Everyone wants to get it done simply and by the way, entertaining, beautiful, original, unique, informative, worthy of the viewers time, respectful of the talent, at a cost effective price.
Nothing new about that.
I don't think you have an equipment decision, sound camera, lights. There are plenty of resources, equipment and workflows.
Respectfully, I think firstly you have a business model decision.
IMO
BC
My business model is not free, but so cheap you don't want to know.
There is a new trend here in Paris which is "we don't buy, we don't hire".
The sound guy on the music video explained to me that he usually gets up early and answers a web advert at 7 in the morning, a bit like construction crew used to do, then he's supposed to turn up with his equipment, and he is asked to work for free, but the "client" will pay an equipment-use fee for all his junk -lavs, wireless mikes, instrument mikes, multichannel recorder etc- of around $120 or so for all of it. I think they will also provide catering. For the customer, this is cheaper than rental, and the equipment walks in on its own legs, and packs itself up and goes home in the evening. Also explains why everyone is happy the rental fees are high.
Friend of mine owns a production company, which has several of its own RED cameras; from my discussions with him it seems on a lot of his projects mostly everybody gets to work for free. Of course he already owns all the equipment
According to my friend, the idea is that once people get well paid jobs they will hire their friends for real money, but my feeling is that thanks to this race to the bottom all the survival-rate mouth-to-hand projects have turned into free projects.
Basically, unless you have a strong established brand, over here you're now competing with free. Maybe in the US it's different.
In web journalism, it is now roughly the same situation, as you probably know. Content is often supposed to arrive for free eg. Huffington Post. I used to be quite well paid as a web journalist -alas no more. Really, in my younger days people didn't expect to write for free.
Edmund