Rise Of The Consumer-Producer
Posted: June 1st, 2009 | Author: bgib | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: consumer-producer, Final Cut Pro, Halo 8, iphone, next generation content producers, reality staff, television editors |If you are a professional video producer/editor, there’s an 800lb. gorilla outside your door, and his name is “consumer-producer.” The launch of Apple’s Iphone 3 is just days away, and one rumor that has been more or less confirmed is the addition of video recording and editing. The editing app is rumored to be a stripped down version of IMovie. Just 10 years ago, video editing was the hallowed ground of TV professionals, filmmakers, universities, and the over zealous amateur. If you needed access to video equipment, you begged for a session in an edit bay and you groveled to the editors to run the equipment for you. Those days are gone. The hallowed ground of the edit bay was desecrated long ago by affordable desktop editing, and whatever is left is about to be buried like a land fill by the proliferation of free editing applications.
Here’s what this means: In the near future, video editing will be common knowledge. Within a couple of years, every cell phone will have basic video recording and editing capabilities. There will also be a proliferation of web based editing apps. Youtube and the like already have basic editing interfaces. Rest assured that those will improve to rival the basic functionality of Final Cut Pro, Vegas Video, and the rest. This will create a future generation of media savvy consumer/producers who know how to shoot and edit as well as they know how to Skype and Tweet. When editing video is no longer a specialty skill derived through formal training, the value of editors and their support staff will plummet and the fiscal dynamics of post-production will flip like a melting iceberg. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the photography industry. It is virtually impossible to start a career as a photographer today because affordable technology and the wide spread dissemination of photography skills have turned the production of commercial quality photographs into common knowledge. Are any of these new photographers Annie Leibovitz? No, not so much. But they’re close enough to drop the bottom out of photography budgets and severely reduce the perceived value of a good photograph. A substantial amount of the photographs we see in print and on the web were taken for free by young photographers who just wanted the credit. Now shooting for credits has become the default currency in that industry.
What does this mean for career producer/editors? It means there will be no more middle class in the employment ranks, and the real money in post-production will be made by exploiting the growing underclass of consumer-producers and their willingness to produce video content for a fraction of the current market value. All of this isn’t going to happen overnight, but I think you’ve got less than 10 years to reshape your post-production career into something sustainable.
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[...] professionals to bolster the Mac market share. I’ve been squawking for weeks about the imminent rise of the “Consumer-Producer” and the dissemination of professional video production into common knowledge. Apple will use this [...]
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[...] In a previous post, I described how the proliferation of free video editing technology might create a new generation of Consumer-Producers willing and able to produce reasonable quality content at a fraction of today’s market rates. Who are these Consumer-Producers? They are the generation of kids raised on social media in an era where shooting HD video and publishing the edits to YouTube is common place. The widespread use of no cost editing software and affordable HD cameras by these Consumer-Producers will bottom out the market for low budget TV and web video production and the professionals that remain will work for little or no money per job. After I wrote the original post, a few people asked me what I thought would become of the current middle class of working video editors – the professionals who cut reality TV, magazine shows, news packages, how-to shows, etc. Will there still be a need for that content? Absolutely. In fact there will be massively more need for content as the delivery mechanism shifts away from networks and cable TV and onto the web. Web video on the TV is already a viable platform, and there will likely be a point in the near future where the viewer doesn’t distinguish cable TV content from Web delivered content. It will all be on-demand, and piped to your 50″ TV in High Definition. Sadly for the producer/editors working on that kind of TV content, the massive increase in production is going to result in lower production standards, reducing the skill level necessary to work in TV. The requisite skill level will fall until it meets the rising skill level of the Consumer-Producers, and we’ll have a new crop of pseudo professionals who won’t know that the previous generation of TV Producers and Editors were drastically over paid. [...]