I was just reading this interview with Don Sylvester about "Knight and Day." In it he says that the schedule was so tight that they were cutting effects on scenes that were still being shot?! I know I have a short turn around on some projects, but that just seems ridiculous, at least mine are typically locked or at least rough cut.
Now, regardless of how it came to this, it seems universal that budgets are getting squeezed tighter, schedules are getting more compressed, and expectations continue to rise in an attempt to out-do the latest effort. And we're all locking in step with the change because... well, as I see it, it's because we have no other choice.
So, without turning this into a my-schedule-is-shorter-than-yours contest, or a complain-a-thon, I'd like to know what benefits you see in compressed time schedules.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is this:
I can have a tendency to digress in my design stage, a good and bad thing. Great for creativity, not so great for making decisions. I wind up with too many sounds and spend too much time trying to incorporate them all. With a shorter schedule decisions have to be made and they have to be made now, with no remorse of what could have been. It makes me think through my design and forces me to go with instinct rather than reaction.