I am just home from NAB 2025, where the most common question was: “How do you feel about the state of our industry?”
Here is my takeaway:
Looking at NAB statistics, official attendance was down from 65,000 in 2024 to 55,000 in 2025. That’s about half the visitors I remember in the past and approaching the number of attendees at IBC. The number of exhibitors was also down (1,100 this year, from 1,300 last year), and the number of foreign visitors was slightly down from last year. On the floor, the traffic did seem to match the official statistics, but the number of non-Americans seemed a lot lower than the numbers suggest. It’s also worth noting that there seemed to be fewer hotel suite presentations this year and more vendors walking the floor to meet customers.
There are several likely reasons for these changes. Many people have become comfortable with remote meetings and internet access to vendors during COVID, and that has affected all trade shows (although attendance at IBC and BIRTV are steadily growing, not declining). It’s worth pointing out that most NAB attendees that I met were more interested in face-to-face meetings than product demonstrations.
The second factor is the economy. Our industry has had some lean times following the pressures of COVID, the strikes, closure of companies - big and small - and, for Hollywood, the recent fires. It is unclear if tariffs and political factors had an adverse effect, but it seems likely. Many vendors were unable to quote for US delivery because of the uncertainty of import duties. Finally, there are always those that are active on jobs with deadlines who simply don’t have time to travel. Absence because of work has always been a factor, but, if anything, should have been a lesser concern this year, since so many people are complaining of less work.
And that is the hard truth. Many of the product companies I met with have successfully migrated from relying on the professional market to generating a healthy income from prosumers. They consider the possibilities of three groups of users: DIY consumers, prosumers and professionals. These classifications have not changed ever since I can remember, but the dynamic between them has.
Product sales
A good example of how a product range targets these three groups is DaVinci Resolve. There is a free version for the DIY and student communities, a cheap studio version for everyone else, and plenty of specialist hardware to boost the productivity and performance required by post production facilities. Traditionally, the number of licenses versus revenue might look like this:
However, this expectation is no longer the case. The professional market faces tougher budgets, fewer projects and high competition. The consumer and prosumer markets have always had tight budgets, but the number of projects continues to grow exponentially, and these groups are self-managed, so competition is almost insignificant. I don’t have actual numbers to support this assumption, but the Users vs Revenue graph is likely to look more like this:
That spike for prosumers is not because they are spending more money individually, but because the size of the group is now so huge that smaller profits on a much higher volume of sales makes economic sense. As a colorist, I am aware that most niche specialty color grading systems measure their professional user base in hundreds. Whereas Blackmagic Design measure their DaVinci Resolve consumer and prosumer customers in millions. Some of those customers are using free licenses, but I suspect that at least half have bought related Blackmagic hardware to complement their copy of Resolve. Multiply that by millions of customers and the income is considerable. I believe that there are two main reasons for this sales strategy.
Firstly, having a lot of consumers familiar with a product, creates a large potential pool of knowledgeable users for the pro market. Second, free or cheap licenses allow schools and universities to include some training and familiarity with workflows using those products. So much so that the social media and internet markets are now big enough to provide significant revenue to prosumers. In fact, I would speculate that there are many prosumers who have no ambition to work in high-end television or features, because their internet and social media content is so lucrative.
The good news is that many vendors that have adjusted their price models to accommodate this shift are doing very well. Vendors that have niche professional-only product lines are finding it tougher and they are of course much more affected by industry growth (or decline) in general.
What about the talent?
But I and my fellow Colorist Society members are not manufacturers or facilities. We are artists. We are, of course, broadly aligned with the vendor categories, but when it comes to people, I like to think of those groups as hobbyist, generalist and specialist. What brings us together is our passion for the craft, but we are very different.
The hobbyist earns a living in other ways, does not expect any income from color grading, and consequently prefers free or cheap equipment. But do not equate cheap with low-quality. Cheap includes much of the same equipment used by professionals, but with minor restrictions, and sometimes second-hand kit that was once high-end. This group includes makers of social-media content, family or hobby-related records, students and individuals with an interest in motion pictures. A typical setup might include a DaVinci Resolve free license, a phone or SLR camera, a high-end television (LG OLED) and, in some cases, Calman Home for calibration.
