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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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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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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What’s not cool is paying ridiculous amounts of money to a design school while you figure it out. If her parents were paying for it, then sweet. Party on. But she’s paying for it, or more correctly, going massively into debt for it and struggling to make ends meet… because she can’t work due to the 18 units/semester she has to take to get everything done in 3 yrs. Being potentially burnt out and in debt is not a good way to figure out what you want to do for a career.

Most of these schools (for profit design schools) will make all sorts of promises about what happens after you graduate. But they know that a good portion of students will drop out (without a degree and in debt usually). Yes, they do have better career counseling than state schools, but in truth, that requires you to make it all the way through, be good, and be motivated. If you’re good and motivated you’ll get a job. Which is why state schools always seem like a bargin to me. Design is design. If you’re motivated, you’re usually going to get just as good of an education at state school (or even a community college) as you will at a dedicated design school. Which you’ll discover, because you’ll be making the same entry level wages as the guy working next to you that graduated from SFSU.

Which is not to say their aren’t some advantages to design schools. They may have wider range of art type classes and better equipment you can experiment around with. However, these are slight advantages and not worth going massively in debt for.  In the end, it’s your portfolio that matters. Not the school you went to.

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I read a report earlier this year that pointed out that TV is still a very social screen.

Families still watch together, groups of friends watch together, housemates, etc., etc. The TV is still, in many ways, our electronic campfire. This may be somewhat obvious, but it’s in contrast to a computer which is usually a one viewer situation. So the use case for a TV, generally speaking, is very different from a computer screen.

To folks developing applications for iOS and Android this is a significant difference. I don’t think most people will use the TV as just another computer screen. It will still be a more passive experience and one where the group of people watching it will have to agree on any apps or widgets that are viewable on the screen. Many apps will probably be info strips (think ESPN scores running along the bottom of your screen) or pop-up boxes, more than full fledged apps taking over the entire screen. Although, I’m sure games will be significant as they are everywhere.

For content creators, I think it matters a little less. However, if you’re creating content for the web it’ll make a difference if you think it’s likely to be viewed on a TV. That file that looks ok on a 17″ laptop screen may not look so hot on a 52″ TV. Is it a 60 second skit meant for youtube or a 10 minute episode of a regular program on blip.tv? The 10 minute episode is probably more likely to make it to a TV, and you’ll want to encode accordingly.

Does this mean you need to re-encode and re-upload all your content? Well, if InterwebTV was here, right now, then yes you would. But it’s not. At least, not in any meaningful way. If your audience is technology geeks, then that day is probably not too far off. Tech people will probably have  Google TV or some such thing sooner than everyone else. But if you’ve got a wider audience, you can’t listen to early adoptin’ tech folks. You’ll know TV via the net (or Over The Top TV) has arrived when your parents have it. This was my gauge for broadband and I think it’s more or less applicable here as well.

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Now, I realize that going into a camera store and stealing a $1000 lens is difficult and stealing a $500 software program is relatively easy. But just because it’s easy to steal software doesn’t make it any less wrong. If you can afford to buy a $1000 lens, you can afford to help support the people that make the software you use to organize, enhance, manipulate, and print your photos. We’re all real folks trying to make a living and, even though piracy is given with software, sometimes it hurts when it’s thrown in your face as my friend did (unintentionally, sure, but here’s someone that’s relatively well paid just casually throwing out she wants to steal Photoshop.).

I usually don’t lose much sleep over piracy. Much of it is done by people that would never buy the program. They  download the software, use it once or twice, and then don’t use it again. But for artists that use something like Photoshop every day, it does dismay me a little about how common piracy is. Some photographers and artists that would be up in arms if their work was copied and used for an ad without being paid, think nothing of copying software from a friend. Yet, it’s the same principle.

I don’t care if you download a pirated copy of our plugins to try out. But if you find it useful, please… support those of us that work our asses off to bring you cool, useful software.

