The 2025 NAB show has drawn to a close, which is more excuse than your narrator needs to indulge in some philosophy. Back on Saturday, we cautiously aired a speculation about a technological watershed which has seemed plausible for the past handful of years – and only seems more plausible now.

It’s natural enough for exhibitors at expositions like NAB to tell the passing public that every camera, lens, tripod, chunk of code or box of blinkenlights is somehow going to change the world (one year, the show’s slogan was “this changes everything”). And sure, in a field where creativity and technology are mutually supporting, it’s tempting to think that we can compensate for a lack of one with more of the other. Often, it’s true.

For decades, that’s been wonderful. Manufacturers have supported everyone’s creativity by offering us more and more performance. In an ideal world, this gets the technology out of the way of the technique, freeing people up from worrying about the failing daylight on the basis the camera can handle it. The technology has been getting out of the way of the technique.

It’s hard to deny that the  is still happening. Fujifilm’s positively Brobdingnagian hundred-megapixel GFX Eterna and Blackmagic’s competing Ursa Cine 17K are an evolution which seems natural to anyone who knows that the next stop after 35mm film is 65mm.

And in many ways that’s talismanic of the issue we’re talking about, because there isn’t a motion picture film format beyond 65mm. The only way to go has been up, for years, and now to go any further in the general direction of up has started to exceed the bounds of what conventional cinema knows what to do with.

A capability watershed – surpassed?

Recent developments in lighting have created a comparable situation. The last decade or so has seen several companies build enviable reputations from an arms race of LED power handling. That race ended for some people when the 1500-watt barrier of American wall sockets was broken. It ended for almost everyone else when manufacturers started shipping models beyond 3000 watts. Here, further growth is not so much unnecessary as genuinely impractical for anyone but Hollywood (though Hollywood does need an LED 18k and somebody therefopre needs to make one.)

But with both cameras and lights reaching a natural inflection point, was NAB 2025 the ends of invention? Are we done here, with gear?

A new philosophy of gear

Well, no. Companies will always need products to release, and the imperative to find interesting new things to sell should lend us some interesting new capabilities. That’s great, and as such, it seems likely that the course of progress might be charted less by numbers and more by ideas. The thing is, that is not necessarily a simple thing to do. Bigger numbers are (conceptually) easy. Original ideas are hard.

Scowling misanthropes such as your correspondent have been talking at film students about the importance of technique over technology ever since the invention of, well, film students. Low-budget indie filmmakers have always been best advised to solve their gear problems with creativity. Manufacturers, though, face the need to fill a release schedule without recourse to that once-reliable bigger-is-better approach to product design.

This probably implies a need to rework the approach to product development quite significantly. Pushing specifications higher takes work, certainly. Companies are keen to present an unruffled public face, so it is easy to overlook the blood that is sweated by engineering teams during the preparation for shows just like NAB. Still, to date, the goals have been clear. Now, after a decade of LED lighting doubling in power every year, things must inevitably  become less predictable.

As to what this means for people at the sharp end, let’s not forget that filmmaking is a combination of technology and technique. If we minimise the influence of one (technology), we maximise the influence of the other (technique). Given the sunlit uplands of technological excellence in which we currently operate, some might say there is a certain imperative on practitioners to become the creative equal of the technological bounty that they find laid before them.

If NAB 2025 had a theme, though, it’s much more to do with the manufacturers, and the question what next?