The generalist does make content for money but is responsible for more than just color grading. Generalists could be influencers, individuals offering a turnkey service or employed by companies to make in-house media. One person may be shooting, editing and producing VFX, titles and delivery masters. This group spends more money than hobbyists but needs all-purpose value for money. Generalists are interested in AI tools and easy-to-operate solutions. They are hungry for knowledge, templates and products from the professional community so that they can copy popular and iconic looks without the costs, skills or time spent by the high-end specialists. The generalists setup could include a DaVinci Resolve studio license with a micro panel and a BMD Ultrastudio video card connected to a prosumer display (ASUS PA32UCDM QD OLED), Canon or Sony cameras, some plug-ins and perhaps Calman Studio for calibration. This group invests in equipment that works on all their productions, spreading the cost.
Specialists focus on providing one category of service, such as color grading or cinematography or editing, and expect to make a good living from it. They might own a boutique facility and employ staff, they could be employed by a facility, or they could be a freelance operation. The specialist sector is the most demanding and spends accordingly. On occasion a specialist will rent or purchase specialist equipment for a project, and usually researches and buys top-of-the-range products. A specialist grading suite might include a DaVinci Resolve studio license with mini or advanced panels and a high-end BMD Ultrastudio or DeckLink video card connected to a best reference display (FSI XMP310 QD OLED), external scopes, and Calman Ultimate for calibration. Specialist setups could also include plug-ins that are paid for per project instead of per year.
Why categorize the talent this way?
To summarize, successful products now find consumer and prosumer markets more profitable than professional sales because they are high-volume. However, whilst the products are democratized, the inspiration, feedback and testing of those products relies heavily on specialist talent.
Specialist talent is now very polarized. Many industry leaders are still in high demand and very busy. A much bigger number of artists have worked very little in the last two years and experienced lean times three years before that. Passion is what has kept us in the industry throughout those hard times, but now there are many who simply cannot survive doing what they love and have had to retrain or retire from the industry. That is hard for them, but harder for the industry. Of those that choose to remain, many have been forced to take on generalist work at generalist wages. Much generalist talent has been squeezed into jobs that would have been done by hobbyists.
So, as software and hardware products become cheaper and better productions are leveraging high unemployment to reduce rates. There is an assumption that as product prices fall, the artists that use those products should also be paid less, which leads to an increase in the generalist community, but a decline in the specialist population that makes the generalists successful in the first place.
Interestingly, I came across several products and services that seemed aimed at generalists from generalists. Products that offered a different way, but not necessarily a better way. NAB 2025 was unsurprisingly full of AI tools introducing faster and better features. Yet they are still just tools, still requiring the vision and skills of an artist to take the best advantage of them.
In a more positive mood, it was encouraging to see how our proven talent and the industry could be redeemed. Studios and producers often require full-service facilities as insurance against unforeseen circumstances. That makes it hard for artists - made redundant through company closures or downsizing - to continue servicing their clients. But a new trend toward remote grading supported by independent facilities is changing that. And whilst the MovieLabs Vision 2030 goal of moving media and processing to the cloud still seems unaffordable and unpredictable, new software solutions (Strada, Amove, etc.) facilitate sharing of local storage as if it were a cloud service. Other new services catalog and manage multiple cloud buckets alongside the shared local storage. I think of these as storage management systems (SMS) and they are a way to benefit from cloud storage without the fear of uncontrollable costs or lack of an exit strategy.
If we do not support and reward high-end talent, specialist skills will be lost, innovation will choke and standards will fall. Nobody wants that. Passion has kept us going through changes and challenges, but talent and experience thrive through events (such as our Colorist Mixers), recognition and opportunity. Let’s get better at supporting the artists and technicians that make these products shine.
Kevin Shaw is the president of Colorist Society (www.coloristsociety.com), an professional society that strives to advance the craft, education, and awareness of the art and science of color grading and color correction.