Yes, there are real people behind all this software… Jim, Garrick, Debbie, and Maggie (see above). And we all greatly appreciate all of you who do find our software useful and help us continue to do something we love… allowing us to create cool software that hopefully makes your jobs easier!

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Same with Reuters, a news outlet known for running its photographs unedited. No use of Photoshop is allowed to alter the image or change its intended meaning.

A story today in Media Decoder questions a Reuters photograph used by The Economist in its June 19 issue. The photo shows President Obama standing alone in front of the Gulf of Mexico, head down as if in contemplation. It’s a striking image on that mid-June cover, and one that inspired me to flip more closely the magazine a few weeks ago.

The issue being ballyhooed is that the original Reuters photo shows two people alongside Obama. They were edited out by The Economist and replaced with an extended blue ocean. In her defense, the deputy editor stated, “We don’t edit photos in order to mislead. I asked for Ms. Randolph to be removed because I wanted readers to focus on Mr. Obama, not because I wanted to make him look isolated. That wasn’t the point of the story.”

Personally, I don’t have a problem with this kind of photo-editing. (Hey, that’s why Content Aware Fill was developed in Photoshop CS5.) Obama was standing in front of the Gulf of Mexico, talking about the BP oil spill, which is the subject of this Economist article. If Obama had been in front of a different ocean for a different occasion, then photo’s message would have been distorted. In this case, editing the photo only heightens its impact and intensifies the message.

What is your thought?

regards -debbie

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A few days ago, I posted an ad in the Talent section of Craigslist. The captcha that I had to fill out, ‘discontented bacon’, was geekiness to its max. More on what this talent ad was for in a few days… we’re excited.

Yesterday I registered Digital Anarchy for a new Twitter name and the captcha that came up made me giggle. The term ‘the overusing’ perfectly describes how Twitter is often handled.

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I mean seriously. Geek evil is sort of like ‘pinky and the brain’ evil. Yeah, they might take over the world, but that’s what they plan every night. And even if they succeed, all they’ll end up doing is having chair jumping contests and all night Star Trek marathons (how else do you explain much of Microsoft’s software?)

Marketers, like Steve, are different.

Much more machiavellian (or Heather-esque, if you will) If Apple doesn’t like you or doesn’t like what you’re doing you’re not in the club. So, of course, Apple won’t let developers use the tool of their choice (Flash, .Net, Java, etc.), denies apps that show political satire, and now Apple is having the police raid journalist’s homes for talking about their products in ways Apple doesn’t approve of. It’s getting a bit ridiculous and it’s not slightly ironic that this is the same Apple that used the 1984 ad to announce the Macintosh. Who knew Steve Jobs was the man on the 1984 screen?

Jim Tierney

President

Digital Anarchy

(Although, to be fair, in this photo from 2000, Steve looks like Brain. What does it all mean?!?)

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From www.notalwaysright.com:

“Customer: “Hi, I’d like a copy of this photo, but I need one the people cropped out. “
(The customer hands me a photo of three men, arms around each other’s shoulders in front of a brick wall.)
Me: “Which one needs to be cropped out?”
Customer: “The guy in the middle.”
Me: “Well, we really can’t do that. That is more for a photo-refinishing artist.”
Customer: “Can’t you just erase the guy in the middle?”
Me: “We could, but then there would be a blank space were he once was. It would be pretty obvious.”
Customer: “Oh, you won’t just see the wall behind him if he is removed?”
Me: “No, the camera doesn’t take a picture of what is behind the person, just what you see.”
Customer: “What if it was a digital camera?”

Since Digital Anarchy specializes in Adobe Photoshop plugins,  I talk to a variety of folks each day with a different level of understanding about how digital imaging works. I wonder how many of you have experienced this kind of question from your clients or customers. The blooper comes from my hometown of Philly, PA, which is cherry filling as well as that much more embarrassing.

