Hey Folks -

Normally I do not initiate postings - I simply try to answer people's questions. But NAB is coming up next week and many of you will be travelling to Las Vegas to see what's new and where things are likely to be going. I'll be at the SONY switcher presentation for a few days & hope to get to connect some of your faces with your names.

But the reason for this posting is this: I want to warn each & every one of you about one of my trade show pet peeves - getting fooled or lied to during a demo. I can promise you from many years of doing demos that you WILL experience the smoke-and-mirrors tricks that a lot of manufacturers use. And we will all hear from demo people or salesmen "Oh, that other brand can't do this or that". They bank on the fact that most of you never bother to find out the real facts for yourselves.

I know that most of us know better & don't need some opinionated TD to be telling us this - but I've seen customers tricked too many times. I've had countless people come to my classes expecting to learn the feature that sold them their product in the demo, only to find out the truth that the product not only can't currently do the function, but that there are no plans for it to do it!

As a quick example, last year one demo person was touting how keys could be isolated from being affected by e-mem recalls. Just what everybody has been asking for. What was being done was to use the Secondary side of the M/E in layered mode as a re-entry into the Primary side...the control was on the Secondary so it looked like the switcher was actually isolating the keys. This was a clever trick, but it was just that - a trick, and something that would be next to impossible to use in a real-world situation where what you really need is key isolation on an effect-by-effect basis. Yet I saw many people walk away from those demos with the wrong impression of what the switcher could do. The moral is this: if you don't see a button or menu setting to address a feature like this, then it doesn't exist - even if it can be demo'ed it may not be practical to use in your production.

I'm not singling out any one demo person or company, because it frankly doesn't matter. If you came to one of my demos, I'd give you the same advice as if you went to anyone else's - don't watch the screen, look at HOW things are being done. If the demo artist won't show you or at least talk you through how it's done, then how can you possibly judge if you can easily do the same thing? My advice: Question EVERYTHING that you're told - especially when someone tells you something about another company's product. I sold 3 switchers right out from another company a few years ago when customers who had committed to that company came over & I showed them that everything they had been told about the shortcomings of the switcher I was demo'ing had been a lie. Many demos are geared towards Management (who of course writes the checks), and all they often want to know is "how much?" and "what will it do for me?" For them, a PowerPoint presentation takes the place of a real switcher demo. They often don't bother to check out the validity of the "information" that one demo person gives about another product. We operators are the ones who often get stuck with equipment that demo'ed great, but can't actually perform.

One rule of thumb that I go by is this: if the person giving the demo isn't currently a TD, then they most likely have less experience on other brands - they may give you a great demo [not being a TD doesn't make you a bad person........OK, it does :)], but any of their information about other brands is probably based on Marketing documents and not their own real-world experience. But whether they're a TD or not, it's to your benefit to check out anything that sounds questionable.

I didn't mean to rant here - I respect the people who do the same job that I do, and I've seen too many of them "taken to the cleaners" at trade shows. My purpose in this whole posting is to raise a red flag for those of you who are getting demos - regardless of the manufacturer. I wouldn't keep posting answers to your questions if I didn't care about your ability to do your job better - regardless of the switcher you're using. I'm sure that this posting is going to raise the ire of some people, but I look at it this way - Las Vegas is the "Magic Capital of the World"...most magicians don't like Penn & Teller because they expose a lot of the shady tricks that other magicians do. If some other "demo magicians" get upset because I'm potentially "blowing their cover" then I can live with that - hopefully some of you can benefit from my "unsolicited" advice.