It requires some creativity to come up with the question of are creative people more dishonest, so are not the psychologists that did the study proved to be dishonest by their own study and not to be believed?

My problem with this study is the way it’s focused on those that are obviously creative (people working at an ad agency). The real problem, perhaps, is people that test high for creativity but have jobs that don’t on the surface require creativity, like accountants and bankers. Unfortunately when you say ‘people that are creative’ most of us think of artists, photographers, designers, etc. But the truth is that genius goes hand in hand with creativity regardless of what your field is… psychologists, scientists, cooking, banking, whatever. The ability to look at a problem in a novel way is important for the advancement of almost anything and requires creativity. Some of the most creative people I know are computer programmers… not a profession usually associated with creativity.

The study does a disservice to creativity, by not looking at other traits such as confidence to see if there are traits that have a higher correlation with dishonesty. It may be true that to be a mastermind of evil it helps to be creative. But to announce to the world that creative people are dishonest because of an anonymous survey and co-eds counting dots seems to me to be a ‘creative’ hypothesis.

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So congrats to Rob for his continued excellence in visual effects, this time for Hugo.

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Awesome! Then why are you complaining about piracy? You want people to hear your stories. You’re not in it for the money. Pirates are just enabling more people to see your movie that otherwise would play at two arthouse theaters on each coast and then be forgotten. What exactly is the problem?

However, somehow I feel he’s not being completely honest about not being in it for the money.

The biggest problem that most artists run into is that if they want to be even remotely successful, they need to look at themselves as a business. This kind of sucks. Most artists became artists because they didn’t want to think about marketing, business plans, how to accept credit cards, who they have to pay off to get in a gallery, etc. Sadly, that’s the hard, cold reality of it. Either you learn how to market yourself, you give up a good chunk of your earnings to someone that will market for you (like a gallery), or you starve. (or I suppose you can subsist in a coffee shop making pretty patterns in the latte foam of hipsters who go ‘Wow, that’s cool. You should be an artist!’)

I was at WPPI recently and I had a good discussion about this with a few photographers. We were talking about how much of their time goes into marketing/self promotion and it’s an immense portion of their time. It’s not enough to be a great photographer. You need to have a business plan. You need to master Facebook and find someone to SEO your web site. And, yeah, you need to have a great web site. The really lousy thing is that schools don’t teach this. The students don’t want to hear it and the schools, if they even think about it, don’t want to push it on the students because they might quit and stop paying their overpriced tuition.

But the fact remains. If you’re going to be successful in your career as an artist you need to market yourself. You can whine all you want about how much cameras cost and how you don’t want to think about business models… but it’s not going to get you where you want to go.

If you’re a filmmaker, you need to distribute your film the way your viewers want to see it. This does NOT mean it’s free. It just means you find a way to stream it to those people that want to do that and charge them. Otherwise, they’ll be knocking on the door of Pirate Bay. AND you use a facility to process your film that has good security so the 18 year old receptionist doesn’t upload your film to Pirate Bay before it’s released.

But there’s lessons in that for all artists. You have to do things and think about things that have nothing to do with art. Otherwise other people will do it for you. Of course, you may have to die before they do that but at least you didn’t have to debase yourself by doing marketing. So the choice is before you: Learn how (or hire someone) to build a web site and do some marketing… or die. (ok, ok… maybe working in a coffee shop isn’t exactly death, but…)

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In the NPR article producer Gavin Polone says, regarding the fact that YouTube and the like are now producing their own shows: “And they will also start to look at this very expensive property as property, and they’re not going to want to have it stolen from them”.

Guess what? They’re well aware of much it costs to make content and they are definitely in it to make money. Could it be possible there are other ways to profit from content than the standard model that Hollywood has used for the last 50-80 years?

And let’s look at some of those models. Like TV. Up until the 80s, TV was completely free for the viewer. How did Hollywood make money off of that?

