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.

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Forgeties79 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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!

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Keyframe 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They’ve definitely played the long game well