Many people I know are freaked out about this. One person was shocked that her photos and blog posts were found. Seriously. There’s a lot of folks out there who are unclear on how all these cookies, logging, networking, and whatever else works.

Privacy Law Needs To Be Updated. Support dotrights.org

Notwithstanding obvious things like blogs, that we put up so other people can see, our privacy is being eroded fast.

For example, a recent Wall Street Journal article discussed how Ebay served ads to friends of the people that were buying things on Ebay. They used a separate company, one like Spokeo, to identify friends of the buyers and targeted ads at them. The assumption was that your friends probably like the same things you do. However, they did it without the knowledge of the buyers.

This should be illegal.

Not because targeting ads should be illegal, but because of other crazy shit companies or the government might do and are doing. Google’s Buzz service, when it was launched, let anyone viewing your social networking page see who you most frequently emailed with… again, without your permission. I wonder how many marriages or business deals were wrecked because of that?

How can they do this? The Electronic Privacy Act, which governs such things, was written in 1986. It is hopelessly out of date and needs to be revised. The ACLU, EFF, Google, ATT, Microsoft, and others have started a movement to get it revised. It’s called dotrights.org.

dotrights.org needs to be supported. We need strong privacy protection for all of us. There’s a lot of data out there about us and it’s pretty easy to gather and use or misuse. Governments, companies and individuals are NOT going to just ignore all this data because it’s the right thing to do. There needs to be a law with teeth that defines what can be done with this data.

Please support dotrights.org.

Your online privacy matters, and right now, you have very little control how much data is out there and how it is used.

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Potential 3D content?

I sat next to the manager of the CBS station on a recent flight. Among other things we chatted about 3D TV and it’s purpose (if any) and whether it was just a fad. Particularly since everyone has just upgraded to HD.

HD is the type of technology that lots of people can understand and get behind. It’s ‘un-intrusive’, meaning it just makes everything look better. You don’t notice the technology after viewing it a few times (or until you see an SD show). People watching just see a better picture, so they’re happy, and producers don’t have to dramatically change how they shoot and tell stories, so they’re happy (except for the make-up artists who now really need to cover up those unsightly blemishes and removed tattoos… or they can use Beauty Box :-). Everyone has to buy some new equipment, but otherwise the changes are minimal.

3D is very intrusive. And does anyone really want it?

3D requires both the viewer change the way they view content, and it certainly causes producers to create shows that cater to the technology (which is expensive). Usually using the technology for the sake of the technology, not because it helps them tell better stories. We’ve already seen this ad nauseum in 3D movies, where there are things constantly being thrown at the screen or other visual gimmicks that really add nothing to the story or experience. Once the novelty of having things thrown at you wears off, where will 3D be? Probably where web3D is. Nowhere.

Back in 2000 I was part of a company that developed a web3D solution (Cycore’s Cult 3D). Web3D was going to be the next big thing. Everyone wanted to see cars, shoes, mp3 players, and whatever else in 3D. As it turns out… they didn’t. And because 3D is expensive to produce, web designers didn’t want to use it. 8 photos of a shoe is a lot cheaper than creating a 3D model. And for viewers, photos have about the save effect as 3D. Neither gets you closer to actually trying the shoe on. Which is the problem with 3D TV.

3D TV doesn’t really get you closer to feeling like you’re part of the environment. You’re sort of in the scene (and junk is flying at you), but the technology isn’t anywhere close to being good enough to really suspend disbelief. So it just becomes a distraction to the story you’re trying to tell.

Good stories is what makes good content. That’s what people want to watch. 3D in it’s current state (and for the foreseeable future), just doesn’t add that much. And into this you have to consider changing viewing habits with more people watching shows on computer monitors and mobile devices. Yes, IF you’re watching on a regular TV, there are some movies, particularly kids movies, that benefit. Games will probably benefit, and maybe there’s some uses in sports (assuming you’re willing to hang out with your buddies wearing 3D glasses). But mostly it’s a gimmick and I think it’s going to be a very hard sell to get people to care about it beyond the occassional kid movie or game.

