double-layer sensors... a new norm to come?

[PannySVHS]

@Emanuel One would need to kiss many asses to get funding and much, much moreso to get distribution and sofore recognition in Germany. Distribution counts a bit in the end, right.

They regularily fund and distribute highend trash, soulless polished garbage. Yesterday I watched a short from a filmschool, Alexa image quality, as it's filmschool and industry standard. But what luxury trash it was. So, no new sensor tech could have changed that.

No new sensor tech will sofore open the gates of distribution for indy narrative masterpieces.

More interesting to me on the sensor side is the fact that Blackmagic stopped the production of the Bmmcc, making it indeed a true connoisseur camera. Glad i own one myself now.:)

cheers

[Emanuel]

I obviously agree with everything you wrote, Marty : ) No new sensors will change that once the revolution is already made in the meantime. No need to say this place is the proof of it. Nothing will change the need of funding and distribution.

The point is that both are much different today. Digital age has opened many other gates you could only dream before. Hey I speak by myself, started more than 25 years ago into old school film and look at where I am now with many international productions running at the same time : )) That was rather impossible just a decade and a half ago :- )

[kye]

On 12/22/2021 at 6:20 AM, herein2020 said:

 

I was being a bit comical in some of the predictions but since you mention it...cell phones have absolutely taken many jobs and replaced many technologies; photography and video has been just as equally hard hit as any of them. As a working professional who has been doing this for over 10yrs even in that relatively short period of time I can tell you that many photography and videography opportunities for professionals have evaporated thanks to cell phones. 

It is well documented that the camera industry has been devastated by cell phones, just like the mobile GPS market, lets not even talk about the PC market, and the list goes on and that is just in the HW segments alone. Lets not even talk about the endless apps that do things in one click that people used to pay professionals for. Every one of those contractions represent jobs lost. 

You mention that more and more people are doing these content production jobs but where are the numbers to back that up which show actual job creation? What I have seen first hand is a serious contraction in the prices clients are willing to pay to do those jobs and in many cases they ultimately determine that an employee placing their cell phone on a little tripod stand is good enough for their social media accounts. Lets not even forget the endless Kim K pictures that get millions of views vs the professional who spent decades perfecting their craft creating works of art that now no one ever sees (or is willing to pay for).

Sure there's more "content creators" than ever before, but that does not mean they are paying professionals to do the creation or even that the process was anything more than pressing record on their cell phone. The value of professional video and photography has absolutely plummeted; the average cost for a wedding video which could easily require $20K+ worth of equipment nationwide in the USA is now around $1400USD whereas it used to easily be $7K+. 

The reality is, this absolute saturation of low quality content has lowered people's expectations to the point to where they do not value the time, equipment, or expertise needed to separate the great from the average and their content creation budgets reflect that. Almost every photographer and videographer I know is now doing it on the side due to passion vs full time because it simply will not pay enough to quit their day jobs. And lets not forget the plethora of mind numbingly boring movies coming out of Netflix, Amazon, Apple, and others that literally feel like cookie cutter corporate clones of each other with no plot, storytelling, or suspense whose only purpose is to gain more subscribers to their service.

So yes, I do believe that as cell phones continue to get better, the devaluing of professional content creators will continue as well which will in turn continue to lead to job loss. Just because more content is being created than ever before does not mean the job statistics for professional photographers / videographers is following the same trajectory. Ok, end of rant, how about those double stacked sensors 😀

I think we're mixing a bunch of things together here.

I don't question that cell phones have had a huge impact on the camera industry, that much is clear with the "falling off a cliff" charts of camera sales.  

I also realise that your comment was probably made relatively casually, and maybe I took it a little too literally, which may not be the spirit with which it was intended, but just to clarify, the comment I was speaking to was:

On 12/20/2021 at 11:55 AM, herein2020 said:

this is just going to bring cell phones one step closer to taking all of our jobs

The two key elements of this that I took here were "all of our jobs".

The articles you linked to featured two significant points.  The first was that there was a huge decline in sales, and the second was that these companies / products / industry segments were enormously profitable.  

The math of this is that profit is money earned from sales that isn't spent on jobs.  Also, being high-technology, the amount of money spent on sophisticated equipment is huge in comparison to the amount spent on wages of workers.  The entire concept of the production line is based on the idea that the machines do the work and the people do the things around the machines.