The real issue is loss of control. Anyone can make a movie now and broadcast it far and wide, bypassing the whole Hollywood machine. There are plenty of ways to make money off of internet distribution. I think Hollywood can figure that one out pretty easily if they want to. Hulu was a good start… but you’ve got hundreds of millions of people around the world that want to watch your shows, many of whom will pay or suffer advertisements to watch them and you can’t figure out how to make money off of that? Really? And you want to cripple the technology that enables that because there’s some web site in Sweden that you don’t like? How about you just create a legit web site that enables people to watch over the internet?

But I think one of their real reasons for trying to cripple the internet with ‘piracy’ legislation is to make it hard for anyone to stream content unless it goes through an authorized Hollywood studio/channel. It’s a control freak issue. They want to shut down sites or make it more difficult to stream any user content. It’s pathetic.

I understand piracy is an issue. I’ve created software for the last 16 years… I understand piracy, believe me. But I also understand that most people that pirate content are not customers. If they can’t get it for free, they’ll go without. On the software side of things, that means students, software collectors, etc.  people that really aren’t going to use the software. But there are people that pirate our software to use as part of their business (yep, photographers, that would go apopletic if someone stole one of their photos, stealing software. Watch out for karma…). So our focus and energy is devoted to making it difficult to do real work with pirated copies and finding ways to get them to go legal.

Hollywood needs to identify the users that will pay or watch ads and craft a solution so as many of them as possible will see through legit internet channels. Attempting to ‘shut down’ piracy is impossible and such attempts will just put burdensome restrictions on the rest of the internet and our civil liberties.

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And I am pretty much the poster child for what happens if you ignore the possibility of RSI. Back when I first started working in software, I worked with a programmer who had to have someone hired to do his typing. The company had people come in and speak about ergonomics and how to avoid RSI. I ignored all of it. Clearly these people were just weak, and I, being invincible, would never suffer such things . Not so much.  Age and too many 16 hour days hunched over a keyboard/mouse tend to take their toll. The whole growing older thing is really a pain in the neck (literally).

People usually associate RSI with wrists, but in fact it can affect your arms, shoulders, neck, and back. If you’re on a computer a lot (and if you’re reading this most likely you make your living using a computer) it’s critically important that you pay attention to it. It’ll seriously affect your ability to use a computer and, if you’re a photographer, your ability to hold a camera for long periods.

So what to do? First thing… start off with ergonomics. Make sure your keyboard/monitor set up are at the proper height relative to how you sit in your chair. Then… Get a good office chair. A really good one, that’s fully adjustable to your body. Unless you are perfectly average, the average $129 office chair doesn’t cut it. You sit in the thing all day long, every day. Invest $900 into a great chair. It’ll last you years and your body will thank you for it. Personally I have a Steelcase chair which is awesome. If you really are on a budget there are some good cheaper chairs out there. We have a couple from Office Depot that run $250 and are pretty good.

The last thing is your input device. Mice are absolutely horrible. Trackpads are worse. We’ve found that trackballs are a better than mice and by far the best thing we’ve tested are Wacom tablets. The tablets are traditionally used for painting on the computer, but if you set them up as a regular input device they put a lot less strain on your wrists, hands, and arm. They do take a bit of getting used to, but they’ve become a critical part of managing RSI for us. They come in a variety of sizes which makes it easier to find one that will work with your setup. You do have to have a keyboard tray/shelf that can accomodate the tablet. For this purpose we’re talking about the Intous or Bamboo tablets. Not the Cintiq monitor/tablets. But we love the tablets, use them in the office and at tradeshows, and can’t recommend them enough as an RSI solution (or at least part of a solution).

Anyways, hopefully this article will encourage you to take RSI a bit more seriously and offer up some potential solutions. I definitely welcome comments as to what other readers are using for RSI and what they’ve found helpful.

Cheers,
Jim

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No Nigerian Scam Here. They’re Making Movies!

This info was put out there to drive home the point that a lot of the growth we’re probably going to see in digital tools is going to come from emerging markets. This means opportunities for both software developers and artists. Granted, I don’t know how much software anyone is actually buying in Nigeria (or what they’re paying artists). However, I do know that some emerging markets, like India, are buying software and, at the higher end, apparently there are some well paid opportunities. I know several folks that are working in China, Singapore, and India.