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HDR Gone Bad

It’s a novelty look and I’m over it. It was cool for a very short time, then everyone decided they wanted to have surreal images. It’s not that hard of a look to achieve, so it’s not that impressive. Get over it.  :-) I much prefer to use HDR for what it was meant for… which is giving a slightly wider dynamic range to create a shot that has similar contrast and color range to what your eye actually sees. No one has seen colors like the photo above has. Alright, well, yeah I’ve taken mushrooms too, so maybe then… but not normally.

The better use for HDR…

Given the normal photo below:

We can use multiple exposures to create the wider dynamic range we’d like to see in a single photo, but can rarely achieve due to the limitations of sensors, file formats, etc. Even when used properly, HDR isn’t without its problems. However, you can frequently get beautifully life like photos that would be difficult to achieve normal. The example below gets the point across (although I’m not holding it up as a shining example of photography, it is good enough to get my point across though):

What you get is more detail in the shadows and highlights than what you’d normally see. You can tease some of this detail out when working with RAW files, but not to the extent you can when you have multiple photos. Of course, multiple photos means you can have ghosting and other artifacts to deal with, so that’s always a consideration.

HDR is a cool technique and can produce some amazing photography work. The surreal look does, I’m sure, have a time and place, but realize that’s not what HDR was designed for.

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Your info. Your techniques. Tips and tricks. I had an interesting tech support call yesterday with one of our users. He’s a photographer that’s been using Primatte for some time. He related an encounter he had with a fellow photographer in his area. She asked him what he was using to create his greenscreen shots, and he told her to go buy one of our competitor’s products! His logic was that he wasn’t going to share info with someone in the same market. He was quite pleased that she was unable to get the same results and was frustrated by the whole thing.

So my question to you is… do you share?

Personally, for me the answer is yes. Sort of. We are not an open source company, so our code is safely behind walls. But I have no problem telling folks what we’re doing from a marketing and support standpoint. There’s definitely some types of info that it benefits everyone, even if you’re competitors, to share. But if it’s mission critical to your success (like our code), then sharing may not be a hot idea. Then again, it may not make any difference because there are so many things that go into a successful company. When you go to ImagingUSA or WPPI there are certainly lots of folks sharing info, who’ve been doing it for quite some time and don’t seem adversely affected by it. But maybe showing off at big national conference is a bit different than showing off at your local photography club that’s filled with potential competitors.

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This does not mean the Flash player is available on the iPhone. Only that the Flash development environment can now build iPhone apps.

Apple of course does not want the Flash player on the iPhone. Why? If you can build iPhone apps that are usable through a browser, who’s going to buy them through the Apple App Store? We’ll see how badly Apple cripples support of HTML 5 in Safari since HTML 5, in some cases, will allow you to build rich internet apps and theoretically get around the App store as well.

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I know that cars — like the VW Bug, Mini Cooper and most famously Bullitt’s Mustang –  have been used as a centerpiece in movies. Don’t think a piece of hardware has been a starring role previously unless you count Carrie’s Mac laptop in Sex & The City.

Adage.com reports on this new star:  “[T]he phone’s technical utility will be driving the next phase of the Pre’s marketing, beginning this week through a series of key branded-entertainment partnerships. Up first is an exclusive sponsorship of “Bollywood Hero,” a three-part musical miniseries premiering on IFC Aug. 6, starring “Saturday Night Live” vets Chris Kattan and Maya Rudoloph, as well as Keanu Reeves. Modernista and IFC co-created a miniseries for Palm, “A La Kattan,” featuring the actor using his Pre to help him out of different scenarios.”

The show didn’t get good reviews, as this one in Variety.com shows. But the review slams the actors and script, not the Palm Pre Phone. Which makes sense, since my iPhone is better at emoticons than I am.

regards -Debbie