Fundamental misunderstanding of the market dynamics here.
There are at least an order of magnitude more people making a professional salary as photographers (ie.: enough to justify a software purchase) than professional videographers.
Outside of film, videographers are generally paid a day rate about half as high as photographers, with enormously higher equipment costs.
Film - hollywood, streaming, TV etc, combined actually employ a relatively small number of people. Sure there's enormously more budget for any given TV show than say a wedding photoshoot, but think about how many people get married, how many corporate photo sessions there are etc etc.
Basically by conflating videography and cinematography you've obscured the issue. Source - I'm a videographer that also works as a cinematographer / director on smaller budget projects.
Also on anything bigger than a very low budget short, it's editors and post people who are using the editing software not the videographers / camera operators / DOP. Bare in mind DaVinci does not own the film industry. It's very much still Avid's game, with Nuke for colour, and a small percentage of Adobe Suite.
As a semi-pro photographer I look at the $295 pricing and think that is a very reasonable price for something that could help my photos look like my photos. I bought DxO PhotoLab for $235 and color grade with it all the time. Right now I use LUTs that other people made and have been thinking I’d like to learn to be more systematic and make my own.
I don’t really do video but I have in the past so a video editor coming in a box sweetens the deal in the same sense that Adobe CC comes with, say, Premiere, which I use just occasionally. I can totally shoot video with my Sony and there is definitely a lot of demand for it on the internet these days. I also know Divinchi resolve is a product that many people in film/video are enthusiastic for and that counts too.
The amazing thing about Resolve is that the free version is almost certainly enough for > 95% of use cases. The features that are locked behind the Studio upgrade are truly pro features - in that you won’t need them at all unless you are delivering for a proper studio or professional project. The amount of firepower you get from the free version is easily at parity with any comparable product from Adobe/Apple - and in many cases blows them out of the water… for free.
IIRC, it only officially supports CentOS or some other baroque thing, doesn’t support importing or exporting mp4 when free, and also (unrelated to the product itself) Linux hw accel of video is flakey.
I'm also a semi-pro (technically I'm a pro but it's just a side gig) photographer who uses DxO. I really like DxO for color & exposure, as well as denoise, but I've gotten supremely frustrated at it's lack of more sophisticated editing functionality. I'm increasingly considering an Adobe subscription just to have something with more effective AI masking -- DxO stinks for this -- not to mention small things like generative fill to simplify stuff like powerline removal.
THe cinema industry is much smaller than photography, but the dialogue between companies and customers is much much richer in VFX.
Autodesk, foundry and Avid all have site licenses with their big players, and the product owners/managers will be on site talking to users to see what bugs/features are needed.
More over a lot of the big companies that buy this software also have their own R&D departments. So there is much cross pollination.
Also people will come to blackmagic and foundry with problems and ask for help (Ie rolling shutter reduction, anti-noise, optical flow, copy grade, etc etc)
> Source - I'm a videographer that also works as a cinematographer / director on smaller budget projects.
Tangential - any helpful advice you could give to budding videographers? I'd love to make those nice B-roll images you see in YouTube videos (Engineering Explained comes to mind).
Most advice is either for folks videoing people, or generally for photography. Funny thing is I'd say I'm already a very solid photographer... but my videos (admittedly shot on my phone) never look as good.
Learn to shoot static first. Biggest mistake I see people make when they move from photo to video is moving the camera without intention. Master the basic size of shots - wide, mid, closeup - with a variety of stills lenses on a tripod (or in hand with good in camera stabalisation).
Then learn the basic moves - ped, pan, track etc. If you're moving, think about how you're stabalising your camera - gimbal, shoulder rig etc. Most DSLR's do not have good enough stablisation to allow movement without artifacts.
Make sure you understand your camera. For photos you have much more leeway in post. For video I'd recommend always shooting at the camera's native ISO, at 24/25/30 shutter speed, and keeping shutter angle at double the shutter speed (or 180 degrees).