There’s a huge demand for digital content worldwide. Movies, games, whatever… With phones and tablets we are constantly connected to devices that let us view and play whenever we have a little free time. Some of this content is becoming less valuable because there’s so much of it. (There’s certainly a lot of crap on YouTube!) The stuff that stands out though becomes extremely valuable simply because it’s able to stand out from the rest of the 10 million lolcatz videos out there. Professional produced and marketed content will usually stand out… but it’s becoming easier and cheaper to produce high quality entertainment. (although, it’s becoming more expensive on the high end for 3D movies and ever more complex and immersive games)

It’ll be interesting to see how and where this valuable content is created. As the tools get cheaper you’re going to see a lot more graphics power in the hands of everyone. Nvidia now has a graphics chip for mobile devices. You can record and edit video almost in real time on a phone or tablet. And it’s fascinating to see things start to go the other way… from digital to analog. Pretty soon you’ll be able to scan in a real world object with an app on your phone, transmit the data to your nearby $1000 3D printer and recreate the object. (or at least the exterior look of the object) There’s some pretty incredible technology out there.

While there is some truth to the computer graphics industry being somewhat mature, there are still a lot of untapped areas. We’re constantly seeing new devices, new ways of distributing content, and the tools are getting cheaper/easier/faster. While we may not be watching movies spoken in Igbo, the content we watch may be coming from unexpected places and the content you produce may end up distributed far wider than you would imagine.

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It’s been interesting and disheartening to see the stream of photos and videos coming out of the Occupy Oakland economic protest that basically got attacked by police a couple weeks ago.  No longer is it just people in far away places like Egypt, Syria, or China using this technology and social media to show peaceful protesters being fired upon and, but now it’s 10 miles away from where I live.
The true power of photography is it’s ability to capture dramatic moments, be they on the other side of the world or across a bridge. This is what makes it exciting to work within the photography community. Even if much of what passes for photojounalism these days is not taken by professionals. I find the thought of having a thousand cameras in a thousand places to be an incredible way of seeing what’s happening in the world.

btw… yes, I support the Occupy movement. However, I think it’s time they moved beyond the campouts and offered some solutions. This article is a good start…

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We recently had the technical guy at a photography studio give us a call. Their primary business is doing greenscreen photography for clients and they use Primatte for it. He called to complain that they had recently upgraded to Primatte 5.0 and that he gets an error message when he tries to run it on all his machines.

All of Digital Anarchy’s software looks for other instances of the plugin running on a network and shuts down if it sees a copy with the same serial number. This studio, which makes their living doing greenscreen, had one serial number. In his words “We have Primatte 3 installed on all our machines and never had a problem, but now it looks like we’ll have to buy more licenses. Why?”.

Well, because we’re nice people and you want to make sure we can eat. And if that doesn’t move you, then consider that we need to answer phone calls from people like you that make their living using our software. If we can’t eat, we can’t answer support calls/emails. This would be unfortunate all the way around.

We get emails and phone calls all the time from customers dealing with one emergency or another. They’ve got an event on a Saturday night, just bought a new machine, and email us ON Saturday in a panic because they can’t find their serial number. Or they run into some problem on a deadline and need an answer yesterday. Such is life around here.

But we need our customers to support us if they expect to be supported. That means actually buying the correct number of licenses to run on the number of machines you’re using. We try to be flexible. We offer hefty discounts on multi-seat licenses. We understand that many people have a work machine and home machine (or a laptop). You can use the software just fine in such a case. But for studios with multiple machines, please support the people that support you making your living. It helps ensure bug fixes are done promptly, that we answer phone calls (on Saturday), and otherwise support the products… which you rely on.

All this is just to point out that there are real folks behind the software. Most plugin companies are pretty small affairs, Digital Anarchy is just four people (plus two cats and an alien), so we’re similar in size to most of the studios we sell to. We do our best to support our customers and hope that they do likewise.

