Hi Ya !
Yeah, I agree it's so nice to be able to keep your eyes on the monitor at all times. That's what so nice about the Roger Rosa tutorials you can just use the Alt+Tab key to switch between the cinemagic movie player and an open instance of XSI.
It's funny you mention the "education price" thing.
I wrote to Cinemagic and asked them about this. Their reply was that they don't do a special price on these because the price is reduced to begin with.
To be fair, I can understand this because at the moment you can get 4 cd's with like more than 12 hours of training on them for not that much over 100 bucks, and that seems like a pretty good deal to me.
Hmmmmm, but still, I do understand what you are saying.....well....
Something you could do is to try out one of the CD's. You can buy just a single CD you know, that's like $49 bucks.
Also, something that you may not know is that when you get these tutorials they ARE in demo mode, so you can just try them out. If you like what you see, you can contact Cinemagic and they will send you a patch that will give you access to all the content on the CDs.
However, you if you don't like them, think they suck, or whatever you can just contact Cinemagic, tell them that you don't like them and send the CD's back.
The CD's come with a guarantee, so I don't really see how you can go wrong. If you don't like them all you will be out is the postage, but big deal.
That's the thing I like about this company, they guarantee their tutorials so if you don't like them, or don't learn something from them you can just return them for a refund.
So I guess that's sort of like a demo really, it might even be better.
It might even be a good idea to write Cinemagic, perhaps you can convince them to send you a CD to try out.
They seem pretty reasonable to me, so I don't think it could do any harm to ask.
Any who...trust me, once you see and use these tutorials you will want to own them, heck, I've learned heaps from them.
How long did it take me to pick up XSI..?
Good question, I suppose I'm still picking it up, it's an on-going learning experience.
Honestly, once you dig in you should be able to get going with XSI pretty quickly. It's just a matter of getting your head around they way it works. The Softimage manuals are quite good and you should checkout all the new features tour materials and so on. Also, work through the tutorials that come with the software, all of it helps to advance your learning fast.
If you want a real jump start, I'm telling you, save your pennies and get those Roger Rosa tutorials.
Oh, and no I don't work for Roger Rosa or Cinemagic, just in case you were starting to think I did 
I am a computer research scientist for a large european drugs company. One of my duties is to help with the training of all the staff animators here, so I have a real interest in education and learning issues.
Well my best advice with XSI is just keep at it. You may feel a little lost at first, but all of a sudden it will just "kick-in" and from then on, it will seem like second nature to you.
Cor