Don't change settings during a shot (other than focus). Set everything to manual, get your ISO, white balance, shutter speed or angle right, and leave it at that for the duration of the shot. If the lighting changes in the shot, your settings should cover the whole extent of the lighting for that shot.
Think about each shot as an image. i.e.: Don't try to catch everything, but focus on a detail, or framing, just as you would with a photo. If you're filming people, how they sit in the frame in relation to the background and other people (how large they are in frame, how they're blocked, whether they're enclosed by foreground detail etc) determines how we see them.
Just focus on all the basic photography stuff - rule of thirds, colour theory, bokeh etc. People just get overwhelmed when they switch to video, but the same rules apply. It's really just moving photographs after all.
Movement is in time, think about a nice frame of a railway line in a landscape - then a train enters and passes through it. Movement is everywhere - water, reflections, shadows, animals. Find a strong frame in nature or the build environment, that has movement, or will have movement passing through it and shoot that.
Then start thinking about how shots connect together. Even B-Roll tells a story and has a rhythm. Wide to closeup, big object to small object, matching motion between shots, directing the viewers eye as it moves across the frame. You're always telling a story, so when you get 'coverage' try to have the story you'll tell in the edit in mind. If you're capturing a place, whats a wide or ultra wide that gives us an emotional impression of the place. What are some details that colour it in. Whats a change thats occurring that ads movement life and purpose.
Basically it's about intentionality and choice. Whats the feeling you're trying to convey and which shots convey it best. A good exercise is trying to shoot a happy event in a threatening or disturbing style, or vice versa. Here's an example where I shot and edited a St Patrick's day parade in a nightmarish style - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpj-fK8obPI
Think in terms of the final video or film rather than individual shots. That's the equivalent of the finished photo.
Steve Yedlin uses Nuke exclusively for grading. AFAIK lots of high end cinematographers and colourists do. I'm a DaVinci man myself, nuke is intimidating.
Unfortunately what you're describing is precisely the opposite of the meaning of 'democratised'. A more accurate term would be commoditised. In this case the capacity to manipulate events becomes as tied to wealth as it is to access to information.
Yeah, I really only mean 'democratized' in the sense that there's suddenly a populace of influence. Whether or not that influence is 'fair' in a democratic sense is clearly not the case, but there's a tipping point in how influential it actually is.
If you're an elected lawmaker, and there's a bill on the floor which gives your district $500,000 in hospital funding but there's $10,000,000,000 in volume just on the 'no' side of the bet, how's that going to influence your decision making?
They may have dropped from the level of death during the war itself. A transnational conflict that involved every continent on earth. But I'd be shocked if the numbers dead from war in the post war period did not exceed the median number of civilian victims of war pre-WW1 or in the post war period. The World Wars normalised the idea of total war, of death squads and killing fields and mechanised genocide. Those have continued apace, everywhere from the Congo to Cambodia. At the time they were novelties in 'the civilised' world.
I asked ChatGPT to compute the rate of total deaths (civilians + military) since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Here's what it came up with:
Period. Approx average deaths from war
1815–1913 ~5–15 per 100k per year
1914–1945 ~100–200 per 100k per year
1946–1989 ~5–10 per 100k per year
1990–today ~1–3 per 100k per year
I know AI is not 100% reliable but it searched on many sources to compute that.
I checked some of them and the conclusion is in line with them.
Here's the "bottomline":
> Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the per-capita death rate from war has fallen substantially, with the huge exception of the 1914–1945 world-war era, which produced the highest war mortality rates in modern history.
TBH this surprised me. I thought that with much better killing machines in the 20th century, we'd be more efficient at killing, and as we're still having wars as usual that would mean death rates would increase... but it seems I was quite wrong.
Alas we're seeing a reversion to historical norms. The "civilized" world was a temporary and localized phenomenon. The usual pattern in conflicts between societies was always genocide: kill all the men, take the women and children as slaves, smash the cultural artifacts, and steal anything of value. Probably thousands of societies have been utterly erased that way. Hopefully we can arrest the gradual worldwide regression to barbarism but I'm not optimistic.
