Cows... that are creative...

September 8, 2005 2:44 PM

Creative COW (Communities Of the World)seems to be a one-stop... stop... for help with After Effects, Combustion, and other industry software of just about any type. While some (nevertheless incredible) tutorials are a bit difficult to decipher, they could also be much worse. The focus looks mostly to be on After Effects and other Motion Graphics software, but the forums are invaluable for just about anything you might need. Of particular note would be the Demo Reels forum, where anyone from Editors to Directors of Photography, and even Game Developers (former or otherwise) can post reels for criticism and even be approached for work. Some of them are incredible, even if you're not involved in the industry.
posted by shmegegge (8 comments total)

the demo reels forum doesn't seem to be opening properly at the time of posting, but the link is correct and the problem is hopefully only temporary. hopefully. the individual demo reel posts are still working, however.

FIRST POST!
posted by shmegegge at 2:45 PM on September 8, 2005

I love Joe Chao's chinese painting effect, thank you shmegegge - and congratulations on your first fpp!
posted by ceri richard at 2:55 PM on September 8, 2005

Creative Cow is a wonderful resource. I'm self/tutorial-taught in AE, and CC has been a life-saver on many an occasion.
posted by brundlefly at 3:15 PM on September 8, 2005

Creative Cow has helped me out a number of times over the past few years when I was just learning AE. I'm in the same boat as brundlefly -- self-taught, and CC has been good to me.
posted by Robot Johnny at 5:05 PM on September 8, 2005

I suppose it's obvious, but I'm also self taught in the majority of the digital apps I use, and this has been a hell of a great resource. ceri richard, you're welcome. But this is my 4th fpp. It's just been a while since my last one and one of the last 3 was a miserable excuse for a double post. the FIRST POST thing was actually a slashdot joke, in reference to how often slashdotters who get to post first on a thread often just write FIRST POST!!! really quickly since slashdot's hojillion users will often reply to a thread so quickly that the first response will happen within seconds of the article's initial posting. Feel free to ignore it.
posted by shmegegge at 5:44 PM on September 8, 2005

Creative Cow is great -- I've used it for both Boris and Pinnacle/Liquid.blue -- and it's full of helpful, insanely knowledgable people, including some of the various systems' developers.
posted by Vidiot at 8:30 PM on September 8, 2005

I'm bookmarking this one. Hopefully, it's going to have the answers to my render issue of the day.
posted by davros42 at 9:41 AM on September 9, 2005

I've been using the Cow since 2000, when they were exiled from the DigitalMediaNet forums. It's a great resource, but CreativeCow has positively THE worst interface design and useability on the planet. Their boxed-in frames with totally obnoxious advertising in them is one of the major reasons why I rarely visit the site anymore, because it's basically unusable on my Powerbook--the advertising frames take up 80% of the browser window, and scrunches the "real" content into a tiny little window. It's ridiculous. The search engine is equally horrible, and won't remember your search results if you hit the back button (thank god for Tabbed browser windows!)

That said, the Cow has totally excellent tutorials and feature articles. The forums, on the other hand, are rapidly declining in usefulness. In the past few years it has become completely overrun with RTFMers, and since the Cow culture is to "be nice" and not rebuke newbies for asking stupid questions, the signal to noise ratio in many of the forums there is just about equal. Many professional and advanced forum contributors and moderators have resigned, or just dont post much anymore, because of this.

I would strongly recommend instead of (or in addition to) the Cow, these forums:

For Final Cut Pro users: The 2-pop forums, LAFCPUG forums and the Yahoogroups FinalCutPro-L list (which is hands down the best forum for intermediate to advanced users)

For After Effects Users: The AE-List, hands down, trumps any other AE resource out there. All the motiongraphics "celebrities (if you could call them that) are active here. If nobody here can answer your question, then pretty much nobody can (I once posted a question about a possible bug i discovered in AE, and less than 12 hours later, I recieved a private email from one of the software engineers in Adobe's AE team, with an unreleased AE update attached to the message whch fixed my problem).
posted by melorama at 10:29 AM on September 9, 2005