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But along with FCP X, we got some info about FxPlug 2.0. Luckily for us, Beauty Box Video is a relatively new product written from the ground up to be 64-bit. So we’re in pretty good shape to port this over to FCP X/Motion 5. It is very possible that we’ll have a new version done by August or sooner. It may be free or there may be a small charge for the upgrade. Just depends on how much work it takes to port. But we’re optimistic that we can get something going in the very near future.

One thing to note… it looks like if you want to use third party plugins you’ll need Motion. FxPlug 2.0 works with Motion and then Final Cut links to Motion. This is my understanding at the moment, but that info may change. Look for updates here and on our Facebook page.

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The main benefit of DNG is that it’s an open format in the sense that the specification is publicly available. So even if Adobe were to fail, it’d still be possible for other software developers to read the format. With so many RAW file formats out there (every camera has a slightly different file format), the possibility that the RAW files won’t be accessible sometime in the future is very possible. Still, such a problem is a ways off. So what are the immediate benefits?

The big immediate benefit is that the thumbnail and metadata is built into the format. No more sidecar files that are easy to lose or not copy over when moving your photos around. This benefit alone was enough to convert me to DNG. While I don’t care about the thumbnail files, I’ve definitely had to redo my RAW settings due to not copying over an .xmp file. Stupid mistake, sure, but something that should be avoidable in the first place by a well thought out file format.

The DNG files are also smaller by about 25-33%. So that makes them easier to backup and transport around. The reason for this, as explained by Tom, is that when you’re shooting the camera is just concerned about getting the images on your card. So the compression is fast, but not as robust as it could be. When you’re creating the DNG file on your regular computer, time isn’t such an issue so a better but slightly slower compression algorithm can be used. All the data is the same.

So I’m a fan and I recommend you take a look at it. It really does seem to solve some very real problems.

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Why do I think that?

I was talking to a friend who had recently been to a wedding. Apparently the total cost of the thing was about $80,000 including about $10K for the photography. At first I thought, ‘well, ok, they must be pretty well off’, but not so. Apparently they took a home equity loan out to finance part of the thing. Never underestimate the need for social validation that comes about by spending money. Sometimes people WANT to spend money.

This is also borne out by stories I hear from my sister who runs a florist in Los Angeles that, among other things, does high-end weddings. (shameless plug: her company is LA Botanicals) There doesn’t seem to be a dearth of people willing to spend $10-15,ooo on flowers. Granted, that’s LA, but it does seem like folks are willing to spend money on weddings, recession or no. And that includes photography. So I think a lot of the fears that any family member with a Canon Rebel is going to displace real photographers is a bit overblown. I think most people understand that if they want memories of this expensive event to last a lifetime, a pro photographer is important.

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Basically, our deal is if you bought it from us, we’ll make sure you’re supported on it. There’s no time limit, support contracts, or whatever. There’s some caveats with this… if new hardware comes along that isn’t supported by an older version, you might have to upgrade to get a working version. It can require a lot of work to support new versions of host apps and new OSes, so we need to charge for upgrades sometimes. But if you bought something and it’s supposed to work on a given system, we’ll support you on it. (this includes stuff that we sold to Red Giant if they’re not supporting it for some reason)

So why are we so wonderfully altruistic? (tongue in cheek ;-)

There’s a few benefits for us:

1) We make software to be used. It’s exciting to see it being used, so there’s definitely motivation to ensure customers are successful with it. Also, if you all use it and get good results, you guys generally talk about it. That’s good for us. For example, I _love_ Amazon’s support. That’s advertising you can’t buy. But they rock and deserve it.

2) You’re a customer now, we’d like you to stay one. There’s no better way to make sure someone DOESN’T buy something from you in the future than to not support them now. If you’ve had a bad support experience, you aren’t likely to expect the company to suddenly offer good support because you bought additional things from them. We’re coming out with new products, we want you to be able to purchase those products knowing you’ll be supported.

3) Folks talk a lot more about bad experiences. It’s not always true, but people are more passionate about complaints than compliments usually. Lots of complaints don’t make other customers want to buy from you.