People love repeating this stuff, a form of navel-gazing: 'Norms' is used by bad people to support their obviously bad ideas - 'I know this sucks, but it's inevitable!'.
Instead of complaining, do what prior generations did and stand up and build something.
We contact support services to fix material problems. 'This booking is wrong.' 'I want a refund for that.' AI systems aren't empowered to solve these problems. At best they can provide information. If the answer is information - the user can likely already find it online themselves (often from a better AI model than they're going to find running your support line). If they're calling, they most often want something done.
Yeah, it's like trying to use an ORM to find data in the database that's invalid due to a bug. You can't see things in the system that break the premises of the system by using the system, and the fact that some things are "supposed to be impossible" doesn't change the reality of what's actually occurring in the data store.
So customer support needs to know how the systems works and need to understand what the data means, but also has to know when the system is factually incorrect. Customer support has to know when the second party is speaking the truth.
Do you know that to be true or are you speculating?
As we argue on the orange site, companies are paying Sierra AI to integrate voice and text agents into their systems to look up account information and process refunds. Fallbacks to human agents are built in to these systems.
We all hate phone trees because they never have the capability to handle exceptions to the most basic functions. We shout "speak to an agent!" into the phone because their website and phone trees only handle the happy path.
One hundred percent. I work in film, and recently had an argument with a friend around this point. He's incredibly healthy, and frequently works a large number of unsociable hours. I was pointing out that filmmaking hours make no concession for family or age. He'd convinced himself that he'll have no more difficulty doing 80 hour weeks in his forties and fifties than he does in his mid thirties, because he 'takes care of himself'. The implication being that everyone could work those hours if they just ate better and held multiple martial arts belts as he does. It was no use pointing out that he'd confused cause and effect.
For set related jobs, the hours are the shoot. If the shoot runs long, everybody's on set. It's an exploitative - and in my view, completely unnecessary - culture. The marriages, parental relationships and health costs cannot be justified by the supposed necessity of dollar savings. But currently - especially in the US, film sets all to often work sweatshop hours. More enlightened practices, like 'French hours' (a ten hour day), are also possible. The films created under these conditions don't seem any worse, and the people involved are inarguably happier and healthier.
Counterpoint, I very much enjoyed the sequels (all but the last). They added three dimensional characters, especially women and explored a variety of aspects of first contact. They're a believable examination of how humans recreate the same social ills over and over, given the opportunity for utopia.
I thought they were reasonably interesting as well, though not quite the same vibe as the original.
Maybe it's that whole sense of wonder thing. When you have no idea why this thing was built and sent here, it's easy to imagine it was something exotic, amazing, high and mighty, wholesome, etc. When it's revealed that the reason was quite ordinary and kind of distasteful to modern human sensibilities, it's kind of a let-down.
> Truth is, once youth passes, over time people become increasingly disinterested in others.
I find almost exactly the opposite is true. As you age your perceived value lessens, while you find the nuances of human behaviour ever more fascinating. Meanwhile many of the current cohort of twenty somethings seem disinterested in everything, including one another.
I would extend that to thirty somethings, so my generation as well.
Over time most of the people this age in my extended social circle kind of... faded. I don't know what caused this but I find myself increasingly socialising with younger people because they still haven't retreated to the comfort of their "me time" activities.
In the US, I think that not doing the boring thing, which is spending time during 20s working or studying for a handful of career paths, climbing up the career ladder, saving up for downpayment for land in the richer areas of a handful of expensive cities, etc comes with huge costs.
The cost is that when you are 40 and you either have stable finances such that you can provide your kids with an acceptable amount of healthcare and education and housing stability, and you will be able to retire, or you get to 40 and you have to start sacrificing the goal of raising kids within the aforementioned parameters.
Maybe that is how it always was, it just wasn't a "known" thing so people didn't incorporate it into the decision making when they were 20.
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