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Interesting post. I'm not familiar with him, but he's in my city (Portland, OR) and I ride the Max often. As a full-time freelance videographer for the past ten years, I just did my end of year accounting for 2024 and I can officially say that my income has been on a downward trajectory since the pandemic. Video production is just not considered a specialty skill anymore. 2023 was so bad that I almost threw in the towel. 2024 was better, but still barely a living -- probably around half of what my friends with office jobs made. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, I'm currently underperforming the average income for other videographers in my area by a wide margin, but I have to wonder about the accuracy of their numbers. A lot of my local colleagues have been exiting the industry just as Airview has. People with genuine talent. One trend I've been noticing in the past couple of years is that I'll show up with a car packed with lighting, multiple cameras, dolly track, etc. and yet some of my clients will often just tell me to hurry up and get the shot with no lighting or movement. And then we wrap early, which is nice. But overall, I feel like my work has been going downhill and this is really bothering me. And then there are discussions like this taking place on Reddit, so I know that I am not alone. Overall, I'm pretty discouraged and I need to figure out whether to ride it out or try something new.

I definitely agree that more SDR luts would be great. It would be nice if cameras could share luts with the same ease as using a new snapchat filter. Or if you could connect your camera to an ipad wirelessly and build the lut in real time using color correction software. There are so many UI/UX barriers to cameras still. However, for narrative projects, I would never shoot anything other than a standard log profile anymore. I shoot in log on large projects because it allows a color managed workflow. If I shoot a scene one day, and then have pickups a month later, with slightly different lighting because it's cloudier--or with a different camera system altogether--log is very useful. Partly because of added dynamic range, but, more importantly, the shots are standardized to reduce the guesswork for adequately matching. I also shoot a kelvin white balance rather than balancing to a card for the same reason. Standardization is key.

Which is pretty much why I shoot log with a burned in LUT. Usually needs a slight tweak but generally nothing major if I got the WB more or less in the ballpark.

Hello everyone, I've invested months in making this free tutorial on how to achieve the best possible quality from color negative scans made at home with a digital camera without using plugins. https://github.com/alchemy-color/color-negative-inversion Based on my previous work with digital camera calibration and emulation, I decided to dive into negative film with a mission in mind: - What could be the most accurate way of capturing and inverting the color negative in the digital domain with simple means such as a DSLR and an iPad backlight? After extensive measurements and intensive testing, I developed a method that allowed me to scan and invert a Kodak Gold 200 photograph of a ColorChecker SG with a resulting average color similarity DeltaE of around 2.70. This exceptional value serves as a testament not only to the accuracy of the method but also to the virtues of color negative film in terms of its color accuracy. Thank you to Reddit users Aaron Buchler (u/Ab_film_92) for the inversion technique and Jack Whitaker (u/jrw01) for his informative article on scanner backlights. Both were fundamental in helping me understand where to go with my methods. Full disclaimer: Close to the end of the video, I promote a product created alongside this research. https://alchemycolor.com/film-emulation/. Color negative emulation is an innovative method if turning digital images into accurate facsimiles of film negatives and ingesting them into plugins such as Negative Lab Pro or FilmLab. Looking forward to hearing opinions and seeing your results. Cheers