4) Bad support pisses me off. And I believe in Karma. So if I’m not willing to make sure my own company offers good support, I can’t really complain when we get crappy support for the hardware, software, and other stuff we buy.

We aren’t perfect. We fail sometimes. We forget to return emails or call people back. We’re a small company and sometimes those things happen. We don’t have a big support staff in India, if you call you’re as likely to talk to me as anyone, so occasionally balls get dropped. But if you call us on it, we’ll do everything in our power to make it right.

We want you to be successful. We want _ourselves_ to be successful. I think the best way to accomplish both those things is to offer good support. (well, and good products)

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There’s been a number of interesting privacy things happening lately. The most interesting is the FTC’s smack down of Google. Here’s a good article on it… but basically Google got forced into 20 (yes, 20!) years of privacy audits and a requirement that users have to Opt-In to future social marketing endeavors. This is a pretty big blow to them and it bolster’s the FTC’s case that they should be able to regulate what companies are doing with the information we give to them. This has to be making Facebook, who happily whores out your data to all comers and constantly tries to ‘innovate’ new ways of doing so, a little nervous. FTC regulation might put a damper on Zuckerburg’s notion that ‘Privacy is dead’ and in the process, affect their IPO which is probably coming soon.

There really needs to be better legislation protecting the data we give to companies. I highly encourage you to support movements like Dotrights.org.

We’re giving a lot of data to companies and when companies like RapLeaf are attaching all that data to your name and then selling it, there needs to be some protections.

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If you’re going to use the cloud, it doesn’t matter if you’re FourSquare or just an editor storing some old video… you need to have a backup plan. Technology just isn’t perfect and never will be. For all those people dismissing the cloud because of the Amazon failure, I’ll remind you of the RackSpace failure a couple years ago. Click here for more info on that… but hosting companies, even high-end, We-promise-you-10000%-uptime-and-you’re-going-to-pay-for-it, hosting companies like RackSpace suffer data center wide outages. So the cloud isn’t perfect. Neither is anything else. Sometimes it’s good to remember that as we decide what to do with our critical data.

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Brilliant spot for Subura. So simple, but shows the power of a great script and good acting. Completely gets the message across and pulls the emotional strings as well.

Beautifully done CG world of paint chips. I actually saw a slightly different one (couldn’t find it online), but they are all really well done.

Hopefully the first clip inspires you to make sure you have a great story. And the other clips offer some technical inspiration.

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Originally posted by Mark Raudonis.  Mark  is a former intern now working in Hollywood.

1. You are here for a short time… make every minute count.
2. If you find yourself stuck doing Xeroxing, it’s your own fault. Be proactive about
your time, your schedule, and what you want to learn.
3. Nobody is going to “hand you” an experience, you create it yourself.
4. You’re onstage here. You may be watching us, but we’re watching you. Make a good impression.
5. Watching someone edit is like watching paint dry. It’s boring! Ask questions. Engage in the creative process. “Outthink” the editor to the next shot.
6. You’re future career DEPENDS on your colleagues. Get to know them. They will be your best source of information for your next job.
7. There are plenty of editors here. Learn something different for each of them.
8. We’re in the communication business. Start by learning to communicate with the team.
Know, understand, and practice communication… and I don’t mean texting!
9. Technology is NOT your enemy. Learn enough about what we use to become confident in using the tools of our trade.
10. Organization is the key to creativity. If you can’t find something, you can’t even begin to be creative. Learn how we organize our projects, our SAN, our servers.

Finally, have fun! I was an intern once. It was one of the best experiences of my career.

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However, if you are like me and get excited when you see a Humpback whale 10 feet away from the boat, you might let your camera slip out of your hand. At which point you will watch your Canon T2i and Ikelite housing start slowly sinking. It’s like watching a big bag of money go down to Davey Jones locker. Not good. For a split second I considered the fact that we were in a whale sanctuary and I might be fined if I dove in after the camera and underwater housing. After the .25 of a second was up, I dove in and grabbed the camera. Luckily, I don’t think anyone other than Mr. Humpback Whale (and 18 other passengers) saw anything and their were no repercussions. I immediately got back on the boat anyways, so it’s not like I was hanging out having a photo session with the whale.

