Heart of the Problem

OK, I'll preface this by saying "I'm not an economist," but here's a thought, when Henry Paulson says things like:

"I have always said that at the heart of the problem is the housing correction. And until the biggest part of the price decline in houses is behind us, we will have stresses in the financial markets and in the economy."

Does it occur to anyone that the heart of the problem might not be the fact that we've overextended ourselves?

That just maybe, $2.6 trillion in consumer credit and the easy lending that helps obscure the fact that real incomes have fallen for the working class for years, is at the heart of the problem. That the collapse has nothing to do with decades of spending beyond our means, and that maybe we should prepare ourselves to lower our standard a living, if only a bit?

Anyway... I digress, let's get back to media matters and other topics... How do you like your H3?

The (Ten Year) Overnight Success

This week in the Guardian, the author writes a pretty good article about the idea of mastery and practice vs. natural talent, and cites a really interesting study conducted in the early 90's comparing children who started learning a skill or developing a talent, and tracked their hours of practice.

From the article:

This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery...."

In other words, a key part of what it means to be talented is being able to practise for hours and hours - to the point where it is really hard to know where "natural ability" stops and the simple willingness to work hard begins.

It's interesting to me, that the 10 year figure is one we use anectdotaly quite often, in the "overnight success that took 10 years to achieve." We see it very often in the entertainment business, and I would say it's held true in my own experience as well.

Ten years of hard work, yields a degree of mastery that looks suspiciously like "natural talent."

Go figure.

Hollywood's Next Big Thing (will be little)

As we've all watched the studios tighten their belts; and the television prodco's around town bury their heads further in the sand, Peter Bart over at Variety had a noteworthy column about 2 weeks ago on the bean-counters taking over.

Mr. Bart, as one of the few people left in our business who has been through a recession before, as a studio exec, has some unique insights;

I was an executive at Paramount Pictures when times suddenly took a turn for the worse and my company decided to do the unthinkable: The corporate mandate was that Paramount was to become "lean and mean." That was all right with me in theory, since I already was lean and my initial experience at the studio was making me mean.

But then came the specifics. The studio's entire production team would be moving off the Paramount lot to a new headquarters in a suite of offices on Canon Drive in Beverly Hills.

The "new Paramount" would continue to advance its agenda of films -- as many as 15 a year -- but budgets would be tighter and deals leaner. And the delicious little "fringe benefits" of studio life would be no more. When a star in a Paramount movie arrived at LAX, no limo would meet him. Unless he paid for it himself.

And here was the surprise ending: Upon leaving the lot, the quality of our movies promptly improved markedly, and so did the box office results. Instead of the over-budget turkeys that Paramount had been making ("The Molly Maguires," "Catch-22"), the studio suddenly was turning out "Rosemary's Baby," "Love Story," "The Godfather," "Paper Moon" and "The Longest Yard." Even the losers were intriguing -- witness "Harold and Maude."

I personally find the history in context very hopeful. Our industry desperately needs thinning out; perhaps I'll be "thinned out" too; perhaps not. Hopefully I'm good enough at what I do that I'll get to stick around and help be an agent of change.

But more than just a re-alignment (cosmic change, as Mr. Bart puts it); tighter budgets means fewer people involved in the creative process, because there isn't enough money to pay them all. Fewer people involved in the creative process means that projects can move faster, lighter, and most of all, the creative juices stand less chance of being watered down.

It means that leaner times can give rise to better films, and better stories.

Perhaps even give rise to braver voices who aren't scrapping over who has the bigger trailer on the set, or the biggest hotel room on location; whose primary focus and vision is that of creating great story.

Because that star (or EP, or Director) who can't do that, will be left waiting at the airport for a limosine that's not coming.

Personally, I look forward to great storytelling coming from this next decade.

Sony HDR-SR11 & Final Cut Pro - Sequence Settings

To respond to a comment/question on the HDR-SR11 workflow post I wrote a while back, a reader asked me to post info on the sequence settings I use in ingest.

I don't use any "easy setup" files, but here's what I do for the sequence settings in editing:
One other thing to note; in the Preferences pane of the Log and Transfer window, here's the settings there:

Hope this helps, and thanks for reading!