When anyone can make it look good

A wedding videographer in Dubai spent years learning to do what most people could not. Steady shots, clean sound, a colour grade that made a hotel ballroom look like a film set, an edit that brought a room to tears in four minutes.

Each year, the gap narrows. Phones film better than his first camera. Editing software that used to need training now suggests the cuts. Presets give anyone a look that took him a decade to find. And every few months something new appears that does in an afternoon what used to take him a week.

None of this was announced in advance. It never is. Each leap arrives faster than anyone in the trade is ready for, and the people it affects find out from their clients.

Here is the uncomfortable sorting it does. Some of the videographers in the city are very competent and have no particular way of seeing. Their work is good and could have been made by any of them. For those, the new tools are a direct threat, because competence is exactly what is becoming cheap. They are on their way to being interchangeable, hired by the hour and compared on price.

Others have a style. You can recognise their films with the sound off. That is worth far more, and it is also exposed in a new way. Once a look can be described, it can be imitated, and soon it can be imitated and extended by someone who never met them.

For a few, this will be the best thing that ever happened to their work: faster, cheaper, more possible than before. For many, it will feel like the floor moving.

Nobody gets to choose whether the change comes. Only which side of it their work is standing on.