nearly infuriating; whoever thought assigned seating is a good idea for movie theatres should be repeatedly punched in the gut for a couple hours. Let’s please leave assigned seating where it belongs: to ticket holders who pay ridiculous amounts of money to sit 20 feet closer to sports events.

Take my equal amount of money and let me do what I want, including by the way, taking the risk of sitting in a theatre with 200 people dressed up in costumes. I’ll happily take my 0.00001% chance 1 of them isn’t really there because they are a giant Star Wars nerd, and snuck a non-foam weapon in. 

Cinema, we love(d?) you.

- Weston, editor

I use OSX and Windows on a regular basis, a bit of Ubuntu on the side.  Quite frankly, I feel like both of these major OS’s do what they do okay, but are catered for the masses!  They are made for consumers, and yet virtually all professionals have to work on these consumer based, made-for-the-masses platforms that simply don’t have us in mind during 99.9% of their development.

Now, in the creative world, most folks see OSX as the “clear, far and away better OS” — where as I, using both fairly frequently, kinda feel they’re, well, really just mostly the same.  They both do the same stuff, have various strong points, and have various issues/annoyances.

I’ll preface by saying I have next to zero interest in Windows 8, I’m not a Windows advocate at all—in fact, I usually run into basically an equal amount of annoying shortcomings when working on Win, as I do when I’m on OSX.

And secondly, what I am looking forward to is change.  I can’t wait to use Lightworks on Ubuntu, especially as the program fleshes out and grows a bit.  I want more competition, more diversity, and more users using something besides the only two choices the “big A’s” seem to allow for.

If our tools aren’t developed on alternative platforms that many actually be better for what we’re doing, how will we ever get there?

Sadly, the reverse is happening.  As companies have to cut costs by going software only and dumping their turnkey systems, the sacrifice is an ideal operating system for that application’s performance and the ability for that company to develop it on an OS they have control over.  

In other words, relatively no one would mess with their workstation’s drive formatting and install some random distro of Linux just to run the new software-only Autodesk Smoke. So, in moving away from turnkey, a product like Autodesk’s Smoke or DaVinci Resolve has to abandon the OS they’ve creating the app around and instead develop at Apple’s hand or at Microsoft’s hand.

This is the vastly more viable decision—develop for what people are already using. I’m very impressed with EditShare’s guts to develop Lightworks on three platforms including Linux, and being a fan of Ubuntu anyway, I’ll be supporting these in this effort as much as I can, because ultimately although Ubuntu is also targetting ‘the masses’ more or less, in my experience it’s been far more solid, reliable, and void of random consumer-driven annoyances or limitations than Win and OSX.

But, back on track!

The big thing to take into perspective: if you didn’t notice by the cruel harassment of the poor (yet impeccably attentive and enthusiastic) team over at Adobe Premiere being hammered about their product not working exactly and identically like FCP7 did in every aspect, people get so used to what they are using, that trying anything different at all feels to them like it’s “wrong” and stupid and ‘doesn’t make any sense at all that it doesn’t work that way’.

So, based on the Twitter feedback when I bring anything like this up amongst the seas of Mac users, here’s a few issues to illustrate that OSX isn’t necessarily the amazingly far and away better choice and often is actually more complicated than it’s primary competitor:

Simplicity- No direct shortcut for one of the single most common tasks throughout the day: new finder window.

Simplicity- Active app you’re working in, somehow, often isn’t the active menu bar.

Simplicity- Most users don’t seem to know the difference between closing a window and exiting a program (what happened to “simple” here?).

Simplicity- Hide vs. minimize. Another spot where simplicity was lost and most casual users only know about the less useful one.

Simplicity- Ever notice there’s more modifier keys on a Mac keyboard? Yet the same tasks are doable on a Windows keyboard in the same apps just as efficiently. (p.s. the Win key is not a map-able modifier key)

Simplicity- Installing apps. SOME of them simply drag into the folder or are self-contained. But basically none of the professional apps do this, as there’s more to it when running a complex program. Complaint here is that we download something, then it mounts itself, and then it installs—an extra step process I’ve never understood. Stop and think about how clunky and redundant it is that it has to mount a virtual drive that you have to later eject in order to delete the original file.

Simplicity- Uninstalling apps. Windows again gets blasted here for no reason. The IDEA of just trashing a program from the applications folder is elegant to imagine, but again, half the programs don’t actually uninstall this way, so you end up with some programs that can be trashed, and others that are supposed to run an uninstaller from somewhere within their folder or the Utilities folder, to uninstall properly, which is actually more complex than managing all your programs in one place where you can uninstall all of them the same way.

Efficiency- believe it or not, keyboard shortcuts to menus with 1 letter actually can be quite handy/fast.  Windows often gets a bad rap for being less keyboard driven, something that isn’t just true if you dig into it a little bit and try using the shortcuts. There’s many operations that at this point in OSX simply and annoying require using a mouse.

Efficiency- Window management still sucks on Mac. At least we can finally resize from more than the lower right hand corner.  It really is less efficient to have to spend time manually move and resizing windows into the spots you need them to be; whether it’s side by siding, sizing, half the screen, whole screen, etc.  Any hint of any sort of useful Mac window management beyond manually moving/sizing them is instantly met with aggression and name calling for some reason.

Efficiency- A decade late, transfers can FINALLY merge folders, but there’s still no options as to what it actually does for conflicts, and transfer queuing which equals horrible speeds during multiple transfers.

FINDer is completely unreliable for FINDing anything because it’s so dependent on Spotlight/indexing which in itself doesn’t seem to work all that well.

Try out thumbnail view. Look at the crazy and odd amount of white space.

Simplicity - the sidebar is just as silly and full of un-useful crap as the Windows sidebar.  Funny how they both went with navigational sidebars full of junk you never use, huh?

“All my files” is the unfortunate new default landing for Finder, following in the footsteps of landing us on the pointless “Libraries” from Windows.

Fullscreen mode/thing is clunky. What’s wrong with a hiding taskbar/menubar to accomplish this? And what’s with that ridiculous animation? (rhetoricals). Also, I want to see how long it takes the casual user to find their way out of fullscreen for the first time.  Very Microsofty.

Etc.

