About five or so years ago, I read an article about how adding video capabilities and using larger storage cards to DSLR cameras was becoming a real boon to amateur and small budget film makers.

In order to shoot anything approaching real on a DSLR you have to hang about $10k worth of shit off of it. This video was shot on a 5D (I was there) and it had five video-assist technicians keeping it happy.

You'll note that the lighting looks like shit and the frame is rather swimmy.

Five months later I did sound for this on a C300.

The C300 was created to capture the rental market of the gakked-out 5D. The support package for a C300 is much smaller than for a 5D but it still looks kinda swimmy and bullshit. It also costs $18k.

There's this persistent narrative that pikers can make movies with bullshit they buy off of eBay that will be clearly 100% as good as anything Cecil b. Demille ever did because obviously everyone in Hollywood does all this expensive shit because they're fucking idiots. So they go to film school, go $80k in debt, GoFundMe some $10k "passion piece" short film that no one will ever watch and then try to pay off their student loans by undercutting everyone else in the market while living off of checks from their grandparents until they fail out and go back to Cleveland.

The net effect has been suppressing wages and providing Netflix with an endless stream of forgettable content. It's gotten so bad that Amazon is now silently pruning all the bullshit college indies off of Amazon Prime because there's so much garbage nobody can find what they want anymore.