Thursday, January 3, 2013

Some tips on footage distribution




Sending  footage to stock agencies can be a daunting task. Beside the amount of data to transfer, filling out file description on each website is  time consuming.
 
Even with a high speed internet,  uploading one movie  to several agencies can take few hours. If you have a slow  connection then it can  became very challenging. One way to get around that is to use PicWorkFlow, a web distribution platform. I also use stocksubmitter, a stand alone application to speed up the uploading process.

Files preparation

Open Stocksubmitter to browse your video  folder and  it will generate automatically  for each movie a 1920*1080 or 1280*720 image (with the corresponding file name). You can then enter manually  title, description and keywords.

Distribution

Use your favorite ftp software to upload  movies and  their corresponding images to PicworkFlow. Once the transfer is over, log into  Picworflow platform to import your movies (it take only  few seconds) and distribute them in  few clicks to your agencies.


Finalizing uploads


For Shutterstock, Pond5 and ClipCanvas, Picworflow developed a firefox plugin  with which you can fill out the movie informations in  one click.
If the plugin is not available for your agency, you will have to use the copy/paste protocol from stocksubmitter  and submit your footage.


In addition to save time, this workflow will allow you to have a good record of your footage on your computer as corresponding  images have title, description and keywords embedded on them.



PicWorkflow (referral link included) service is not free but very affordable: it costs  1 US cent to upload 22MB of data hence for a clip of 200MB  it will cost you around 10c. Taking into account the time you save and the selling price of a clip it is worth it. 100c are giving away  every month allowing you to upload 2 clips to 5 channels for free so you can test the platform.


My best  stock agencies in 2013 were Pond5 and  Shutterstock. I put my referral links below if you want to sign up with them. Cheers!

 Submit Footage Clips to Shutterstock and make $$$!


Royalty-Free Stock Video at Pond5