The moral of the story: Sometimes a $10 lanyard can save you a lot of camera equipment!  (Feel free to post your own stupid photographer tricks in the comment section)

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I’ve written about this before… when Digital Railroad failed a couple years ago and gave photographers 24 hours to download their photos, it should have been a big wake up call for photographers that these services can’t be trusted as archives (at least, not without offline backups as well). Now, maybe they can’t even be trusted as temporary storage. With tech companies it’s all good… until it’s not. Then the CEO announces everyone is laid off and the servers are shut down. I’ve been part of startups where this has happened. As Jason Perlow points out in an excellent blog post ‘Flickr: Too big to fail?’, Flickr is not too big to fail.

AND even if it doesn’t fail, that doesn’t mean your account won’t be accidentally deleted and since Flickr doesn’t have backups of your data, there goes all your photos. Which means all the links on your blog or web site that point to Flickr (or Vimeo or…) get broken requiring a lot of time and aggravation fixing your site. Assuming you have all those photos backup in a single place and you don’t have to go rooting around for the particular photos/videos you uploaded… which would involve even more time.

I’ll point out that I think these sites are great usually. I use them, particularly vimeo. However, it’s important to know what will happen if things go wrong and to know what you’re in for.

Anyways, give Jason’s blog a read… it brings up some good questions and concerns.

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The DVD has a lot of amazing photos of the Humpbacks, but very little actual video. This is due to the fact that the 5D doesn’t work well for wildlife videography. Now, some of you might have expected that, knowing about rolling shutter, aliasing, and some of the other issues that DSLRs have. However, when I started the project, I was blissfully unaware of most of those issues. Even though we shot with the 5D on a Stedicam Merlin most of the footage was unusable. Between the motion of the boat, the rolling shutter, and fast moving wildlife the 5D proved not to be the camera we hoped it was. (it was everything we expected for the tripod shots, so that came out well. But when we were actually on the boat… not so much.) There are some Final Cut Pro plugins to help out with these problems, but when dealing with a boat and wildlife it was just too much for the camera.

So the DVD was made with a little video footage of the whales and a lot of great photos. It came out fine, but looking to the future we want to shoot videos of the whales. What to do?

Buy an inexpensive HD Camcorder! In my case, I choose the Panasonic TM700 (Canon also has some great ones, but they’re more expensive and nothing I read indicated they were worth the extra money). $750 and it shoots 1080/60p in high quality AVCHD format. The other nice thing, at least for wildlife, is the touchscreen focusing. You can tap the screen on the object you want the camera to focus on. This is incredibly useful because one of the main problems with shooting wildlife is keeping it in focus. And when you’re on a moving boat trying to focus on a fast moving whale you really don’t have the time to manually focus.  It’s extremely difficult and unless you’re a real pro at it, you’re usually going to miss the shot while you’re futzing around with the focus ring.

The image stabilization seems to have a noticable effect on the TM700 (perhaps because it’s designed for video). On the 5D (24-105 lens), the image stabilization doesn’t seem to make a difference. Of course, the real solution is not to shoot handheld and use something like the Steadicam Merlin. But nothing I shot handheld with the 5D was usuable (and very little of the 5D on a steadicam was either), whereas the TM700 produced relatively nice footage. It’s going to be fun to put it on the Merlin.

Here’s the first test with the TM700. This was basically just taking it out of the box and shooting. There are a number of things that I need to set up, which I think will improve the video even further. But right out of the box it trumps the 5D hands down for for this situation. For interviews and other situations where you have more control over what you’re shooting and how it’s being shot, the 5D is an amazing video camera. For scenics it’s beautiful and for wildlife where you can sit in the bushes with a tripod it works well. But if you’re moving and your subject is moving it starts to present a lot of challenges.

http://vimeo.com/18688733

Vimeo, in this case, darkened the footage, so the original footage is nicer than what you see on vimeo. I’m still working out the best way to get the .mts files through FCP and into Vimeo. But still, good footage from a $750 camera!

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