Time-lapses POV

Every now and then I snap with my tablet or cell phone few pictures of my time lapse setup. In this post I selected several shots taken on  location. If you click on the picture the corresponding clip will open in a new window. As you can see it often looks quite different than expected especially after the video is edited.

For these time-lapses, in used  my old and defunct  Canon HF200, a Canon 5DMKII and a GoPro3 black edition mounted on tripod, gorillapod or a suction mount depending on the situation.

I will update this post with new shots when available. Enjoy:

You can see more of my footages on my Shutterstock   or  Pond5  portfolios.
 

Angkor Wat Cambodia, 2012

Angkor Thom, Cambodia 2012

Tonle Sap lake Cambodia 2013

Kawa Putih lake, West Java Indonesia 2012

Kuala Lumpur traffic, Petronas towers 2013

Petronas towers Kuala Lumpur at night 2012

Some tips on footage distribution

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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 $$$!

Clipcanvas HD footage marketplace review

In this article I review Clipcanvas, a HD footage marketplace I joined two months ago to distribute my clips. Also in this post, an interview with Cato Salter, CEO of Clipcanvas who was kind enough to answer some of my questions about his company.

Presentation

Clipcanvas is a HD footage and animation marketplace based in Norway founded in 2007. The website site with a black and gold design is fairly quick to load. A large window , on the right hand side of the screen displays continously three different footage every week. Video clips previews use the flash based Flowplayer technology with success: preview window is large (420 by 238 pixels) and the image is crisp and clear making it the best previews I have seen so far on any footage agencies.


How to submit?


You can either run the Clipcanvas uploader application from your desktop or normal ftp software like Filezilla.
The Clipcanvas uploader is pretty straightforward to use: Once logged with your credentials, you just have drag and drop your clips onto a window and click the upload button.
Once submitted, your clip will be placed in the ''tag your clips'' section of the site.The last step is to enter keywords (separated by commas) and minimal informations about the clip such as category,dynamic,handling,camera framing.
Based on my experience, once you have your keywords ready, the final submission does not take more than 30 seconds and if you have a group of similar clips, less than 10 seconds using the available fast tagging. Clipcanvas is by far the easiest and fastest site for your final submission. In addition, clip reviews are very fast, mostly done under 24 hours. I found out that if the Clipcanvas uploader was very slow, uploading using ftp was considerably faster so I will recommend the latter.


Video clips requirements


Clipcanvas accepts clips with a minimum duration of 2 seconds and a maximum size of 750MB in the following formats:DV,DVcam,DVCpro 25/50/100,HDV1,HDV2,Xdcam,Xdcam HD,ProResHQ 10bit,ProRes 8bit, AVC intra (must be delivered in ProResHQ),Cineform, 12bit (must be delivered in ProResHQ),Dnx, DnxHD,Photo.jpg/.mjp 75/100%, Digibeta (export to ProRes or photo.jpg before upload).
I did not have so far any rejections by uploading quicktime movies (motionjpeg 95%) rendering from avchd files.


Interview with Cato Cater, CEO of Clipcanvas

Q: Can you present briefly the business in which Clipcanvas operates?

A: ''We are in a competitive industry comprised of so many professionals with high standards, and it is important to us to do our best to meet the requirements and demands that this implies. This goes for our submitters as well as for our buyers. We deliver video footage to our customers in more than 7 different professional codecs and a total of 20 variations thereof, bringing flexibility to our buyers´ digital workflows. Our primary focus is HD. The main bulk of our customers are working in production and post-production houses, and this list is growing by the day, representing companies and buyers from all over the world''.


Q: What can you tell us about your upcoming developments at Clipcanvas?


A: ''With regards to developments in the future, I would like to say we continuously work on making improvements:
- the referral program is in place and will be available from early January - referrers will earn a flat 10% of sales generated by these referrals for a set period of time for each buying user referred
- we will also offer more advanced affiliate solutions for those that want to integrate more closely with Clipcanvas through an API (will also be available in January). For example, the API would make it possible for any of our submitters to display and offer their own clips for sale through their own webpages (if they have one), but it would require some programming skills (with which we might even help out with in certain cases).
- also we are continuously working to improve the service we offer, based on input from all our users, and some of these improvements take more time while others take less, some you notice and some you don´t. We still have a lot of work to do, we are working hard, and I hope our users appreciate this even if some developments take longer time for us to implement than we would wish for''.
''We market our service and the video content offered through Clipcanvas in many different ways, both online and in more traditional media and communication channels. This is something we will intensify in the upcoming year, as we are now at the point where we pack some punch in the market''.


Conclusion


In summary:

Plus for contributors: Euros zone, video previews, referral program (to start in January 2010), ftp, quick final submission, quick reviews, high commission rate (60%), option to set your own prices (from 50 to 500 euros).
Plus for buyers: billing accounts, live support,free H.264 watermarked previews for testing.
Minuses for contributors: did not find any... but feel free to leave a comment if you find some!

Overall, I found Clipcanvas to be a great marketplace to join and I am looking forward to their new developments in 2010. The number of clips doubled in the last 6 months and Clipcanvas has now a library of just over 50,000 clips. For future reference, Clipcanvas is ranked 157,235 in Alexa.com and below is a 6 months trailing of Clipcanvas traffic compare to some of its competitors.











With a bit more than 100 clips on line I already had my first sale and looking forward to have more. Clipcanvas referral program is not ready yet but feel free to join by clicking the banner below. You can also follow Clipcanvas on twitter or join their fan page on facebook.


Browse my HD clips at Clipcanvas !