We're not hiding anything intentionally... Sometimes videos have their own default setting though?

Thanks Adeel!

Film is coming along really well. Really slowly, too, but... *ahem*, Carl, next commenter, you can always find updates here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanbkoo/man-child-feature-film/posts

Right, it's a piece of software, not a membership like Creative Cloud. They may later come out with a new version, and I'm not sure if Academic versions are valid for upgrade pricing (with Adobe they were not, IIRC), but it's not going to automatically charge you again or anything.

Sennheiser is too. RODE is Australian. Sony and Canon are Japanese. But something tells me the equipment itself is going to be much more likely to come from America, mere hundreds of miles away, than from the other side of the world...

Thanks for posting, Isaac. Edit button coming very soon!

Thank you, Joe, for writing this beautiful eulogy for your friend, and for sharing it with the NFS community.

We've all been shocked and saddened by Dave's passing. I'm glad we have a post to remember him by — other than our memories and his own posts — and this is also a great outlet for us to share more memories. Thank you as well for bringing Dave to the site in the first place!

I was so glad to bring Dave, along with Joe and Micah, to last year's NAB trade show in Las Vegas. Three years ago I went myself and had no idea what I was doing, then two years ago Joe went by himself (and probably had a better idea of what he was doing), and then last year the site was finally large enough that we could send an actual crew to shoot some videos and more importantly get a chance to hang out in person. It was great to meet up with Dave in person and get to know him during meals, during work, and during those "let's figure out if we brought the right equipment and if everything actually works together" sessions that filmmakers — especially indie ones — are all too familiar with. I'll never forget seeing Dave hooking up a microphone to an audio recorder and then using the recorder's output to get the signal into a Blackmagic camera. A dozen extra feet of cable running in and out of a recorder that we weren't even going to use to record — it was exactly the kind of thing Dave would make work, no matter how absurd it looked. I would be saying, "I don't know about this," meanwhile Dave would just be doggedly charging forward with the making the diagram in his head a reality.

I looked forward to many more years of this annual tradition, thinking Dave's passion, humor, and ability would be a big part of our NAB coverage, and suddenly and unfathomably that's just not possible anymore.

Because so much of what we've done here at NFS has revolved around virtual interactions, I went back and read through a lot of the conversations Dave and I had in our NFS group chat program. It's odd to have so much digital history readily available — someone's status on Facebook, in a chat program, etc. does not change when they pass away. There is Dave in our chat list, today, just as he normally would be, but I can't say anything to him, nor do I have any inclination to remove the user from the list. As long as the username is there, so too is our chat history, and it's like being able to go back through a photo album and remember things you've since forgotten.

Joe's description of Dave, that "he could always see the potential in every human being he came in contact with," was absolutely true — and looking through our chat history I found a plethora of examples. One of them came after I had taken a lot of flak in the comments on this very site, back before we had user profiles and anyone could comment totally anonymously. Dave sent me, unprompted, a message complementing me for what I was saying and defending me from a commenter that you can tell he is TRYING to dislike... but he's such a positive guy, he can't do it! Here's what Dave wrote, unedited save removal of the commenter's name:

"By the way, on or off the record, and I don't like saying things like this because I don't think they're constructive or beneficial to a greater common understanding of anything really and I consider myself a bit of an overly optimistic humanist, with too many commas, but [commenter] is a very passionate intelligent but woefully misguided and (again hesitantly stated) childish individual who can't reconcile his envy for your calm and more universal charisma and savviness for inevitable success with his own strangely entitled and polar outlook."

Dave couldn't call someone a name, even in our private chat, without qualifying it with "hesitantly stated" while also describing them as "very passionate" and "intelligent!" This is not to say that he wouldn't state his opinion in no uncertain terms — Dave called them how he saw them — but this was a perfect example of him going out of his way to see the potential in someone, even when all he had to go on was a comment on the internet. Not to mention that he was able to sense through thousands of miles of copper and fiber that I was sitting there in my room, grappling with my own uncertainties of how to respond to these unexpectedly heated and critical responses. Both the fact that he reached out at all, as well as his description of the detractor, show that he was, indeed, an "optimistic humanist." We will all miss him greatly at NFS.