Ah, one of those days… As I’m writing this, a whopping 500 megabyte update for Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder is downloading, which makes me yearn for the days, when we swapped software on floppy disks and developers competed for the best compression to get their programs among people as slim (and thus distribution cost friendly) as possible. Compare that to today’s gluttonous apps who seem to suck in extra bytes just to inflate file sizes… No wonder the internet is requiring more and more resources to keep up!

The latter also applies to Cinema 4D R12, whose demo weighs in with a hunky 1.6 gigabytes. I just gave it a spin for about 15 minutes, but there is really not much there to write home about. A few “me, too” features that competing apps have had for a while, but not really anything truly innovative. Feels to me like Maxon is the next Autodesk or in fact worse, because they hold on to their outrageously high pricing (strictly speaking about the only “complete” package, Studio), without being able to offer a similar return value to the user. Dunno, while I was willing to give them some credit on R 11.5 a year ago, I now again have completely fallen from faith. It’s certainly still a very usable and comprehensive package, it’s just technologically outdated in too many areas and nowhere near competitive anymore.

And what do we have on the hardware front? Yes, of course, Apple is presenting their annual updates to their iPod line of products. Now my 2 year old nano is showing signs of the battery getting weaker with every recharge cycle and a replacement would be due, but I just can’t wrap my head around this multitouch nonsense. The jog wheel was so much more practical – you could operate the damn thing blindly while it was in your pocket. Now you will probably have to take it out, unlock the screen and do some weird gesture every time you just want to skip a song. Mmhhh… at least they had the sense to add some buttons for volume control. In any case, I’ll have to take a look at the thing in a hardware store before making any decisions.

On that same note, Apple keep sending me those mails about “The best Mac Pros of all time” and indeed those new 12 core machines do look interesting. So who’s up for buying me one? ;-)

Recently I had several contacts via my contact form and through private message systems on forums. While I appreciate everyone’s trust and adoration as much as the next guy, let me be candid: These means are not meant as a way of providing individual support for problems you may have with Adobe software, Maxon‘s Cinema 4D or any creative issues you may have. Yes, I maintain a site that is 90% After Effects centric and yes, at some point in my life I did those tutorials on creativeCOW that somehow still are popular, but my life consists of more than that and I have moved on in several areas (including currently not using C4D). I’m also not in any way affiliated with Adobe or Maxon beyond my voluntary work on forums and a few other places. It’s not that one of them sends me 2000 Euros a month just so I can advise their users… So with all due respect, take your questions elsewhere and post them publicly in forums or on mailing lists. There is no reason to be shy about it and you may even get better answers than you could ever get from me, especially with regards to software that I haven’t used in 5 years. If I pick them up there, that’s a whole different matter, but otherwise I really don’t feel like replying to PMs and filling in the gaps of the companies’ support systems, much less on a day like today where it’s 36 degrees in the shade.

…with Bodypaint and Photoshop. Yes, it seems after all these years someone has taken up the challenge of coming up with a "proper" 3D texture painting tool that gives the two old stinkers the boot. Especially Photoshop‘s sucky 3D painting abilities will now be even less attractive to 3D artists. Sorry guys, you have lost that battle and so has Maxon. Okay, Bodypaint will be with us as Cinema 4D‘s painting and UV texturing toolset, but has long lost its luster as a standalone painting tool. At the time it first appeared it was brilliant, but Maxon it has been stuck in limbo for several years now, with only minor additions and enhancements here and there. It’s easy to see how a tool, that runs in OpenGL, can handle floating point textures and seems quite beastly on other ends, too, might take the crown. Now add to that the ability to get animated textures with all those same features, this might even make After Effects users take a look… For the full blurb, just keep an eye on FX Guide. I’m sure over the course of NAB and until SIGGRAPH more wonderful details will be revealed. Oh, and they also announced some new stuff, including their 3D tracking features from Nuke X as a plug-in for After Effects, but unfortunately that’s the part where I don’t trust them an inch: They will probably make it so overpriced, it will be less than attractive for average users and people will gladly spend their money on SynthEyes for a few years longer…

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.

After Maxon treated me so poorly a few years back after doing those MoGraph tutorials on that web community site whose name I don’t speak anymore, I try not to promote their products directly or indirectly, but I have to give it to them – the new Cinema 4D R 11.5 is not looking all that shabby. Could it be, that instead of being utterly delusional about taking the highend character animation markets and wasting all their resources on trying to catch up with XSI, MAX and Maya, they remembered that they have a good standing in the broadcast and motion graphics market? At least that release looks like it and makes me believe, that there is yet a tiny streak of hope. Still, at that price it is way out of the question. I simply don’t have the money, especially in this year that is so bad for so many, including myself.