My point is: 

Different platform; slightly different shortcomings.

Not far and away superior.

Okay, I know, not everything on this list is actually even much better on Windows. Yes, yes, there’s 25 random 3rd party installs I could bloat up the OS with that takes care of many of them—on both sides.  And anyone including me can come up with a similar list like this for Windows or other platforms.  But point is, not only is OSX really not the beautiful (I find the bright grays are becoming dull and dated, and let’s not even discuss the fancy new crosshair metallic texturing job), perfect, end-all OS with everything done right; it’s not even really the lesser of two poisons. It’s more like.. a different poison that just kills you in a slightly different, slightly more elegant-appearing way.

 - WB, editor

If like me, you’ve ever decided “you know, what? I’m not going to install Flash!”, you’ll know how broken the interwebs is without it.  Even now with HTML5 supposedly ‘taking over’ and Flash kicked & bruised by Apple, leading to supposedly serious development away from it, it’s still all over and many sites loose functionality altogether without it.  Every third website you come upon will annoy you with pop ups, drop downs, and message boxes telling you to install Flash, get Flash, & Flash required.

• This image is obviously faked. Adobe would never hurt puppies. To my knowledge.

But no, really. Here’s a day in a life without Flash:

I know it looks fun.

Above, at the top of the page, you’ll find the lovely experience YouTube’s Flash UI gives me.  I try to stay in the YouTube “HTML5 beta” because I actually do prefer not to have Flash (or anything other excessive software) installed on my workstations, but it doesn’t like to “remember” that I have joined the beta, and it means I have to go back to http://www.youtube.com/html5 often and “join the beta” over and over again.  To Google’s credit, YouTube is one of the onlywebsites I’ve found that at least does offers a working alternative to their Flash offerings—the site and videos run, and run well, under HTML5 only.

There is a caveat though—many older uploaded videos will not play on the HTML5 player.

Soundcloud is another exception, it works beautifully without Flash… but it has the same issue: I keep having to dig into my preferences and re-turn-on the “experimental” HTML5 feature.

And lastly but not leastly, Creative Cow gets it right with their videos that not only look better than just about any other screen captures I’ve ever streamed, but don’t seem to require Flash Player to begin with.  

• Thank you, Creative Cow.  

Vimeo, on the other hand, appears to be a leader in HTML5 development.

I’m pretty sure they had this option well before YouTube dabbled into it (okay I unknowingly lied—still, it’s a far more prominent option to users browsing Vimeo). But wait, look what happens if you try to use Vimeo on a machine that doesn’t have Flash installed:

What?  But I thought Internet Explorer 9 is the only browser that supports native h264 video.  Remember, the goal is to not install any extra software than what is absolutely necessary; I want to keep my stations as clean and simple to rebuild as possible.  Hence, the use of the world’s least favorite browser, IE.  Well, I can’t find any evidence as to why Vimeo’s HTML5 browser appears to not work without Flash installed.  A bit pointless, yes?

Now, before you tell me that’s what I get for using Internet Explorer or to ‘buy a Mac dude’, let me arrive there on my own.

Two more key components that we use here on a weekly basis for professional purposes & simply don’t work without Flash installed are:

WeTransfer.com

and Google Drive (formally Docs)

With both of these websites not working on a system which it’s entirely possible a regular-joe might be running, I figured something must be up.

So I proceeded to install Chrome just for giggles, because that’s what I use, love, and adore on my personal laptop.  Everything works!

• How Curious.

Yep, turns out Google bundles Flash Player into the Chrome install. Probably smart of them, but not quite what I am looking for.

Chromium, no go.

Opera, which I’ve always wanted to like, but it’s no fun being at the bottom of the every web designer’s priority chain; no go.

So finally I decided to give the browser I’ve been resisting and deeming as the worst browser ever a shot, Safari.  Please don’t hate me, I promise I’ve tried it several times in the past, trying it for longer than you think, and did so on the Mac experience—I simply found it rather unenjoyable and actually somewhat archaic to use compared to what else is out there.

But hey:

• Look ma! No Flash!

So, maybe I’ll give the thing a chance to grow on me again.  I don’t like having a secondary browser installed, but at least we can upload to Google Drive to deliver drafts of videos, and view Vimeo videos, something that comes up often.  It also makes sense in that it’s already the native browser if a Mac makes it’s way into the #editcave, which is a very likely possibility in the near future.  Additionally, Google Docs’ formatting works like poo in IE9. There’s clearly some major bugs going on that, after waiting patiently for years for it to work properly, it’s probably time to abandon ship.

Unfortunately, YouTube’s HTML5 player that is 2 years in the works still can’t play a large portion of the videos they offer.

And we’ll just have to sit tight until the 1st quarter of 2012 for @WeTransfer’s promised update of an HTML5 version of the site:

• Whoops.

It’ll get there eventually, we hope.

[UPDATE: I’ve since got re-fed up with Safari and webkit crashing every 5 minutes—I decided Chrome will be on the workstations so at least WeTransfer and Google Drive work properly which are both used weekly here.]

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One of the two readers that made it through this post is probably thinking, “why is your workstation hooked up to the internet to begin with?” and the truth is, it’s just a pain is the ass to route sent assets, uploaded materials, emailed feedback, and send out drafts through another station.  I’ve done it before, and I’d rather deal with an occasional reinstall—if being intelligent about what you do on the internet doesn’t eliminate that problem altogether. 

• No, that’s not the download button. 

That’s 595 total peers that are going to be taking their computers in for repair shortly.

The other of the two readers is thinking, “what’s wrong with having Flash installed anyway?” and my only answer is that it’s a result of the minimalist approach to keeping a workstation working as long and clean as possible, without going to extreme of never connecting to the internet and refusing to update anything (despite what Avid/pinnaclesys/they-really-should-think-about-updating-their-host-site says).  I’ve many guys even running OSX recommend a wipe & clean install every year or so.  On the flip side, I’ve been in post houses where they are running Windows XP HP workstations that haven’t been wiped clean for a half decade and still work perfectly.  My older workstation at the moment has purmped out material for a couple years solid without many issues.  I don’t think the “yearly clean install” is entirely necessary if the machine is well kept.

