Knowing What You Don't Know

I had a silly little experience at Pixel the other day. A young programmer we've got doing some Flash stuff for us did some audio editing of a high quality MP3 I had sent him, a simple single-channel, mono voice over track. And it came back sounding like crap. Plus, the bitrate was higher than it was when I sent it to him. So, more bandwidth, lower quality. I think not.

It was the result of a cascade of little mistakes he'd made when recompressing the files, little compression tricks he didn't know about. Tricks that I do know about. I redid the compression myself, and ended up with a file that was one quarter the size of his, yet indistinguishable from the original.

The situation made me realize that sometimes I don't give myself enough credit, and I forget that, yes, I've been working with digital media since, well, digital media was invented, and I've picked up a thing or two along the way. Knowing the proper data rates for various flavors of digital audio just happens to be one of many little recipes filed away in my brain. These things usually sit in there like the Ark at the end of Raiders - it's in there, but good luck finding it. But every now and then I think to myself, "Hey! I know how to do that, and that's a pretty cool thing. Most people don't know how to do that."

Sometimes it's important to sit back, take a moment, and be thankful for the things you do know, and humble about the things you don't.

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