Honestly it SHOULD be a better career option than shooting professional video with RED. People's lives and safety depend on train operators. --- In my area, which is mostly rural, I am offered more jobs than I need/want. There aren't tons of videographers in my neck of the woods, so there is a lot less competition. In an area like Portland, Oregon it doesn't surprise me that it is becoming harder though, especially in specialized areas like drone videography which I think is what this guy specialized in. Anyone can buy a DJI drone and get impressive visuals with almost no skill, as the drones do a lot of the work for you. I've seen all this before. I started in video when I was 12 years old. Working in video was an expensive endeavor and very specialized back then. Things changed when everything went digital and all of the sudden anyone could buy a $500 miniDV camera and a copy of Pinnacle Studio for $99 at Staples or Best Buy. I used to get hired in my teen years to film and edit birthday parties, recitals, sports games, and other stuff people wanted to have filmed for their own collection. I used to go to sports games and film things myself, then sell VHS tapes of the games for parents to buy! It was great and paid for all my equipment! But everything changed once video became less specialized and Dads could buy a camera and editing software to do it all themselves. Soon every computer came with editing software, like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. Then YouTube became a thing! Then everyone had a video camera in their pocket when phones started adding cameras! All of these things, to some extent or another, impacted our industry and has continued to. With each step more and more folks found themselves either out of work or needing to adapt. As new things pop up we'll continue to need to adapt. It's not unique to just us, though. I know someone who became a millionaire off of building websites who now mostly gets work specializing in helping folks with Wordpress and Squarespace websites. I know a print shop and marketing owner who used to be able to employ 6 full time people who now works alone because many local businesses have taken marketing in house since they can just get one of their younger employees to figure out how to use Canva. It's happening really everywhere. All you can do is adapt. Not everyone though is going to be able to, especially the more specialized their work is cause once that becomes less specialized there isn't a lot you can do about it.

Yep, I remember working at a production house that produced made for TV movies, it was at the time of transitioning from film to using HD for shooting (Mostly HD-Cam and DVCProHD videotape). They figured they could streamline all sorts of things and save time and money. They decided to not use a slate anymore. What happens was that, yes, you could now sync the audio with software (PluralEyes) and you could figure out which take it was by what order it was shot in, it took so much longer for the assistant editors to do all that work that it was much faster to just take 30 seconds before each take and use a slate. So, basically, the new technology helped a lot in lowering the cost of production but they had to scale back a bit for practical reasons. (They also tried to shorten the shooting schedule to 12 days for a feature. That proved to be too little time even with two cameras running and they went to 18 days.)

So it might not be ‘sexy’ but the average salary for a train driver in the UK is approx double my salary. And you get paid to go on strike whenever you feel like in order to petition for even more pay. Yup, that is the world we live in. It’s mostly been that way actually as in one where very few creatives actually make any real money and the financial benefit is usually in favour of having more regular employment.

I know it's bad to generalize but I want to open 2025 by doing so. What is happening in the video, happened ten years early in computing and more specifically in the web. Huge numbers of people have had access to devices and skills that were previously restricted to a few people. Let's call it democratization, that is, a downward availability of resources. A fundamentally good thing that has triggered processes of competition and lower prices for customers. But if we look at the issue from the point of view of those who have (or had) an IT company with employees or maybe even freelancers but not off the books, the issue also had negative effects: any pimply nerd from his bedroom would make you a website at bargain prices that you with your company would never be able to offer. You will say, yes but the quality suffers. Yes we agree. but how many customers appreciate it or are able to tell the difference? for every wise customer there are ten who rush to buy at the lowest price and who gives a shit if the results are crappy. Now, in my reasoning, replace computers with video cameras and software engineers with filmmakers. Does that make sense?

Interesting stories in that Reddit discussion. I guess we're dealing with Chinafication of content creation: super fast, short, low budget, cheap consumerism.

Reality for me...and I guess many folks is yes, FP-L trumps it for outright image quality, but S9 beats it pretty much everywhere else from having IBIS plus tilt screen, battery life and a few other areas. But then for me, S5II beats S9 everywhere except some features specific to S9 that may come in firmware. Conclusion = LUMIX is for me, still the mainstream hybrid brand for pure video needs and has the least number of compromises over everyone else. What is their compromise? Outright image quality possibly...but actually, struggling really to find one... Another conclusion and that is LUMIX should work more closely with Sigma to create the ultimate real world hybrid!

Don't want to start 2025 with a negative post, but I saw this depressing new year resolution today: Nothing wrong with being a train operator, but we're at a point that being a train operator is a better career option than shooting pro video with RED cameras.