For now, I’m thinking my well kept machines will have to do without this old piece of devilry:

And unfortunately, I for one, cannot find the new HTML5, freed-of-Flash interwebs.  It must live in the iPad.

Onward.

- Weston Woodbury, Editor

No catch!  Just a friendly reminder to… just give back once in a while.

I work fulltime (and then some) in video & film production, and in doing so, I try to “give back” by supporting various projects on sites like kickstarter & indiegogo that I am interested in and would like to see made.

I’ve invested in maybe 4-5 projects total.  I don’t do it actively, but more reactively.

There’s a certain project I had been contemplating giving to recently, and mostly, just kept forgetting to.  Well, I finally got around to it… and no joke, less than 15 minutes later, in the middle of the night, a client submitted a payment to me from over a month ago that I had totally forgotten about.  What’s more, the amount of the payment was nearly three times as much as I was expecting for the job, and in total over eight times more than my donation to this particular project.

I neither believe in some sort of divine reason something like this would happen, nor that by doing one event it somehow caused the other.  I also practice decent bookkeeping on all of my jobs — this gig just happened to be for a client that does not work with my invoicing system so it hadn’t made it into my records.

But the logic here: you have more than you think.  So just be generous once in a while. Help some cool projects become a reality.

Fun apparel that brings back memories of whatever MS-DOS how-to book you sported back when it took time to do things on computers (remember?)

(via theriotisover)

How iPads and smartphones are inferior to a sandwich.

http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign

The silliest part of this is, Sony was on the right track years ago.

I always go skiing with my old Sony mp3 player that everyone see and thinks it’s some sort of fancy lighter.  Even though it’s a (now) measly 2GB and a total pain in the butt to transfer music to, I bring it specifically because it can be completely controlled by touch and feel.  



I never have to pull it out and look at it to do anything.  I can do it all by feel and knowing what the buttons do.  But Sony got crushed in this department, despite all the excellent engineering, design, and quality.  Sony’s new mp3 players?  iPod clones that dance around the lines of many patents, that you have to stare at for most of anything you can do on them.

Smartphones don’t help the matter, because it’s just some more touchscreen programming that’s acting as the player.  I have another long post in store for this subject in particular.  Everything I’ve found is so difficult to unlock, queue songs, navigate through the app, etc, that it’s actually pretty dangerous to try use while driving.  As opposed to the good old, big-buttoned, designed specifically for ease-of-use radio.  Talk about progress backwards.

It wraps back to this article, about our sense of touch, tools, and the vision of the “future”.

There are benefits to “pictures under glass”, of course — this is really cool, some R&D making the bridge between the two interfaces: http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Research/PneumaticDisplays

Thanks @dwolfmeyer with the Twitter share on this. A “must read” indeed!

Sort of.

Turns out, either nearly all the editors on twitter have already switched over to Avid already (only somewhat joking), or mostly Avid editors participated in this week’s #postchat :).  Anyway, we have a nice list of people’s keyboard shortcuts to share and compare.

If you want to add a pic of your shortcuts here please let me know.  Also, this blog may indeed be reposted over to #postchat’s real page; I’ll do an update here if that is the case.

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AVID MEDIA COMPOSER

@adoxography

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@c0ina

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@har0ldm

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@Hitecsoftouch

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@westonWoodbury

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@dwolfmeyer

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Here’s a link to Keyboard Exchange: Get Ideas From Other Editors’ Mapping, an even more extenstive resource Benjamin Hershleder has put together for Media Composer editors.

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FINAL CUT PRO

@Dr0id

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@ChristianGlawe

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ADOBE PREMIERE PRO

@Salah_Baker

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@westonWoodbury

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Thanks for checking this out & thanks for the very insightful conversations on twitter #postchat :).  Again just shoot me a message if I missed you or you want to be added.

- Weston Woodbury, editor

Warm weather must bring bloggin’ fuel with it. Time for this small book-sized post:

 I’ve come to rely on at least 4 free tools that are totally essential (okay, or at least really damn handy) when using computers for professional uses, with their remarkably consumer-orientated operating systems, Windows 7 and Mac OS X.

4 100% free tools for Windows 7 that make digital life smoother and simple tasks less of an annoyance while working as a professional instead of more of one.

1. Treesize

Ever low on hard drive space? Wonder what is taking up so much room? I used the mass ‘right click get properties’ method far too long to track down where data is and determine what can be deleted, before wising up and Googling it like any decent troubleshooter would. Treesize makes up for the lack OS basics in it’s ability to easily display anything and everything’s size, including folders. Already past the risk of sounding like I’m getting paid to promote this product which isn’t the case, cleaning up your hard drive has never been easier or more efficient (sparkle!).

 2. TeraCopy

 Windows 7’s vista-deriven file transferring is miles better than OS X, but it doesn’t match the completeness of TeraCopy. TeraCopy works like FileZilla (and other FTP options) does when it comes to file moving and copying—it gives you options to make your transfer quickest and most efficient. Such as.. only overwriting a file if the original has a older timestamp. You can even tell it what to do ahead of time, so you don’t have to wait around until the transfer hits a duplicate file like you do with the regular Windows transfer.

 Additionally, TeraCopy automatically queues up transfers so they move/copy 1 at a time, and gives you the option to manually start 2 transfers at once if you really want to. So, by default it waits for one transfer to finish before starting another. This is important because you kill hard drives when you transfer two things at once. Making this simple, the hard drive has 1 point that moves around and reads parts of the disk. If you have more than 1 thing going at once, you force the hard drive to constantly bounce back and forth between 2 or more points on the disk, as fast as it can, and you can hear it if you listen. It kills your transfer speed, and because it’s a mechanical animal, it wears and tears the drive—I’ve literally had drives audibly die while trying to transfer more than 1 thing at a time. 

Queuing transfers is a no brainer & frankly it’s a little unbelievable Mac and Windows both still have it wrong. You may think, ‘well I don’t want to wait until a big backup transfer is finished, before a small document or something is transferred to my jump drive, for example’.  TeraCopy is already a step ahead you; it will automatically go ahead and execute any small transfers that aren’t going to affect the longer one that’s going, while queuing up any larger transfers to save the speeds & drives.

