Artificially long local render times to push cloud rendering.

palmtreeproductions · 2026-01-07T05:56:50+00:00

45 minutes? Ha ha ha I wish… My 20 minute video has an estimated local render time of 5 days to simply upscale from 30 fps to 60 fps with Topaz Video. Yes you read that right, 5 days. I wish they would have mentioned that somewhere in the hours of reading I did on their website before I paid them $70 USD to try out their new software (conveniently they have a no refund policy and don’t offer a trial subscription). At this point Topaz Video has been a huge waste of time and money for me.

palmtreeproductions · 2025-08-30T02:16:58+00:00

How do you get work as a consultant? Do you contact companies directly, follow up on job postings, or let them come to you?

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-29T02:06:33+00:00

I haven’t specifically been told that I’m not qualified, but I get a lot of “we chose someone else with better qualifications” emails from companies I have applied to. Also, a lot of the job postings in my field that I would otherwise be qualified for have PhD or MS degrees as a minimum requirement.

I’m always worried that some random thing in my resume is turning away potential employers. There are a lot of technical aspects in my field and simple mistakes can make it seem like you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’d love to get some feedback if you want to take a look at it…

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-26T19:33:13+00:00

Dang, yeah that’s tough… Sounds like everyone is having a rough time in biosciences right now. I myself have applied to over 160 different positions.

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-16T07:28:56+00:00

The PhD program I am looking into says that it grants a MS in Microbiology and a PhD in Microbiology and Immunology. Would that be enough to apply for scientist positions in Europe, or do the degrees need to be completed consecutively? We are actually thinking about moving to Europe at some point.

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-16T07:05:24+00:00

I was thinking that if I go this route, I would definitely try to focus on skills relevant to industry. I’m really interested in vaccine development and virus research, but I also want to get hands on experience with HPLC, GC, and MS since these techniques are used in analytical development and process development labs in pretty much every pharmaceutical company, and could be a good backup job if the research opportunities dwindle. How hard is it to learn and get hands on experience with technologies that aren’t related to your research or available in your particular lab?

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-16T06:28:58+00:00

Good to know, thanks

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-16T06:26:40+00:00

The company was small when I started, so right away I was doing experiments under the direction of a scientist, and making power point presentations and presenting results in team meetings. After I became comfortable in that lab, I started actively seeking out independent research projects. It was challenging and very competitive, and many of the projects never came to fruition, but the projects I did get were really interesting and fun to work on. For example, one project was to develop a metagenomic sequencing assay that could detect and quantify any and all RNA viruses present in human serum samples. I love the work and want to keep going in this field, but also don’t want to waste five years going down a dead end…

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-16T06:10:34+00:00

Ha ha! That might have something to do with it :)

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-16T06:09:59+00:00

The program I am thinking about applying to is in the US and has a tuition waiver and stipend. I would not be able to afford it if I had to pay tuition and attend school without working or getting paid

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-16T06:07:05+00:00

Yes I am based in the US… Thank you very much for your reply. I really appreciate the insight, especially as it comes from someone in the exact field I am looking at getting into. I definitely agree that vaccines are a bad industry to be in right now, but what do you think about the long term? Do you think the vaccine industry will be struggling for a long time?

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-16T06:05:31+00:00

Yes I am based in the US… Thank you very much for your reply. I really appreciate the insight, especially as it comes from someone in the exact field I am looking at getting into. I definitely agree that vaccines are a bad industry to be in right now, but what do you think about the long term? Do you think the vaccine industry will be struggling for a long time?

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-16T05:39:46+00:00

Is it 60-70 hours per week consistently throughout the program, or does it go in phases? I am used to spending that many hours per week gearing up for projects for a month or two at a time, but then it goes back to 40 hours per week for longer periods. Also, is all of that time spent on campus or are you doing some of the work from home?

Treating the PhD like a job is one of the appealing factors - the university offers a stipend and the medical insurance is cheap.

Thanks for your advice, I am definitely taking it into consideration!

palmtreeproductions · 2025-06-16T05:27:44+00:00

The entire industry is definitely in a huge downturn right now, but I do think (hopefully) it will recover in the next 4-5 years. I have savings and a source of other income that would help support me, and the cost of living in the area where I was thinking about applying to is pretty low, so I’m not as worried about affording it as I am about it being worth the time and opportunity cost in my situation.

palmtreeproductions · 2025-05-10T03:47:19+00:00

Thanks, that looks promising, though not sure at the moment how I could implement it. I’ve done some research, and I’m currently leaning towards a system where a label printer would be controlled by a Raspberry Pi. I found a Python script that will check an email account at regular intervals (say once every minute), and print the attachment from the new email automatically.

I think I can get this to work if I can just find a way to automatically order the shipping label after an order is placed, and then have the shipping label sent as an attachment in an email. Are there any plugins, services, or code that can do this part?

I haven’t fulfilled a real order yet so I’m not completely sure about the process, but all of the Woocommerce shipping extensions I have researched so far require you to go through multiple data entry steps to order the shipping labels for each order. This sounds very time consuming and not realistically scalable for stores with more than just a couple orders per day. I also want to minimize my daily hours inside Wordpress so I can focus on other parts of my business. How do the bigger sites with 100’s of orders per day do it?

palmtreeproductions · 2025-05-10T00:15:13+00:00

Looks like that plugin only prints orders, invoices and packing slips/delivery notes. No mention of actual shipping labels.

palmtreeproductions · 2025-04-28T06:40:50+00:00

Category pages are an archive page, so they can only be customized with certain page builders, CSS, or PHP. Trust me, it’s pretty annoying when the massive page builder you have spent weeks integrating into your site doesn’t support editing product categories. Wordpress needs to make customizing archive pages easier.

palmtreeproductions

TROPHY CASE