I see the jobs that we're talking about falling into a number of categories: those that might increase in demand, those that stay steady, and those that are likely to decline.

Jobs that will decline are pretty straight forwards and obvious, being people who work on the production line of all the different products now effectively merged, R&D across the many companies now reduced to the main manufacturers, designers for all the different products, and the associated corporate jobs that sit in every company.

Jobs that will likely not decline as they have nothing to do with the price of a camera but are related to the number of productions include a vast array of things like producers, directors, production design, grip, sound, editing and post.  I have grouped the "stays the same" and "increased demand" together because I think it's very difficult to understand the impact of wider trends.

You also linked to an article showing that the going rate for wedding videographer is much reduced.  I am happy to admit that a reduced total cost for services will translate to less people being able to make a living (therefore losing jobs), however it won't be proportional as the reduced equipment costs will have been passed on to the customer, along with the reduced time for editing and post production, etc.  

I don't know where you're based, maybe the US or UK, but globally the market for something like wedding videography is likely to be exploding.

From the wikipedia page on Middle Class:

Quote

In February 2009, The Economist asserted that over half the world's population now belongs to the middle class, as a result of rapid growth in emerging countries. It characterized the middle class as having a reasonable amount of discretionary income, so that they do not live from hand-to-mouth as the poor do, and defined it as beginning at the point where people have roughly a third of their income left for discretionary spending after paying for basic food and shelter. This allows people to buy consumer goods, improve their health care, and provide for their children's education.

I realise you said "all of our jobs", and I'd acknowledge that not many of us are doing projects in the Punjab or Shaanxi, so maybe that point is besides your original comment, but it does speak to the wider theme of the impact of cell phones on the entire job market for professional moving image creation.

My point about cell phones driving demand for video is probably not easily quantifiable, but I would suggest that it is also undeniable.  Back in the days when equipment was expensive and not accessible by the average consumer, the only way that person would ever see themselves on video was either via a handycam or if they managed to do something newsworthy and got themselves on TV.  I had access to a video camera for intermittent periods from about 1986 onwards, and the idea of recording myself was completely foreign - there was no expectation that I should appear on video.

Now, the consumption of media that features normal people has exploded. There are more TV stations and movie production companies than ever, for sure (boosting demand for all the production-related jobs, not the camera-production ones) but the explosion in content has been of people pointing cameras at people who aren't famous or trying to be famous.  The idea that I would film myself doing something now isn't so alien, because it's normalised.

Perhaps the biggest element in this whole equation, I think, is that of change.

Every period of upheaval is both a crisis and an opportunity - but only for people who either weren't attached to the old ways of doing things or who can change to adapt to the new opportunities.  The entire domestic drone market is one such opportunity, just to name one.

Change is hard, though.  Really hard.  Lots of people don't make it, kind of hard.  I think this is where the statements of impending doom comes from, like the kind I smelled in your "taking all of our jobs" comment.  Maybe it wasn't intended to be taken as literal, and maybe you feel that I'm picking on you (which I'm not, but I am posting this to try and make a point, which is that one-sided statements like this don't really help anyone and don't add to a conversation, whereas nuanced comments do) but I think it's obviously false.  We have at least one person on these forums who won't be unemployed as they do sound, which no amount of DR can substitute for getting a boom mic close to someones mouth or telling the AC that the generator needs to be further away from the set.  There are others here too where it's really obvious that no amount of camera tech will impact them.

Am I saying change is good?  No.  Am I saying change is bad?  No.  

What I am saying though, is that regardless of if your statement is true or not (taken literally it's not and taken figuratively it probably still isn't) it's not useful.  

Change is hard and people who don't want to change, can't afford to change, or don't have the ability to change (for whatever reasons, of which there are a great many very valid reasons out there) will be having a very very bad time.  If this is you then I would encourage you to reach out for help, and rather than phrasing your pain as "we're all screwed", instead rephrase is as a request for support or comradeship.
If this isn't you, then think about the impact your comment has on other people.  This is, sadly, a matter of life and death for some people, and think about how you feel about your contributions to this, very grave topic.  

So yeah, that's my piece, happy to go on talking about these mythical 30 stops of DR phones that you're dreaming about, but please, rather than adding to the dumbing down and negative spiralling nature of internet discourse, I'd encourage you to go the other way.