And, best of all, TeraCopy goes another extra mile & completely replaces the default copy/move functions in Windows 7, eliminating all the issues you once had. I also conveniently logs it’s transferring file by file, so you actually know what files didn’t make it if it had errors, and can go back and address those specifically. Suddenly backing up projects manually is infinitely easier.

Somebody, the right person for the job because they designed this tool to perfection, saw the problems Windows had, shared my frustration, and did something about it. Thanks, somebody.

3. Unlocker

The website describes the problem and the solution.  It deals with files that are mysteriously in use or otherwise screwed up and Windows won’t let you touch.

Delete, or copy, or move (great options provided) anything Windows complains about and be done with it, a couple clicks.

 4. Renamer

Super easy to figure out and use, it does exactly what the name says: batch renaming files based on whatever parameters you want it to, in the blink of an eye.

It’s really really fast, and really efficient.  Another total basic that has been largely ignored by the OS giants, even though it really should be built in to the operating system (no, Automator doesn’t count).

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All freeware, all unintrusive, and all pick up slack Windows doesn’t care to up the ball on by caring about professionals and help us use our time more efficiently.

One important note: with freeware often comes sponsorship, they do pay for this stuff somehow. Take care when installing anything free, go slowly through the installer steps, and READ each step of the installation, or you’re going to end up with 30 programs starting up with your computer, Chrome with 7 toolbars on top, and wonder why everything is so slow after reading that silly #editcave editor’s blog post.

On to 3 tools for OS X.

There is a Treesize equivalent called WhatSize—however, the usable version of it costs some $. But I think the small cost is worth the hours of time you’ll save using “Get Info” to try to track down where big files you can delete are.

And.. there are probably equivalents to the other issues I’ve found solutions for on the Windows side — I just haven’t looked very hard.

I typically just use Adobe Bridge for most of my “Finder” activities. It does a good job at transferring files, works seamlessly drag/dropping with Finder, and didn’t go half-ass on it’s options for how the files are listed. Thumbnail view, especially, I much much prefer Bridge for browsing photos and video, it feels so much more usable.

Again, Bridge costs.  It’s part of any of Adobe’s Creative Suites.  Which many of you already have, so maybe you are good to go—open up Bridge and start getting familiar with it.

Then there is EasyFind hosted on Apple’s own website, addressing the fact that Finder/Spotlight (these two things are seriously not laid out clear enough for the average user to know the difference, btw) is only good at doing 1 thing—indexing recently accessed files for quick access again.  Finder is not functional for something as basic as.. let’s say.. finding a file.  This free tool will do exactly what you expected Finder to do the first time you tried to look for a file using OS X.  Be sure to take note of it’s “reveal in finder” command.

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Well, hope this helps some of you out there & saves you some time.

Cheers from the #editcave.  Download and conquer.

Weston Woodbury | Editor | www.westonwoodbury.com

LJ’s post is interesting. But… not really sold on ‘damage control’. I still think Apple’s intentions are to move away from the market that’s in arms right now. I’ve thought this dating back to FCP7’s barely-updated release, back to noticing how long it takes Apple to update their MacPro’s and MacBookPro’s, and that they are always lagging behind in hardware specs with the rest of the world. To dumping Quadro and acting like AMD consumer grade cards should come with a workstation, to MacBookPro’s having no professional hardware in them anymore.  And no e-sata, not even usb3, and now a super fast Thunderbolt external connection that most people will occupy with just a 2nd monitor.

But back to ‘damage control’, they priced FCPX extremely strategically. I doubt Apple’s worried about damage control, if their intention is to move into a (much larger, btw) more prosumer & consumer market. Everyone that’s pissed about FCPX has already paid full price to do so (well, most of them). Very few have held on to their 300-400$. Because it’s a “what the hell” price. It’s Redbox. It’s the dollar menu. Whether it’s, “something I need to have on hand”, “something I want to play with”, or, as someone pointed out, “a 299$ way to get ProRes encoding”—the price point is very easy to justify. If 300 times more users own Final Cut than own Avid Media Composer, or own Adobe Premiere Pro, they don’t need to charge the thousands of dollars for the software, and since it’s exclusive through the AppStore there’s zero physical product costs, if that was even a factor. Isn’t that highly logical? Isn’t figuring out a way to appeal to mass users who already use their other products, instead of cater to individuals they aren’t making that much money off of to begin with, a logical way to approach rebooting a product?
So many people probably bought FCPX already, right now, that it’s made it worth it.

Really how much development went into FCPX?  Yet there’s boatloads of basics/essentials missing.  Half the fundamentals & “improvements” that Apple boasts are already present in iMovie or, a little known fact, already in other NLEs.  They were just marketed in the case of FCPX. And, maybe I’m wrong that it has paid for itself, but it’s going to continue to sell until it has. Sure, the very negative word of mouth from professionals is going to kill Apple’s reputation… as a professional product. But we’re after people recording with their iPhones and iPads, or who want to take their current iMovie project a step further. There are so many tell tale signs, ranging from the AppStore itself and licensing ignorance, to the fact the program itself looks and acts identical to iMovie, and 50 other unprofessional details that 50 other editors have already detailed and listed out on all of their blogs so I don’t need to do that. Look at it, Apple already has the numbers of iPhones and iPads they’ve sold, and a huge number of iMovie users. People who’ve shown they’ll spend relatively large amount of money on things they probably don’t need. That’s a market to be had.

- ww, editor

As the norm, long time no post.

Because I can’t resist.

Can’t resist super-mega-ultra tweeting about Final Cut Pro X. It’s Final Cut Pro X, from FCPUG’s NAB-ish SuperMeet, not from a FCP dude.

First off, big thanks to Michael Horton of FCPUG for getting me in on waitlist, and of course organizing this thing. Without FCPLUG, who knows what Apple would have done, since they are above and beyond NAB.

Those that know me technically, will know I lean toward using a combination of Avid Media Composer & CS5 (and only CS5, CS4 was a HD nightmare), but I am a FCP regular as well. I’ve edited a fair amount of projects on FCP, enjoy some things about it, enjoy learning the software, but have been annoyed by it every time.

