"He said it right."

Reader Adam made a great point in the comments to the last post -

I still have people who try to write scripts that have had one too many English classes and try to write for the human voice with proper English. The problem is that nobody speaks in complete sentences.

Adam is dead-on right here, and we've run into this situation countless times over the years. These days, when we ask for a script from a client we frame it by asking for a "script outline" and tell them that we'll likely be fine-tuning it for the spoken word, then coming back to them for approval. That way, whoever is doing the writing knows ahead of time that there will be changes, and they're not as likely to get their feathers ruffled. Although sometimes they still get their feathers ruffled. 

This clip from The West Wing sizes up the situation rather nicely - 

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Why Most Execs Give Lousy Presentations

Andy Craig posts a really spot-on article at chiefexecutive.net on why so many corporate execs, otherwise excellent communicators, give such lousy presentations.

"You didn’t put in the hard work in advance of your presentation. As a result, you ask your audience to work hard to follow your Death by PowerPoint presentation and the blather loosely associated with it."

Check out the entire article here.

Rehearsal is critical for any live presentation. And not just an "Oh, I'll read through this presentation and go over what I'm going to say in my head..." kind of rehearsal. Get out the projector. Use the remote. Talk out loud. Run through the slides. You will quickly find the flat spots, the transitions that don't work, the phrases that are just plain hard to say. You'll go in more relaxed too, knowing you've actually ironed out the rough spots and you won't have to deal with them on the fly.

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Inactivity

Yes, I suppose some explanation is order for the lack of updates lately.

Truth be told, it's been a combination of having an extraordinarily busy time at work and not having very many truly compelling things to share. I don't want this to be a link aggregation blog, and I don't want to post just for the sake of posting.

I'm contemplating posting about things that aren't strictly industry related, but have some connection, however small. You won't see posts on what my kids had for breakfast, for example, but if I had a really good time watching the Iron Man movie (I did) and there's something worth sharing about the effects or story telling, well that seems to remotely on-topic.

I'm a big fan of Mark Evanier's blog, News from ME. Mark strikes a good balance covering things that interest him, professionally and personally.

Opinions? Anything in particular you'd like to see covered? Please let me know.

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Some Nice AE Tutorials

David Torno posts some really nice AE tutorials over at AE I Owe You, his blog.

Check it out.

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ProMax Shutting Down

Word came over various mailing lists and forums today that Promax, longtime VAR to the video industry and sponsor of the NAB Digital Media Cafe, is shutting down. Lots of people are justifiably lamenting this, and wondering what it represents to the industry as a whole.

Personally, we hadn't order anything from Promax in close to a decade, after some bad experiences with them selling us removable media (Jazz cartridges, when they were all the rage) that were clearly used, some even containing other people's data. The first time it happened I wrote it off as a simple mix up. But it happened again, and Promax never was able to provide a decent explanation, or, for that matter, an apology. So, needless to say, we stopped ordering from them.

Our situation must have been the exception, however, because Promax had a reputation for integrity, something that isn't always easy to find in the cut-throat world of hardware sales. Charles was a good guy, always friendly and gracious when I'd see him at industry events.

The industry has changed a lot since Promax opened in 1994. Building hard drive arrays is no longer the black art it once was back in the SCSI days, and technical information and support is readily available online, making it much easier for people to build their own systems without having to rely on VARs. Margins are razor thin, competition fierce. Our faltering economy only makes matters worse.

Interesting times...

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Multiple Monitors

In the last post on using a customized keyboard, we got a great comment on the use of multiple monitors. We've been using dual monitors on all of our production machines at Pixel Workshop for as long as I can remember, certainly going back to the 8100av Mac days, as I recall.

It's a simple, inexpensive way to markedly increase your productivity. There's the obvious benefit of increased screen real estate, but I also find I like the organizational aspects of having a primary and secondary monitor. Being able to place apps, windows or palettes that I'm not using "out of the way" (but still available at a glance) is a really nice organizational tool for me. Apples recently added Spaces feature is an attempt at this via a single monitor, and it is indeed useful, but I still wouldn't give up multiple monitors.

I know plenty of editors, people I respect, who insist that a single large monitor is the way to go. Certainly, there's something to be said for having a Final Cut Pro or After Effects timeline stretch across a 30" monitor, but I still prefer the organizational aspects of two screens. Even if I had a 30", I'd have a smaller, secondary monitor, too. (Our main edit system has two Dell 24" monitors.)

It should be noted that there is a potential performance hit when running two monitors from a single graphics card, since the VRAM is split evenly between the two screens. Apps like Motion and Color (and, to a lesser extent, Final Cut) use the graphics card to do a lot of the heavy lifting, and you're essentially halving the amount of memory available for the graphics card to use on any given window. (Installing a second card would solve this issue, but alas, slots are still somewhat dear in the typical Mac Pro being used for video and motion graphics.)

I have an iBook G4 I use for email and web surfing (soon to be retired and replaced with a Macbook Pro, I'm hoping...) and I recently added an external 22" monitor to use when I'm at my office desk. Wow. What a difference! My productivity has noticeably improved.

Oh, one more thing, a bit of a blast from the past. I remember years ago, probably when we were using 9500s as our main workstation machines, setting up a machine with three monitors, one in the middle and one on each side, because there was a F-15 flight simulator that would give you front and side views when using multiple monitors. It was a gather-up-the-geeks cool moment in our studio.

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