# Getting Help Plz send help # Who Can I Turn To? Some of this is true both for getting help as in “how do I do this thing?” and as in “I need professional help!” but this section is mostly about getting help to assist you in figuring out how to do a thing (mental health is important though). Ask your friends and colleagues. We have a pretty good shared rolodex of collaborators. Beyond that - some folks are willing to be transparent about what they know if you ask them nicely. I am one of those folks. Some people aren’t. But generally: the vibe is to help out other people because everyone benefits from shared information. This **Almanac** is a great place to start. Just do a search for a keyword. If you’re having issues with or want to understand projector lenses; search for “lens” or “projector” or take a look at the document outline which breaks things down into sections. Some **forums** are really good. The best, though, is probably the **Vectorworks** forum. Their user base is incredibly active and knowledgeable. And shockingly responsive! The **Redcine** forums are good too, at least I remember them being good. Garagecube’s **MadMapper** forum is good, too, but it tends to be you communicating with the developers or other mega-dorks in deep niches (this is true, also, of **Isadora**). **Adobe’s** forum is a mixed bag. The Adobe employees there aren’t always helpful (eg, the response of “submit a bug” to the memory hole isn’t super helpful). There are some lifers on there that ***are*** helpful (you have read things by me and not known), but it’s amazing they do anything else. Rick Gerard is an MVP. If you spend any time on there, this will feel familiar; [![image.png](http://tech-almanac.org/uploads/images/gallery/2025-04/scaled-1680-/image.png)](http://tech-almanac.org/uploads/images/gallery/2025-04/image.png) Some email support is good too. support@figure53.com (**QLab**) support@garagecube.freshdesk.com (**Madmapper**) supportinbox@boxxtech.com (**Boxx**) support@borisfx.com (**BorisFX**) Don’t underestimate the power of picking up the phone and calling a manufacturer. Some **phone support** is also good. OWC - (866) 692-7100‬ Epson - ‭(562) 276-4394‬ Barco - (866) 374-7878‬ / (866) 992-2726‬ Panasonic - (877) 655-2357‬ FujiFilm - (800) 800-3854 If automated, a quick way to get through support gatekeeping is repeating “representative” or “sales” over and over again. I can also recommend strategic use of written tutorials. By that I mean, if you can find a written solution to your problem, you might solve it faster than watching hours and hours of tutorials. That said: video tutorials made by the companies that developed the software are usually pretty good. I’ve gone through the same VWX training twice (60\*2 hours) in 3 years because of how helpful it is in making my workflow efficient. # Basic Troubleshooting For All Things Surprise, surprise guys: Unfortunately, we are **still** in age of – did you try restarting? Sometimes a fix is on the application level and sometimes on the hardware level. For example - if a program like Zoom isn’t recognizing a webcam that you used 10 minutes ago, and you’ve restarted the app to no avail, try to restart your computer! Premiere Pro and Vectorworks are big offenders of this, too. It’s amazing how often it fixes things. Think about every process and configuration as if it produced a cache. When the cache gets full, sometimes you need to reboot to empty it. In the early 2010s, it felt like we were floating bally getting beyond this, but now we’re back again. I have to restart my iPhone daily because of dumb little UX bugs. This is called, colloquially, Voodoo shit. I’m looking for a new term, as this is probably offensive, but this tends to be more accessible than the phrase Deus Ex Machina. When the robots finally take over, call tech support and they’ll ask you: are there steps you can take to reproduce the issue? Also, try asking chatGPT to write some very specific Excel formulas for you and react in fear with its insistence on solutions that fundamentally do not work. We are s-c-r-e-w-e-d.