Some small, basic features, that I want to accomplish to fulfill my creativity in the cutting room, also known as the hashtag “editcave”, I have to constantly send out to Motion and Soundtrack to do, and that annoys me to death, as well as dramatically affects FCP’s rendering times.

Well, several hours after taking in SuperMeet and the lovely FCP X sneak peek, I’m come to the conculsion it’s an enhanced-GUI mashup of just about every other NLE. The features that the hard-at-work and very trendy-looking Final Cut team showed today may have drew gasps, oohs, and awws from the time-tested loyal Apple audience, but in reality, not a whole lot new is being introduced. For the most part, just a fanciful way of doing it & showing it happening in the GUI.

To start, you can throw the old FCP out the window. FCP users will be starting from practically the same, ground zero level that someone new or coming from another system will be at. That is, unless that system is iMovie. Forget preview-program, source-edit windows, forget drag-drop overlay editing, forget how you manage media in Premiere and FCP 6 or 7, and forget the way the timeline works.
Which… so interestingly—Avid Media Composer just finished revamping their timeline to match Final Cut’s features, and Adobe Premiere Pro barely (v5.5) integrated the drag-drop overlay insert or overwriting, just to be more like Final Cut. That’s words straight from an Adobe rep who I talked with, by the way. Anyway, I think this all puts the market in a very unique position, given that Final Cut has, more or less, dumbed down their “pro” software, as, more or less, expected.

Let’s jump back to what FCP X has mashed up. And, give me a chance—I’m somewhat fair, not committed to any NLE one way or the other, & there’s both good and bad in this list!

A - a huge feature that was shown off was actually, literally, clip grouping. FCP only being able to link-unlink thus far, made a gigantic deal about being able to group clips together; something that’s been a part of Premiere and others like Edius for years. They branded it differently, it’s all about “making a relationship” or something or other with the clips so that they never loose sync or ‘how you want them to stay edited’. But, in the end, it’s the same thing as grouping, just branded much, much more eloquently by the presenters—genius.

B - Where did rippling go? FCP X didn’t even credit itself it the fact that it’s always been possible to do edits without affecting other parts of the timeline or messing up anything down the line. It’s called rippling and FCP used to be known for it. Apple completely resold rippling as if it’s a new feature that no one has ever done or thought of before. It’s not called anything, not rippling, just ‘it won’t allow you to accidentally mess things up’ and ‘keeps your edits exactly how you want them’. Yes, the timeline automatically makes room for changes you make. Yes, you can drag things around and change the order of a sequence of cuts, and things readjust accordingly down the line. Like usual. Just because it does it in a more graphical, animated type way, it’s apparently no longer rippling and it’s now ultra revolutionary. The other side is, with the magnetic timeline, essentially the timeline is kept very compact—rippling is much more practical when the timeline is kept simple, so that’s the hope for Apple on this in my opinion—the changed timeline forces cleanliness, revealing just how handy ripple editing can be when used correctly.

C - another big feature, related, collapsing down a section of edited clips into one “clip” to be working with more simply. Again.. something another editor, Media Composer, has been doing for years. In fact, can’t you also accomplish this as a subsequence already in most NLEs? Anyway, the concept has been part of what gives MC an edge. Same deal—you click into the clip, it changes the timeline area, going down “into” that clip, and you have your original edit & layers all sort of “nested” within that one simpler clip in the timeline. Granted… it’s made much clearer that it’s even possible in FCP X, uses a huge difference in the visuals making it look cool, and they give it their own name “compound clip”, and that’s the beauty of Apple.

D - Audio. Hello! FCP just took an overnight lead in powerhouse audio editing, inside the video app; taking, I think, most of it’s inspiration from real audio software like Vegas, which still is more of an audio app than a video app. Okay, Logic, Audition, Soundtrack etc. They all work similarly. Audio was my single biggest annoyance-complaint-grievance in old FCP—those AWFUL automatic upper J-shaped fades, that I’m constantly trying to fix manually with 25 keyframes. Now, I finally can change it to the type of fade I want—and it seems like audio rubber bands can work in conjunction with them, I can’t remember. Just go find the video demo to watch—the audio in FCP X is sick. It’s all realtime waveform based—all changes made tweak the waveform in realtime, as you drag, being exactly what I’ve ever wanted in a video app. That’s me versus goliath, all the typical product forum buffs, who are just waiting to tell you that you should be doing audio work in Pro Tools or some other dedicated audio editor. Well, shove it forum troll, it’s the primary (but not the only) reason I’ve stuck with Premiere so long & honestly, the audio tools in FCP X, look absolutely exceptional. As long as dynamic audio filters are there.. & track-based effects might hurt FCP X big time in the professional world, if they don’t allow for some sort of equivalent.

(post append | I’ve since learned all the cool audio tools I was so excited about are literally pulled straight from iMovie.  I still stand by the fact that I really love how it works in FCP X; other non-linear editors really ought to step up to the plate and make audio editing good.  Vegas remains the only NLE that, since it was built on top of an audio program, handles audio properly and with total freedom and little limitations.)

E - iMovie. Some went as far as calling it iMovie Pro, saying they’ll hold on to their Final Cut Studio 7 like no other, and they aren’t too far off base. FCP X inherits an extremely iMovie-esk ‘scrubbing’.. oh geez, in Apple-speak it’s skimming.. skimming everything everywhere. And this is where it get’s heavy and you’re thinking okay.. this is totally a consumer tool. Some, but not a whole lot, of actual manual controls were shown. However, tons and tons of overly-simple, 1-button, automagic features were shown. Clips are automatically everything as they are brought in.. automatically prepared to be stabilized, automatically prepared to be colored, automatically scaled, and automatically analyzed—it detects people, and it detects what kind of shot it is.. wide, medium, CU, etc, for media organization purposes. All of those things, seem very iMovie-esk, as far as I know b/c I don’t know iMovie well.

