[Tim Wilson]

You, sir, are the man!

thx,
tw

[Tim Wilson]

Y’know, I don’t actually have a problem with this at all. It’s one of the many ways how this industry and many others have been built. You want to become an agent? Start in the mailroom. Want to become a producer? Start as a personal assistant.

On one level, sure, it’s exploitation. More important, you want more from your assistant than somebody for whom being an assistant is the best job they’ve ever had, or the only job they want. Unless you really ARE an exploiter, you want somebody who can grow into another role over time.

My first job in the visual arts was as an assistant photographer, ie, I carried the bags. Then I showed him the pictures I took on my own time, and took his criticism. “Great eye, kid, but it takes many hundreds of photos to know what you’re doing in the darkroom.” He was right, of course.

My next step was taking the assignments he didn’t want (school board)…and from there into editorial and layout, and on and on until I owned my own company. But the only reason my boss hired me is because he knew I was at least a decent photog and that I wanted his job.

Oh yeah, and things I learned from those lame school board meetings, and hanging in the newsroom and listening to reporters laugh at candidates and hacks helped me make political consulting and campaign management a big part of my business.

I started that first job making nothing.

This is similar to how — what’s that you say? Bob ZELIN??? — Zelin and other people I know got their start. Working for next to nothing at a job that was NOT their goal, but enough to get them in the door. They moved up because they asked a lot of questions, and started doing jobs nobody else wanted.

So to me, this driver/editor job listing falls into the categories of, “Fun to mock,” and “If you don’t want it, don’t take it,” but most important, “Wow, I remember those days! It was gruesome, but it got me where I am today.”

Consider it a Rorschach test. Are you closer to the beginning of your career, or closer to DEATH? Because hey, that’s how it went, and that’s how it goes.

Yr pal,
Timmy

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine!

My Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”

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[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “Effectiveness is assumed, and their Venn diagram would have just two circles: cost and timeliness.”

I agree, my clients with the highest standards were all in government. But I think that in the public sector, “effectiveness” is the place the “good enough” most comes into play.

Reminds me, though, of my favorite T-shirt ever, for the late-lamented Aron’s Records on Highland. Not done in by MP3s, but by the one-two punch of a Virgin Records on Hollywood (kaput), and the wondrous Amoeba Records on Vine within a few months of each other.

This was the kind of place where there were highly articulate hand-written recommendations all around the store. The clerks weren’t exactly snobs, but definitely judged you — only they were too cool to say anything about it. I got a tiny smile once when I was checking out, as the guy held my purchase in his hands before he put it in the bag. Dude wouldn’t even look me in the eye, but we both knew that he not only approved, but was kind of impressed.

I tell you all that to tell you this: The t-shirt said,

“Fast Friendly Service. Pick one.”

[Tim Wilson]

[Ron Lindeboom] “only 640×480”

I can’t believe I forgot 640×480!

I did a job with my UVW BetaSP and Media 100 for a couple of regional American Express spots. This guy was a notorious stickler, and he said to me, “This isn’t going to be any of that 640×480 desktop crap, is it?”

I looked him right in the eye and said, “Your standards are famously high. I know that if the work I do for you the first time isn’t good enough, there won’t be a second time.” He positively beamed with delight.

What did I give him? 640×480 desktop…not SO crap…indeed, it was…

…good enough. When he saw it, he beamed with delight.

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine!

My Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!

[Tim Wilson]

re: your point that there are advantages to many of the products in the “good enough” category, absolutely. So let me put it this way.

Good enough almost always wins, and the outcome of that victory is almost always good enough.

🙂

I still think that price is a big part of the appeal of “good enough.” I could afford UVW BetaSP at $10,000 for the deck and $12,000 for the camera. Both gave me advantages over lower-end competitors, and allowed me to compete as…good enough re: the upper end.

The flip side of this is that buying “good enough” in one area can be smart if it allows you to buy more somewhere else. I spent many thousands a year on the absolute best music licenses I could find, which wound up winning me as many jobs as my video did.

[Bob Cole] “But as with other truths (“we’re all going to die”) it can be self-destructive to let “good enough” occupy any space in our own heads. For most of us, to achieve “good enough” status, we actually have to be “the best that we can be.””

Absolutely. I think we’re the best we can be if we’re honest. We’re all going to die, so life is too short to work at a job you hate, or drink cheap hooch. You make better choices if you don’t act like you’re going to live forever. Have more “relations” with your honey. Kiss your kids more. Find ways to start doing NOW the things you’d do if you were retired, even if on a smaller scale. Time’s a wastin’.

