I wouldn't put it synonymous, but most of the SaaS products I've ever paid and used were based on monthly/yearly subscriptions and were not "pay per use", so that's probably why people mostly use it that way - but there's credit token models though, e.g. SauceLabs or Audible where your monthly payments grants you N tokens to spend now or later.
Hi, Indie Hacker here who also has some experience with politicized corporate environments. I’d like to encourage you to ignore some of the bad advice in this thread.
Sounds like you were in a gnarly situation and did well to get out. You are what you do, and those types of places can have a long-term corrupting influence on your professional habits and instincts.
The observation that “all companies have politics” is about as useful as the observation that both Venezuela and Denmark have imperfect governments. These statements are correct only in the narrowest sense.
Those pointing out that you never work for “yourself” are also technically correct. If you own a business, you have a responsibility toward your customers. The good news is that it’s possible to find a niche in which you actually like your customers and enjoy doing right by them. Running your own company also gives you the opportunity to optimize for what you think is important, both personally and professionally.
I like your analogy about Venezuela and Denmark. : )
I do think they have a point. Throughout this process I've continually tried to consciously avoid a "grass is always greener" mentality and recognize that starting my own company will have difficult challenges as well. So I appreciate the feedback from both sides.
That said, Indie Hackers is filled with stories of people who left corporate jobs and found greater satisfaction in their own companies, so I think it varies by person and requires some luck. I'd like to see what happens regardless.
3:1 would be an extremely low -- I've never seen a shooting ratio that low in my life. Shooting just 4.5 hours of footage for a 1.5 hour film, for example, is unheard of.
Even a 10:1 shooting ratio was pretty low for indie features in the 35mm days. Nowadays it's not uncommon to see shooting ratios upwards of 30:1 on digitally acquired productions. (Although that number varies a lot with the director.)
Most VFX shots loop through not one but several software packages. Sometimes even through multiple VFX vendors. Project files are proprietary and become inaccessible over time. And different VFX houses write their own add-ons that are not shared with a vendor like Netflix.
So collecting VFX shots in a pre-rendered state is notoriously difficult. Doesn't mean it's not worth trying. But you'll probably end up with various decomposed elements (models, rigs) and not something you can easily and quickly re-output in 4k, HDR, etc.
Often you can't reliably re-render shots from a few months earlier on the same project due to the pipeline changing so rapidly. Nevermind going back to the tapes for files that probably came off Irix workstations originally. The file formats for assets (models and textures) are backwards compatible enough that you can usually reconstruct models and maybe animation. So having an archive of the original files doesn't mean that you can re-render at higher resolutions without a lot of effort. The originals would need to be redone with more detail in any case to benefit from the higher resolution.
I'm not familiar with modern VFX software. But couldn't you just take a snapshot of the server and then load that onto a box in the future if you wanted to re-render it?
Archive-by-VM has been attempted from time to time. In the case of VFX there isn't a single server, but many different workstations, servers, render blades, etc. So preserving the entire pipeline in amber is a challenge.
And, somebody has to pay for it. The producers of the current project won't allocate any of their budget to preserve something for a (hypothetical) future sequel/re-release - that is somebody else's problem. The only places that I know of that do a decent job with archiving are animation houses like Pixar that own their own IP.
Saying that Medium needs to hire writers misses the point entirely. Medium is a platform--not a publisher or a content studio. SV doesn't like the "studio" business model because it doesn't scale: there is no such thing as a 100x writer, 100x animator, or 100x video editor. If you want more output, you have to hire more people.
(I used to run a post production boutique and learned this the hard way.)
Ev Williams' previous startups (Blogger, Twitter) along with other networks like FB all rely on users producing endless streams of content FOR FREE. This seems to be working when the "content" is 140-char witticisms, cat videos, or various forms of lifestyle/status/virtue signaling. The "content producers" seem to think that the tradeoff is worth it.
The math is very different when it comes to producing thoughtful, long-form, polished content. Ev Williams hoped that he could provide writers with enough incentive to do that sort of difficult work on the Medium platform.
But even assuming that there are enough writers willing produce high-end content gratis, it is still unclear what incentives Medium is offering in exchange for moving your operations into their walled garden. A better <TEXTAREA>, plus some hand-waving about the future, isn't cutting it.
Pro was always a stepchild at Apple. Steve Jobs never stopped by NAB for the Final Cut Pro press events. And more than a decade ago I started seeing middle managers being "promoted" from Pro Apps to other divisions like iTunes.
The hard truth is that we pro folks aren't that lucrative. Pro users probably sit in the bottom of a smiling curve with high-volume consumer products on the one side, and high-revenue Enterprise on the other. To a company like Apple, pro users represent the worst of both worlds.
That's why you also see "media storage" companies like G-Technologies, who introduced pro products (like the late G-Speed) only to abandon that market for high-volume, low-touch consumer products like LaCie Rugged.
I want a new MBP with an nVidia GTX 1080 as much as the next guy, but I'm not holding my breath.
Let's not forget that long before Apple exited the "Pro" market, companies like SGI went out of business. So did all the companies that used to make graphics hardware targeted to pros. They were overwhelmed by ATI and NVIDIA's repurposed gaming GPUs.
Yep. Tricked-out gaming rigs catching up with the heavy-iron graphics workstations was hugely disruptive. Low-overhead boutiques could suddenly do the same work as high-overhead facilities. But then you blinked, and the same work was happening in no-overhead places like The Director's Living Room.
