You know, there’s this quirky little 3D program called Cinema 4D, which I used for quite a while way back then and even did tutorials on it, before Maxon told me to go fuck myself. So in turn, it is not without some sort of malicious glee that I monitor their slightly odd and bewildering development and marketing efforts. The recent "super secret" survey is one of these things where they completely hit the wall.

Let’s recap the facts first: On Thursday I got this mail from Maxon USA, stating that in order to help improve future versions of Cinema 4D I should kindly take a survey, but not share it with the rest of the world. Okay, being a good boy, I do, even if they screwed me over in the past. And now imagine – only a few hours later all hell breaks loose. People are discussing the survey openly on forums, because especially foreign users question the legitimacy of it, not having had any advanced warning. To put those users’ minds at ease, the company sends out a mail confirming that all of this is official, but only to mess up a second time in the process – the mail is sent to users, also, who didn’t get the original invites for the survey. So much for "secrecy" and keeping quiet tabs.

Could it get any worse? It could! And with that we get to the important part. Of particular note is actually what the survey asked users and how poorly put together and illogical it is. I will not repeat everything, but when you are asked on page 1, which version of the program you currently own and stating none still allows you to continue, it only illustrates the poor methodology employed. Furthermore, on the following pages the questions are full of Cinema 4D specific lingo. Okay, I know what they ‘re talking about, but imagine a Maya or MAX user who has so far never even visited the Maxon pages – either he’s laughin’ off his ass right away or spends a good chunk of his time trying to figure things out. That’s not how you even remotely win over users from other programs!

The ultimate flaw, and that is what I consider truly poor market and development research, is that the survey gets itself all wired up on way too specific features. It is that feature-centric thinking, which has given us such monsters as Photoshop or web browsers that need quad cores to run smoothly. We live in a day and age, where it’s no longer the question whether program X has a feature over program Y. On the contrary, the competitive edge is defined by how easily usable a feature is, a.k.a. how user-friendly the overall workflow is. You cannot find out that by asking whether someone uses a feature or not, but you may by asking what people do with this feature. And to do that in a clever way, of course you should employ some psychology tricks.

So ultimately, what Maxon have now, is a bunch of useless results. They are no closer in knowing what their users truly want, but have dropped their pants in front of the competition, partly thanks to their over-concerned own user base. But worry not – I’m sure, someone there can’t resist the temptation of putting together a few charts and diagrams all reflecting favorably on the product. Perfect fodder for the Junk Charts graveyard, no doubt.

As I mentioned in some post last year, there are certain kinds of movies that I so much would like to use as an excuse to drag my lazy ass to the cinema, but usually they are in "limited release" and that here in Germany often means they are shown in 20 cinemas for one weekend and then no more and to add to that bad situation, none of those cinemas ever seems to be near me. One such movie that suffered this fate is Fanboys, which I finally had the chance of seeing on DVD. I will not spoil it for you, as the movie’s title pretty much covers it, when you add Star Wars vs. Star Trek to the game and take a guess what it aims at, but trust me, it does so in a quite funny way. Naturally, the movie was full of stereotypes and cliché, but it always kept a good balance, after all. Myself being a mild case of a Trekker, I could quite well relate to some of the weird things that fans do and that must look extremely strange to outsiders. The film even playfully exploits this by taking every opportunity to interpret every day situations as reincarnations of one or the other franchise, quite often by just adding all those swooshes, bleeps and plongs in the soundtrack or using similar shot composition. The problem with this is of course, that after the first watching, those gags lose their momentum when viewing the film a second, third, fourth time, and that’s its weak point, as the characters themselves do not have enough of their own story to hold it together. I guess therefore it is even more regrettable I couldn’t see it in the cinema – would have made some good setting, because you’d literally have been surrounded by other fans.

One of my many obsessions in computer graphics is to observe how light behaves when it hits the camera. I’m an adamant observer of things like glows, refraction, dispersion, abberation and ultimately also lens flares and I take just as much joy in re-creating those things myself as I take quite a bit of pleasure in disecting other people’s work. I just hate cheap and goofy artificial lens flares as they are so often used in movies and commercials and I really wished some plug-in vendors would stop selling their crappy offerings on that end. Knoll Light Factory has always been one of the better ones and while it’s realyl beginning to look old and a bit dated, it still holds up nicely. However, it needs to watch out for the latest addition to the family by ways of Video Copilot’s Optical Flares plug-in, which I must say is nothing short of awesome. I had the great pleasure of testing it and developing some presets for it and it really blows pretty much every one else’s "Me, too!" lens flare tool out of the water. Especially the trigger system lifts it to new heights – never before was it possible to make things look so natural. Now of course, being the nerd I am, I’m never satisfied with anything and must admit that it still has some weak areas, but that’s what other tools still can be good for. So if you have Knoll and know your way around creating some additional elements manually as used in my old lens flare project, you should be good to go. And to help you even further, I will share some of the presets I created soon-ish on my content pages. Ain’t that something?

As I mentioned in this older post, After Effects CS5 will be a native 64bit program, which is some people’s most wanted feature, others’ most dreaded one. Reasons for fearing this day go far and wide from being stuck with an older computer that cannot be outfitted with 64bit-ness to issues with Quicktime to simply losing support for third-party plug-ins. None of that is of course true. Quicktime will work and most commercial plug-ins should be available as compatible versions by the time the product is released or shortly thereafter. So, by all means, collateral damage on that end should not be a problem. You may just need to part ways with some free plug-ins, as the developers may not have the time, resources and interest to update them.

Well, chances of that cosy warm place getting covered with a shield of ice are diminishing, as it’s getting a bit more bearable at the moment temperature-wise and that being so, I took the chance to update my After Effects Error Code Database and the After Effects Plug-In Guide as long as I’m stuck at home. Interesting observation: Obviously people do that specific Christmas shopping thing even for software – there is a notable surge in page requests for the plug-in guide in November and December.