Ditto “good enough” work. Agreed about being the best you can be, of course….but there’s no benefit to us to bemoan our business being eroded by the “good enoughs” under us. Most of us got where we are the same way. EXPECT it to happen. Build your business KNOWING that cheaper, faster, stupider, less skillful punks will be nipping at your heels. Every. Single. Day. for the rest of your career.

NOW, what will your business look like? Where will you put your time and money?

Or, as Bob Z might put it, when do you buy your hair net to work the french fryer?

Enjoy yourself now. Plan your next moves knowing what’s coming. Because it is.

Be ready to find a new groove that’s…good enough.

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine!

My Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!

[Tim Wilson]

Guys, I’m kind of surprised this is coming up at all. I mean, I understand why Wired thinks it’s news — they’re easily 10 years behind with regards to our business, but that’s the point. If we’re honest, we’re ALL in the “good enough” business.

Our key to success isn’t forgetting this, or blaming our competitors who are more honest about it. Our only hope is to acknowledge, and market our a##ses off to make sure that our clients forget that they already settle for “good enough” in nearly every area of their lives. If you’re lucky, you can dangle shiny things — okay, and service, and skill — in front of them long enough to distract them.

Here’s a very, very short list of some of our “good enough” choices as professionals, in reverse order (from more or less now, more or less back in time). Ycu can argue about any one or couple of these, but you’ll get the idea.

–HD has been widespread for 4 or 5 years now, but for most of my clients and deliverables, SD is good enough.
–Jim Cameron shot Avatar at 1920×1080. It’s not 4K, but it’s good enough.
–EX-3 and HPX aren’t REALLY CineAlta and Varicam, but they’re good enough.
–Blu-ray has a lot fewer features and much higher cost than HD DVD, but in the end, it’s good enough.
–720 isn’t 1080, but if it’s good enough for half of the major networks, I guess it’s good enough for me. (Seriously, does anybody even remember how het up we got about this, or why?)
–Final Cut Pro/Motion/Soundtrack Pro aren’t Media Composer/After Effects/Pro Tools, but they’re good enough.
–DV isn’t Beta, but it’s good enough….
–Beta SP isn’t DigiBeta, but it’s good enough.
–UVW isn’t BVW, not even PVW, but it’s good enough.
–It’s 1995, and NLEs aren’t especially high quality, they rarely stay in sync, but hey, they’re good enough.
–This CoSA After Effects thing is MUCH less featured than…well, almost anything…and sloooooow, but hey, it’s good enough.
–Wow, those Macs are sure underpowered, overpriced, and WTF? It’s been 3 years, and those things are still in BLACK AND WHITE. I’ve spent more on expansion chassis than I did on my car, but cheaper than a dedicated workstation. I guess it’s good enough.

I’m missing a bunch — HDV, DVCPRO, ProRes and the DNxHD it’s based on, XDCAM, LCD monitors on the dekstop/plasmas on the wall for color accuracy, etc. etc. — but you get the idea. We can justify every one of these “good enoughs” as actually having some advantages…and they absolutely do…but some of those are definitely tradeoffs between quality and cost that we heartily embrace.

The wheel of karma, friends.

Okay, now on to the personal things that you and your clients have chosen.

–Wow, this 2008 iPhone drops calls like a mutha, you can only have one app open at a time, and you can’t copy and paste. No video or photo SMS? Not even a video camera? WTF?
–These 2001 iPods are one-tenth the capacity of the MP3 player I’ve been using, support hardly any formats, and for pete’s sake, Apple didn’t even develop either the hardware or the software! They freaking BOUGHT it! It’ll get better, right? But good enough for now.
–Love that DirecTV, but boy howdy, those macroblocks are the size of my nose, and I keep losing the picture when the weather changes. But it’s good enough.
–CDs are sure convenient, but they really sound thin and metallic. I guess they’re good enough.
–VHS isn’t nearly the quality of Beta, and they both bite compared to laserdiscs, but hey, VHS is good enough.
–These bananas don’t actually taste like I remember them tasting, but I ain’t gonna spend for organic. These are good enough.

Again, I’m leaving out plenty — remember when Japanese cars represented a compromise? At least they were cheap, and even cheaper to fill up. Add microwaves for anything but warming and popcorn, frozen food, etc. etc. Here, throw in convenience, but a whole lot of these “good enough” choices came down to money.