F - Additionally for media management, it’s super tag based.. they almost ditched folder and bin type organization (I think it’s still there, but not sure). Tag not only clips, but individual parts of clips, and taking the time to do all this taggings seems essential to a clean workflow; to being able to search, etc. Basically, a more friendly way of adding metadata, but a step that I know for a fact, most users will skip. Again it feels like feature Apple’s maybe approached as, “how can we make approach this thing creatively, to where it becomes a more standard part of anyone’s workflow?”. Well, tags aren’t called tags, and they sure aren’t called markers, they are called keywords or something like that, & Apple’s presentation liked to pretend markers have never existed in any other NLE before, & that “keywording” is revolutionary because you can now quickly mark and find a spot in a clip. Again, things possible in other editors, but sort of graphically improved upon and dressed up in FCP X, in my opinion, so that maybe people will be intrigued enough to actually use them.

G - Color? Entire filters have disappeared and have been replaced by flashy GUI color correction, for example, looking about as simple as it can possibly get—a few sliders here for gain, a few sliders there for colors. Impressively, secondary color correction is very much there and seems quite usable, decent masking (but who knows on tracking, it’s maybe an X factor to be discussed below). Not being familiar with Color, I’ve heard this all is perhaps inherited from Color.

H - Almost lastly, from what I can remember without listening to my Livescribe recording of the whole presentation, it inherits ‘cropping’ and ‘animation’ at least somewhat from Smoke. Coming right from a Smoke demo, I couldn’t help but tell the similarities of entering sort of a “mode” where cropping and animation takes place, and the way that doing so interacts in a very quick and efficient way—automatically taking the crop to fill the frame size, for example, instead adjusting values manually as we’re all used to: crop, scale, move, nudge till the black is gone. Animation-keyframes is all done right within the timeline, instead of in a separate window, which I think is great. I’ve always wondered why it wasn’t already done this way, and this is another inherit from Motion—it appears to be very similar in how Motion/AE/Smoke handles keyframing inside of 1 timeline, & very unsimilar to PP/FCP6&7’s separate panel.

I - In addition to audio, I’ll give it to Apple, the trimming mode and the magnetic timeline (and finally doing what PluralEyes picked up the slack on) are all really interesting, maybe great, features that should have been thought of a long time ago. I’m curious to see if the double click into trimming gets tedious and actually slows down the editing process. Another feature from iMovie I’m told.

J - time changes — I love how everybody missed Adobe’s rate stretch tool, for years, as if it never existed. Well, Apple’s finally stolen it and will finally make it widespread, as usual, via better marketing. When ‘stretching the time’ on the fly in the timeline was demoed on stage, you’d have thought the audience saw a ghost, magic; something that is mind blowing and never thought possible. Oh wait, it’s been in Premiere since at least CS3, that’s only when I noticed it. Further, as far as I’m concerned Apple is strike two on ramping clip speed changes already — in 6 and

7 it was an immense mess, barely usable, & this time around as far as I can tell it’s not possible. Instant change from 25 percent speed to 400 percent speed, no easing about it, which is essential for professional looking work.

_______

All in all, I’m impressed, and FCP finally looks and feels (from what I can tell) like an actual Apple product, and not a Macromedia product that has barely been updated in a decade. Here’s my prediction, however, of what’s going to happen, mostly based on what other people at FCPUG’s own people were discussing about the preview right after seeing it:

It all rides on what we didn’t see.

How customizable is it? How far into ‘manual’ mode can we go on all this, and can we turn all this auto stuff—as nice as it is in theory—off? Performance is an enormous question—is it better than what Adobe’s accomplished or not? It’s 64-bit, the big RAM hurdle that we all hope helps out, & apparently it uses GCD—Grand Central Dispatch, whatever that means for the benefit of the software, probably the worst name to ever make it through the ranks at Apple and out to the public.

It was unclear what’s actually going on under the hood.  At first, it was explained in a way that obviously pointed toward ‘background rendering into ProRes’, worded as “media being prepared for the edit process”. Everyone’s huge concern going in was, can I play media like CS5, like AMA, and be able to edit instantly; so this is an “ut oh” moment that brought a bit of a hush over the crowd.  The presenter even had a hard time getting it out, he knew people might not like it too much.  Then, later into the presentation, it was boldly announced, as we’ve heard year after year now across the NLE market, that you can “now work with your media… natively, instantly… right on the timeline!” and applause was rampant. If I had to guess, it’s likely doing what Edius does & lets you use the original media immediately, but queues up the transcode and background renders it to the butter codec.

IF the little things we didn’t see turn out to be able to highly customizable and professional and allow total user control, FCP is going to reign king again. Speaking of which, I wouldn’t buy their graph for a second, showing FCP as growing faster than any other NLE, and with a huge lead in market share. Apple shot their fellow A’s (one still a sponsor of the FCPUG SuperMeet) out loud as “competing for second”, when I think we all know Avid is the clear standard anywhere the money is actually at—TV and film. Face it, they had 2 shows to show that were cut on FCP, and the number per year isn’t even increasing year to year. Notice their graph was “new workstations sold” or something like that—hmmm.. well maybe one lasts longer than the other? One retains value, retains a workflow that actually works smoothly enough you don’t need to buy a new workstation, perhaps? A product that turns around more quickly, and that charges for entire suite version update that improves upon 2 or 3 tiny features, doesn’t equal market share. Back on track though… if Apple delivers a product that caters to a the professional market that they already have through customizability, if the settings are all there, etc, it will be a enormous success and FCP will be more popular than ever.

However, if FCP X is released and it really does feel like a fancy version of iMovie, with no options to get back the flexibility and more open environment of a more tradition editor, this is going to be a real game changer. For example, tracks are gone. Trying to keep music, sfx, titles, etc all on one ‘track’ for easy selection looks impossible in FCP X. How is this addressed? Is it, and does Apple care? So remember, Avid and Adobe both just adopted some very FCP 6/7-ish looks and feels. Media Composer’s timeline now reacts the way that FC does (err.. once did), making it feel quite familiar to the typical Final Cut Pro editor; and Premiere added similar tweaks, including improving their custom keyboard shortcut preset to completely cater to Final Cut’s hotkeys. Say Final Cut Pro X is released and FCP users are missing all their favorite features they’ve used for years. They can jump into PPRO CS5.5 and immediately get everything back, everything right there, familiar, and working almost exactly how they like it.
Which way will it go?

