[gyomu]

The short of it is that there’s no money in photography, compared to videography.

Movies routinely have 8 or 9 digit budgets, with teams of hundreds of people who have to collaborate to make footage coming from dozens of different cameras look seamless and consistent. Meanwhile, $1M would be an insane budget for a photo shoot.

You can see this in the actual skills of people working in the field as well. Anyone working in video has a solid understanding of the technical underpinnings of their craft. On the other hand, it’s not uncommon for working photographers to not understand some really basic stuff about color science/data formats/etc.

[dbspin]

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.

[PaulHoule]

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.

[omgitsu]

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.

[ryukoposting]

(and it supports Linux)

[doubletwoyou]

Theoretically..

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.

[ryukoposting]

Huh. I got it running on Ubuntu 24 a while back. Didn't know that was an accomplishment.

[eitally]

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.

[KaiserPro]

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)

[user_7832]

> 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.

[dbspin]

Sure. It's a very broad question but...

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.

[motoxpro]

100% agree. Photo is a much muuuch bigger market.

[Melatonic]

From what I remember colourists are not using Nuke (more compositing)

[dbspin]

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.

[mastermage]

Counterpoint most of the Movies budgets is usualy spent on the actors and on the filming. Not on the editing team. There is also copious amounts of money in photography Alot of advertising is still static images and print.

[atoav]

Yes, but if the budget of the whole thing is high(er) they don't tend to cheap out on details that could mske or break it.

Or phrased differently: If your shoot codts a million a day it doesn't matter if your camera costs 400 bucks a day or 40. In fact they may ask you whether you really wanna go with the 40-buck camera.

[mastermage]

> Yes, but if the budget of the whole thing is high(er) they don't tend to cheap out on details that could mske or break it.

The evidence does not point to this. There have been copious amounts of movies that hired the Rock and then made the worst CGI in the history of Cinema.

[hobofan]

> Meanwhile, $1M would be an insane budget for a photo shoot.

Photo shoots for automotive advertising regularly are around that pricepoint.

[d3vnull]

But there's a couple orders of magnitude more photo shoots than movies and since once you write software once, you can copy it for free, investing in creating photo editing software still makes sense.

[coldtea]

>The short of it is that there’s no money in photography, compared to videography.Movies routinely have 8 or 9 digit budgets, with teams of hundreds of people who have to collaborate to make footage coming from dozens of different cameras look seamless and consistent.

Movies are not where BlackMagic makes their money. It's from the millions and millions of small videographers, news teams, ad teams, and content creators.

Same for photos.

[dylan604]

> Anyone working in video has a solid understanding of the technical underpinnings of their craft.

Lol. That's the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I've been on so many sets where there was not a single person that knew how to read a waveform. After the Canon 5Dmkii came out where "the producer's nephew could shoot this for $500" became a thing, the skill set dropped dramatically. There are people that can frame a pretty picture while at the same time have zero understanding of what's happening between the lens and the sensor to the recording medium. When video cameras started shooting flat expecting the user to know what to do with that, it became a trend of sending the flat look out because people didn't know what to do with it. When DV cameras were shooting 24 but still recording to tape with pulldown applied so it still recorded to a 29.97 tape, people had no idea how to get rid of the interlacing properly and just edited 29.97 instead of the 24/23.976.

You are giving way too much credit to people in the industry. It would be nice if everyone on the production crew and in post knew everything they should to be competent, but there are many many people fakin' it 'til they make it.

[traceroute66]

> The short of it is that there’s no money in photography

Oh dear...

I'd better go tell all the gear manufacturers, especially the higher-end kit like PhaseOne cameras and the Profoto flashes. Guess I should also tell the pro departments of Canon and Nikon they no longer have a job either.

There's TONS of money washing around photography.

From the wedding and sports photographers, to the paparazzi to the household-name fashion / landscape /architectural photographers.

There's then all the semi-pros and the amateurs with deep pockets.

Most of them will spend more money on insurance ALONE than the $295 asking price of DaVinci Resolve - Photo.

Hell, most of them will already have an Adobe subscription that they won't be cancelling any time soon. :)

[Keyframe]

those big productions are production design and above the line heavy. Most people on shoots are paid well. However, if you look at the other side of the coin, hardware and software supporting the industry, it's actually "laughable". ARRI which is the biggest name in the game on shoots is ~$1b, RED was sold of for $85m, BMD could fetch as high as $3b, Autodesk's Media & Entertainment is <%5 of its revenue which would, if it were standalone, also bring it to around $1b valuation. Avid the same at ~$1.5, Grass Valley the same ~$1b-1.5, Sony's ET&S is hard to gauge since it includes everything, but an estimate is ~$1.5b, Maxon ~$1.5, all of Nikon $4b, Canon's camera division ~$15b...

and then you have Adobe which has ~%65 of its revenue coming from Creative segment ($14-15b over $23.77 for 2025), which would put it at ~$70b - $100b valuation if it were standalone (5x-7x revenue).

That's how big Adobe is compared to literally everything else. Its creative division is 3x-4x more than the entire industry combined.

You do have new contenders now with Epic (~$22b), Canva ($26b), Figma ($20b), but I'm not convinced.. in certain segments for sure, but still not confident based on stock performance or revenue.

[Forgeties79]

Adobe may be a big dog but it hasn’t insulated them from black magic eating more and more of their NLE market share with every passing year. BMD went from making a (niche for everyone else) Hollywood color tool to a full blown NLE with almost 20% of the market share in less than a decade. Not to mention a very respectable camera line.

I remember hearing the phrase “round tripping through resolve” for years as some sort of magical incantation only somebody in post production understood. Now resolve is fighting for Lightroom’s space within a full NLE. That’s something!

[Keyframe]

Yeah, BMD has a fighting chance. It's interesting how they got there (software-wise). They bought cutting-edge and expensive tools and kind of gave them away for free-ish. Hardware sales gave them a chest to do it with, and small market for those niche tools allowed them to buy it for peanuts. It's Autodesk's playbook on M&A but definitely different strategy in capturing the market.

Even Apple had a horse in the race with Color, but once Resolve became free or ridiculously cheap it was game over.. even for more advanced tools like Lustre (which merged into Flame), Film Light, Base Light, Scratch, etc. More than I can count which died even before that.

Turns out if you can afford to give your tool to wide audience with no budget, that's what they'll use (especially if it's any good) and will end up turning to you eventually for more professional setups once / if they get into pro waters.

[Forgeties79]

They’ve definitely played the long game well