Pro camera forum

[Simon Wyndham]

Chris, a while back I remember reading that the idea of a professional camera forum (ie REAL professional cameras such as the DSR570 all the way up to Cinealta's) had been discussed.

Has anything come about or has the idea been dropped? Personally I think it would be cool to have a place where these cameras could be discussed, and setups exchanged etc.

[Chris Hurd]

Hasn't been dropped, Simon, in fact I have the domain name(s) registered (can't give away what they are just yet). The only thing is, I guess I'm not all that confident about the amount of traffic we can draw. I'd like to see a good large group of folks who would say they'd make it their home. For the pro shooters, it seems like they tend not to hang out online as much, perhaps because they're too busy shooting! But I would definitely like to do it, if they could help create content, drive traffic and keep the buzz going.

[Jesse Bekas]

Why not just add a "Pro" forum to the current board at first? There seems to be a decent mix of professionals and prosumers/consumers here already. If it gets enough traffic after a certain amount of time, then decide if it warrants it's own separate website.

BTW - Not to sound lame, but it isn't the idea of a site like this to kind of bring together both the experienced and inexperienced DV fanatics to share info. I know, I've learned a lot from just reading threads here, even if I don't actively participate in them. With a separate section for the big boys, there'd be a lot of info for users like me to glean off of.

[Ken Tanaka]

To elaborate a bit further on Chris' remarks...

This is something that we've discussed among the moderators for nearly two years. At surface value the viability and desirability seemed self-evident.

Further investigation and discussions, however, suggested otherwise. As Chris noted, there's little evidence that professional camera operators are inclined to come home, pop a can of beer and spend an hour or two typing about their cameras. If anything, the evidence strongly suggests quite the opposite.

But setting that aside for a moment, establishing an online environment inviting to "pro's" en-masse would, at a minimum, require creating a peer-to-peer environment. Few of these folks will be very interested in fielding students' / amateurs' questions about prosumer cameras or about how to get a job swinging big cameras. The true possibilities of interchange between amateurs and pro's would be very limited.

So that's basically where it's at. But we do, in fact, already have a number of very experienced professionals that frequent the boards here daily. So in that regard we already have a pretty good pro/amateur interchange on the existing boards.

[Jesse Bekas]

Well, why not experiment, and put up such a "pro" forum here for a little bit and see what happens?

When I mentioned gleening info off of higher end pros, I meant, personally at least, by lurking in their forum and just reading through threads. I don't think they'd get inundated with too many noob style questions. Most of the ammy's wouldn't even know what to ask. The ones that would would probably belong there.

Although, arguing against my own point, I have seen the kind of fan club that tends to follow Charley P. around from time to time (deservedly so, but still...)

To reiterate it seems like nobody would know for sure without an experiemental pro forum, which could possibly lead to a separate board depedning on the behavior of the "pros" and ammy's alike.

[Ken Tanaka]

Suggestion noted, Jesse.

[Simon Wyndham]

Yes. I was thinking along the lines of the forum being here on dvinfo. I don't think it would be worth shelling out the money for separate space.

TV cameramen may not always want to go to forums, but there seem to be plenty of people who do corporate work etc that also use the big cameras.

[Michael Struthers]

The cinematography forum has lots of interest, some of these people are very busy professionals, but when you have down time in the industry, it could be for a month or so...

I think there would be no problem with posting traffic. Some of us like the idea of those 10k ikegami cams anyway... ;-)

[Charles Papert]

Well, there are those working folk in other forums (such as cinematography.com) who seem to post more than even I do here. The only thing I wonder is if there aren't already enough places for them at current. But I think it would be an interesting experiment.