The price suggests iMovie Pro. High end features? Pro? No one’s expecting it for 299$. Either that’s a special price for some reason unmentioned, or we’re not going to get the Final Cut Pro we’re imagining. Secondly? That price point will likely drive down competition, putting them even more affordable than ever for people already are used to paying a higher price and don’t really complain about. This isn’t the 50,000$ Avid situation again; people are willing to pay a few hundred bucks for a better tool, otherwise they’d all be using Sony Vegas & Ulead VideoStudio.

I think the industry’s on a edge, there will either be some major market share changes or some major innovations & price drops all across the board. Quite the curve ball was thrown at SuperMeet 2011, from the crafty company obsessed with product design. Knowing their master plan would be incredibly interesting and help clear things up. Anywho, it’ll be fun to watch how it all unfolds.

- Weston Woodbury, Editor, www.westonwoodbury.com

It’s about TIME we hear about new MacPros. Unfortunately, still a let down. It seems like Macintosh is always a year or two behind by time they actually release something, I think development just takes too long—it was probably the latest and greatest when it was announced internally at Apple. Where as, it would be impressive if they were ahead of the curve for once.

Instead, it just always shows off the overpricey-ness of their products, beings you can go grab a PC equivilant or better for so much less.

Okay. Up to 12 cores, and the cheap end that most companies/individuals with a budget will decide on is 4. Well, AMD has as 12-core processor single right now, that’s even affordable (and about as much as Apple charges for a 4-core). Intel just brought out 8 core Xeons. If your worried about processing power, it’s an easy decision to just spend less on on a 16-core machine/32 “virtual cores”… I’m throwing it in because Apple’s featuring their “24 cores” on the home page.

Graphics; this is the single biggest reason I will NOT be pushing for companies I’m involved with to buy the new MacPro. No Quadro AGAIN, as even an option? Really? Is Apple aware that a huge part of their MacPro fanbase is Avid users, Avid who doesn’t qualify AMD/ATI graphics cards, much less gaming cards? Yes, Radeons are gaming cards. AMD/ATI makes workstation cards, which are geared toward exactly what Apple lists on their site: motion graphics, 3D modeling, rendering, or animation. And the new MacPro is not even letting it be an option to get one, again missing the mark for another huge market of MacPros, 3D designers. I don’t get it.
The good news is that Apple’s store is insanely overpriced and you’re better off buying the Quadro for Mac seperately.

That leaves about the only decent thing about the new MacPro, the storage options, which have always been nice and haven’t changed from the last generation. Actually, the only good thing about it is the design; it’s very convienent to take the side off and pop in or out a hard drive. Not as convienient as a screwless case design, but hey, fancy and cool none the less. And the design does really well with dust, it isn’t much of an issue on a MacPro, which is just brilliant.

Think maybe they went ahead and updated to SATA III, doubling the hard drive speeds to 6.0Gb/s—which is available on most new motherboards right now, on boards that are less than 100$, by the way—? Nope, not at all. We’re stuck with the quickly becoming dated SATA II. Well, if you want to dish out 700 more dollars, you can always RAID your 4 drives, a feature that’s already integrated into most workstation motherboards, even the cheap ones. Oh yeah, and you also have the option of up to 4 SSD drives! Great, I can’t wait to see what ludicrous value Apple places on them. For anyone who doesn’t know, you can buy any hard drive and format it Mac, Windows, or anything else, so look into it before dropping 3 or 4 more paychecks on your Apple order.

Want more bologna? Here we go.
- NO Firewire 400—have fun driving to BestBuy and giving Apple another 35$ for a cable just to be able to capture video. Firewire 800—when F/W 3 is just around the corner, which would give us a significant boost in performance.
- More Blu-Ray ignorance and instead up to 2 Dual-Layer DVD burners. Wake up.. even Dual-Layer discs are less common than Blu-Ray now; but no suprises, Apple has to stick to their guns on this long-fought, hard-headed issue of theirs.
- No E-Sata, ignoring the fact that thousands of MacPro users have E-sata cards installed in their machines—because everything that Mac includes on their MacPro is TOO DAMN SLOW. You can’t work off of it! Are they doing any research on this thing?
- And WORST OF ALL, USB 2.0! Yeah, 2.0! Apple’s really going to wait around for another 1-2 years, where USB 3.0 is already out and has been for some time?? Ridiculous. It’s bad enough that the MacBook Pros updated earlier this year ignored USB 3.0, but still ignoring it now? Wow.

I just don’t see why anyone would buy or recommend this. HP probably threw a company party last Tuesday because they’re the only real Avid Qualified System at this point. MS ought to do the same; as more workstation users will flock over just because of random performance issues that Apple didn’t address at all.

Personally, I’m just glad it comes with that proprietary power cable.

Okay, despite all the bashing, I love MacPros. If I could see a reason, I’d probably get one. I love the stability and design factors that have been engineered into OS X and the MacPro/MacBook Pros; and the performance just “seems” to be better than PC equivilants, even the iMac’s are really impressive.

But, failure to keep up with technologies that have been announced and/or out for half a year, a year, two years… really shows how little Apple could care about keeping professionals happy. And frankly, I’ll build an illegal Hackintosh before supporting attitude like that.

p.s. I don’t use any of your precious consumer devices you’re so focused on… I don’t own an iPod, an iPad, iPhone, or iAnything. Glad that’s working out for ya, dudes.

- Weston Woodbury
Editor

Just wrapped unintentional show down of image stabilization. Winner: Magic Bullet Steady (others tried include SmoothCam, Avid’s Stabilizer, Motion’s Stabilize, etc). Close 2nd was the demo of iStabilize, which is only 50 Euro—impressive.

Steady not only did a great job in processing, but comes with bonuses. You can choose if your footage shakes quickly, weaves, or wobbles—independently for both horizontal and vertical. This came in real handy since the rogue footage jittered up and down from rolling on the floor, but wandered back and forth due to lack of being locked down. Another thing is that it bundles a noise reduction filter, to make up for that digital zooming in you’ll be doing to crop the black edges resulting from the stabilize. But these beside, all in all it just did the best job of analyzing and not bugging out part of the camera move, which is the problem I was having with everything else.

