So far I only know one of my photographer friend that didn't use flash for AD shoot. And he is shooting with mainly prime in high ISO.
For me after used & own several light modifiers (LS, WT, OmniBounce, etc) in AD, for me the best is still a cheap jumbo bounce card (cheap, good & portable). :thumbsup:
Shooting an AD without flash is possible if you know what you're doing. But for many cases we need to use flash to assure a large depth-of-field for groupshots etc.
Making sure your light is well spread out is very important as well. As bro hanqiang has spoke about ceiling bounce, i will add on that ceiling bounce can also be combined with a decent catch-light/bounce card especially for groupshots. Good example of a diffuser that does such would be the press-lite vertex and the demb flip-it.
As clients are mostly not tech-savvy, they expect the scene to look similar between real-life and photos; Ceiling bounce recreates this effect by simulating ceiling light, and a bounce card can help to add fill and flavour.
Other situations such as tea ceremony will require a mainly ceiling bounce light to prevent the closer subject from being over-exposed. Lightsphere/whail-tail would be the worse choice for scenes with uneven lines of subjects.
I'm someone who favors flashless photography even at dinners because these reasons;
1. White-balance trauma even when using gels in varying hotel lighting.
2. Danger of flash refreshing too slowly especially for march-ins.
3. Un-natural front-lit look when using flash as the primary light.
A good example of me shooting with my 85 f1.2 wide-open with AI servo for a march-in;
If the videographer using an video light? I still remember there was once that the video light was so strong that it blown my exposure. Which make me have to correct most of the evening AD shots in PP.
Hence I would think communicate with the VG first would be a better than not using flash at all, if the VG is experience enough I am sure he/she would understand it. Ultimately the VG & PG have their job to do, if you don't use flash and need alot more time to PP your shots I doubt the VG would compensate you back your extra effort.
Recently, I and a friend had to shoot a wedding dinner together and was extremely irritated by a videographer and his video-light (I'm a regular wedding videographer and generally see no reason to use video-light in most situations, i'm sure some vgs out there will disagree with me).
He used a white LED light in a tungsten dinner environment and caused our white balance to be heavily thrown off...
I'm also surprised by why the videographer is disturbed by flash from the photographer.