Keep It Simple (Stupid)

Complexity is the mother of frustration. Technical minds don’t often worry about how complicated their system is, all that matters is what it can do and the process of manipulating it into doing those things. But what happens when they have to show someone else how it works? Or even worse what happens when someone else has to figure it out on their own?

It sounds a little morbid, but I’ve heard it put “If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, could someone else jump in and keep it going?”. The simpler a system or process is to use the better the chances they have. 

Follow Standard Practices

For others to easily step in, its best to follow standard practices. This ensures that if they have any experience, things will be set up in a logical way that they might expect. In the worst-case scenario, if a professional needs to be hired to work things out, it will lessen the number of things they have to do and ultimately save the organization money. In the case that you as the builder are the one teaching the system to a new volunteer, they will be learning the correct way and when they go into a different scenario will already know what best practices are instead of enduring the frustration of now having to unlearn potentially bad habits. Training a volunteer well will have a father reaching kingdom impact than you will ever know. It is short-sighted to only focus on what is right in front of you. 

Access Wants VS Needs

There is new equipment coming out every day and with a lot of really cool features. It's very tempting to chase after a certain piece because of a feature it may have. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this, but just be sure you’re not overlooking how that piece will integrate with the rest of your system. Is that feature worth adding (meaning will it provide a better experience to the people in the seats) if it requires a bunch of additional workarounds and converters to implements that piece in with the rest of your system? This can be a difficult question to answer and you have to check your motives for wanting the new piece of equipment. 

It's a lot easier to start by asking yourself “what is the specific issue we are looking to solve?” Then once you’ve identified that look for the simplest solution to the actual problem. I often have to check myself when it comes to brands. I have to ask “ am I choosing this because of the name or the prestige that goes along with it or is it the best option for this organization at this time?”. 

It's important to remember that we are there to serve the organization and one of the best ways to do that is by making decisions that benefit the organization, not just you. 

Keep Other People In mind

More than likely, you won’t be the only person who ever runs the equipment, or even be in charge of it forever. Volunteers and technical leaders will follow along after you. So it's crucial that you set them up for success too. Just because something makes sense to you, doesn’t mean it will to someone else. When making decisions on equipment purchase and system setup, it can be helpful to approach it like you are a consultant looking to help someone else make the best decision possible. What would you tell yourself to do, if you were advising you? 

All that being said, I’ve been in situations where someone came along behind me to what I obviously thought was a great setup and they tore it out because they either didn’t like it or understand it. You can’t prevent that. All you can do is make the best decision in front of you at the time. 

Focus On The Basics

When it comes to simplicity, you have to put the basics first. In a previous post, I talked about the value of the basics, but when you focus on getting the foundations right at the beginning, it helps alleviate complexity and the need for more advanced processing later on. 

For example, I was recently working on the color of a live stream. The skin tones weren’t quite right and they didn’t all match across the stage. Throughout the process, I had put in a lot of small modifications at different points in the signal chain to correct different issues. It got to the point where anytime I’d want to make a change, I'd have to consider how it would look after it went through other filters further down the line. Eventually, I decided to start over and match not only the front light color but the front light source. (You can read about lighting color here) I also made sure that the front light color was exactly what I needed it to be, in this case, it had a little too much green so instead of trying to correct for that in post, I tweaked the lighting gel until I was happy with how the color looked to my eye in the room. So finally when I manually set the color temp on the cameras to match my front light, everything looked clean and uniform without the need for additional digital filtering further down the line that affected other parts of the image more negatively. 

Another example could be drum sounds. I’ve been in situations where no matter how much processing and tweaking I did at the console, the drum still didn’t sound the way I wanted it to. The right answer was always to just walk down to the stage and talk to the drummer about the drum. Once we got the drum sounding the way I wanted at the source, a lot of the added processing could be turned off and it sounded much better. 

Look for the solution that will fix the problem, rather than the easy to implement band-aid that could cause issues further down the road.

If you’d like to talk more specifically about simplifying your systems, send me a message, I’d love to talk with you.