That phrase sound familiar? From information I researched, it appeared many years ago:
"Jack of all trades and master of none. Said of someone who has a basic familiarity with many things but isn't an expert at anything. The phrase has been in use in the United States since 1721..." From "Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings" by Gregory Y. Titelman (Random House, New York, 1996)."
Well, it's not the 18th Century anymore but, we seemed to be plagued by this problem in the production business. I'm all for democratizing technology - though I don't want the art to suffer as a result. This new ability to give the masses the technology to do picture/audio creation is generating a world of "mediocrity". Just because you can move pictures around in a time-line or put your i-Tunes music behind your home movies does not make one a production professional.
I liken it to the musician, who learns to make sound come out of an instrument after a few weeks or months of training. But, to make "MUSIC" takes years and years of practice and commitment to learn the nuances that make a piece of music come alive. It's the same in the production business, whether you are editing together a :30 TV spot or your Academy award winning major motion picture, the wise creative seeks out those who specialize in their discipline. It seems that in this era of shrinking production budgets the goal is to "just get it finished" ignoring whether it will actually garner enough attention from an audience to "sell" the product or "instruct" the viewer/listener. One of the hardest lessons for an editor to learn is that just because you have a "tool" you don't HAVE to use it. Sometimes the judicious use of a few production techniques is enormously better than throwing in all of these "cool plug-ins" with magic settings like "The Perfect Voice Compressor".
A facility, like Soundworks, has people with decades of experience in turning a project into one that sounds as if it were "worth a million bucks", even though on many occasions it started out about $1.25. These are the people who truly are Masters of one demanding discipline, the Art of great sound.