Biggest downside; no CS5 yet. At least it’s in After Effects, though; having to import/export in/out of FCP or Motion every clip would be hell, they both slaughtered my DNxHD footage. iStabilize is independent which I really liked. Export an in and out, bring it back in fixed. No plug-in compatibility problems.

So now, if only Magic Bullet Steady was ported AVX…

- Weston Woodbury
Editor
www.westonwoodbury.com

I love how uncaring the University (USU) is about who is teaching a class. They list unknown, TBA, a professor that’s not teaching the class, or a professor that completely changes by time the semester starts. You practically don’t know who’s going to be there to teach your class until the first day when you show up. This is an enormous issue that is just simply ignored because it’s left overs of everything else that’s wrong.

It’s sad to me that this issue is just part of a bigger whole, the real problem. It’s only confirmation of the fact that they (administration) know damn well that every student (defined: to be herded in order to use more money & create jobs) is taking the class just because they pretty much have to since some advisor signed them up for it, and ignore the fact that someone might actually be taking the class based on who is teaching it.

Knowing who is teaching a class is absolutely essential to (1) connect with those people you want to connect, for example someone whom you’ve heard good things about and want to get to know (2) maintain a halfway decent GPA if you give a damn about it, which you have to because (and only because) the rest of the educational world (and only the educational world) gives a damn about it.

If the school switches around who’s teaching a class without anyone knowing—which they do constantly—they are inherently putting both of these points in risk for the student: an opportunity to meet and learn from a particular person you specifically want to learn from, could connect with, and open a path to a job or career; and ruin a GPA, potentially ruining a scholarship, a chance for a scholarship, a chance for grad school, etc. etc. Maybe without that scholarship they can’t afford school anymore (those who actually pay own way, god forbid) and they are forced to drop out. And is the school blamed, for not allowing kids to pick professors that they bond well with? Is the professor that grades randomly and carelessly, giving a couple A’s a semester and power-trip tough, blamed for drop outs? NO. Because kids keep taking their classes anyway, because more or less, they are forced to if they don’t want to put up with a giant world of hassle.

But, I know, I’m the only one who cares about this. No one cares who’s teaching their classes, but only that they are taking that course number and checking it off the list for graduation; but I, for one, take classes entirely based on who is teaching the class, their reviews and comments from other students, and what I’ve heard and/or experienced from that professor.

When the university carelessly switches it up on me and I get an message from the new professor they’ve put in place of the one who they lied to me about back when registration was open, they basically might well have bent me over and screwed me. Who knows? Maybe, maybe not, but I’m certainly not in a position to do anything about it or have any options at all.

Weeks away from class starting (or if you’re really lucky, you find out about the fire drill they pulled on the first day of class), every other class is full—you specifically signed up for this class, at midnight, 5 months ago to make sure you’re in. No options, except just take it to see what it’s like, perhaps risking the things I mentioned above, or just drop the class. Either way most likely a loss situation driving students toward quitting school altogether, with, granted, the slight chance of a win by the class actually being better with the new professor you’ve read, heard, and know nothing about.

Why does this happen? Because the of other loopholes to get through other anti-progressive restrictions that have been placed. Red tape is in an incredible abundance at the Universities nationwide. Most likely, it’s “just listed on the registrar that way”, in order to make it okay to bend rules that shouldn’t be there in the first place. Who’s at the receiving end of that little trick? Students. I’m just a little tired of being deceived.

- Tyler Woodbury
Student @ Utah State University

Shame on Mountain American CU & InMotion Hosting for making things harder than they ought to be. Business card expired, and set off flurry of payment bounces. Having REAL problems getting it renewed and/or using another card.

First, MACU didn’t send me another card in the mail, and after it expired and stopped working, going into a branch meant waiting a few days, during which time wbp couldn’t charge business charges to a business card.
After receiving the new card, going to use it meant calling the activation number. Called the activation number, who (some random 3rd party VISA company) said that MACU didn’t send them the info to activate it, and that I need to visit a branch.

This is a thorn because it’s right before a business related shoot, time’s a ticking, and I need to make purchases before the shoot in an hour. Driving across town to the branch, I find that only the drive-through is open on Saturdays. I told them the problem, and they said I have to go inside to activate business cards. BUT the inside isn’t open!! So I have to again, eat it up expenses on a personal card, and have wasted an hour doing essentially nothing but pointlessly driving around.

Then, my domain bounces and my hosting company’s renewal bounces; all that stuff is set to my business card, which apparently, it’s God’s will for me to not be able to use. After the activation problems, I decide I better put this thing, again, on a personal card for about a month so that my stuff doesn’t get deleted from my website’s server. Well.. I call up my web host, InMotion hosting, who were (I admit) actually pretty good about contacting me about the problem (3 emails, and at least 2 phone calls from what I could tell).

I run into a brick wall—they need to “verify the account” by giving me either the “original password” or the “last 4 digits on the credit card on file”. I tried both—neither of them, apparently, are what I was fairly sure that they were. Instead of just helping me out, they told me they’d send an email with that information on it. Well, I’m on the field doing shoots. I don’t have internet access for another 2 days.

Oh, and by the way and backing up, for some reason I can’t just log in to my InMotion hosting account and just update my payment information like every other online company on the face of the planet. Instead, I’m forced to go through billing customer support and unnecessarily verify my identity in order to give money to them. Odd and contradicting, right?

Anyway, finally, (at this point my domain/website is literally down) I get home and can access my email. I get back with InMotion customer support, which is very conveniently, usually, open 24/7 both phone and chat. Turns out, the **Billing**@inmotionhosting.com and “maybe” they’ll have the authority to do that there. Okay.. Well, I have no intention of putting a year’s charge for my business on a personal debit card. So, another brick wall, it’s either the year’s worth or wait. Still nervous about whether or not they’re going to wipe my data clean. After all, the site is unavailable at the moment.

Tomorrow, I can finally make it to the credit union when the inside is indeed open, attempt again to renew my card, and then, just maybe then, with all forces aligned for the better, be able to renew and pay for my business expenses again.

So thanks, Mountain America Credit Union, and InMotion Hosting, Inc., for making convenience SECOND to a huge overdose of unneeded security. You’re both just lucky I don’t know anywhere better. ;)

Weston Woodbury
http://www.westonwoodbury.com