Oh yeah, and MP3s..and MPEG in general, and and and…

Revolution? You gotta be kidding me. Seriously. Good enough was the story of AT LEAST the last third of the last century, and every day of this one. The only way virtually any of us got into this business was because we were (are) “good enough” relative to people with far more expensive systems doing higher-end work.

That’s not to say that we don’t work harder and smarter, and haven’t as a result had to rely on our wits…but hardly any of us are at the tippy top of our markets…which means that we’re playing “good enough.”

Again, I don’t think of this as an indictment. That’s just the way it is. We can distract our clients with service and skill, but eventually, they’re going to go to someone else for the same reason they came to us — the same way that they’ve made so, so many choices in so many areas of their lives.

Hey, and have a great day!

Peace, love, and chocolate, and how about them Red Sox? They aren’t going to win the division — not even close — but it turns out that the wild card is……good enough!

Yr pal.
Timmy

[Tim Wilson]

[Daniel Edelman] “Do the firewire 400 and 800 operate on separate busses?”

Sorry Daniel — no extra busses on the Mac. It’s the tradeoff you get for such a sleek chassis.

tw

[Tim Wilson]

[Chris Blair] “…shooting in HD has advantages in quality, but if a client asks you to shoot in HD and that quality advantage is completely negated by the fact that no one will see it in HD…”

But I think they will notice.

You don’t shoot consumer-grade MPEG just because your work is going to SD DVD. Your web video might play at 512 KB, but you shoot a much higher data rate. I delivered on 3/4, and before the turn of the century, a lot of VHS for client review copies. But I didn’t shoot in those formats. And even the most chowderheaded of my clients immediately noticed when I upgraded my equipment.

The web video thing is interesting all by itself. It used to be synonymous with tiny, low-quality movies. We’ve found that the web is increasingly the HD platform of choice. We stream up to 900 px wide now, for both tutorials and hosted video (reels, shorts, etc.) and it looks pretty darn good. So even if you can’t deliver HD to air, you can absolutely deliver it on the web!

If you have SD equipment and it’s making you money, carry on. But your clients will definitely notice when you switch to HD.

The additional interesting thing is that, especially with ProRes and DNxHD, you have free, built-in solutions to deliver pristine HD in SD bandwidth and storage.

And if you’ve used your camera long enough to pay for it, you may well find that your new HD camera costs a lot less than your SD camera did. I could get a really nice Varicam or XDCAM HD for what I paid to shoot DigiBeta, and have enough left over for a nice little vacation.

So HD can cost less, and give your spouse something to smile about. Look! I bought a new camera and got a romantic getaway free!

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine!

My Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “The keychain secret TV remote was made for folks like us, to kill the offending TV :-)”

I don’t travel much anymore, but I sure wish they’d had this at the time: TV-B-Gone.

There was a scandal of sorts when it was introduced at last year’s CES, when those scamps at Gizmodo ran around turning off displays in the middle of vendor demos. As a civilian, I think this is pretty hilarious, but I can absolutely relate to how thoroughly people flipped their lids when it happened…leading the offender to banned for life from the show. Let that be a warning to some of you ruffians.

Tim Wilson
Creative Cow Magazine!

My Blog: “Is this thing on? Oh it’s on!”

Don’t forget to rate your favorite posts!

[Tim Wilson]

[Todd Terry] “How many times have you been to a public place (doctor’s office, restaurant, bar) where there is a 16:9 set displaying a 4:3 picture all stretched out? I see that all the time and it drives me nuts.”

As the AV nerd for both sides of the family, as far as the term can possibly be extended, I set up a lot of TVs. Without exception, every time I set up them up to protect 4:3 pictures, people FREAK OUT.

Here’s the thing – nearly all of them get that it’s stretched SD. They don’t for a minute think that it’s really HD, and would rather the picture be distorted than not. I think there’s a combination of “I bought all these pixels and don’t want to waste any of ’em” and the discovery that things are more fun to watch on wide screens.

(I think there are physio-anthropological reasons for this, but that’s another story. I’m also aware that many people outside my sphere influence have no idea that they’re not getting HD.)

Here’s the thing I’m a little embarrassed about: I’ve gotten kind of fond of stretching 4:3. I watch so little of it that I don’t feel particularly strongly about the sanctity of the frames.

And seriously, anything playing on a TV in a public place deserves to be disrespected. If stretching is the most that can be done without actually tearing the thing from the wall, well, then so be it.