New Auto pricing now active???

So now when entering data there is a block for 4K and HD pricing. Still can't set prices individually. Even worst is in auto price downsized the HD price is 50% of the 4K price now.

Why can't we just simply set our own prices for both 4K and HD. Allow Artists to set 4K and HD prices in templates and batch tag.

P5 continues to market and advertise that this is the only Agency that lets Artists set their own prices. How about letting us set our own prices please.

So now that the price is 50% does that affect all the pending files? Does it affect approved files? How much fixing do we need to do to get where WE want the prices to be. A little heads-up warning and then when we have over a hundred pending files we can make them right instead of having to figure out how to repair them.

So is this the new standard fixed price model? Going from 75% to 50% just causes more frustration at a different level ;)

I am so frustrated with Pond5 I don't know where to start. The one thing we have been begging and pleading with them to do for ages was not done in their update. To make it worse, Jonathan and others have been promising us that they were working on the fix. Really! This is what you give us as the fix??? We still cannot set our own pricing for downsized files in the templates. Why? What am I missing? There is only two possibilities at this point. Pond5 is to stupid to figure it out and the company is going to be out of business before to long, or they lie through there teeth to appease the contributors while they purposefully force their horrible ideas on us for who knows why (price fixing is the only thing I can figure).

We were told by Jonathan they were going to start running things by contributors. How many of you out there were asked to take a look at this before its release? My guess is zero. It took me all of 2 seconds to realize what a useless update this was. Enough with my rant. Pond5 only makes me more and more frustrated the longer I am here. Time to go film myself pulling my hair out so I can at least get something from my frustrations.

Why are you so upset? Do you know that you can set the HD price via the Actions "set downcoverted price (Video)"? For me it works well. You can show only the 4k files via Type "Native 4k+" set the price for 4k and afterwards use the action to set the HD price.

I know that it can be set in the actions menu. Although it has to be done several times because when the clips are accepted it resets all their prices. The thing that is upsetting is that they are creating new pages and features but still not implementing the thing people have been asking for. They created a new 4k template (which is a great idea and kudos to them for taking the initiative) but they didn't make it possible to set your own price within the new template. Why on earth would you not include that feature? There are pages and pages of posts over the last half a year asking for that feature. Without it, nothing has changed. They spent time and energy creating a new page that doesn't do anything different than the previous page accept that they changed the automatic pricing to 50%

Its not the update itself that is frustrating. It is Pond5's inability to listen to their contributors. As Don has mentioned many times. Every time they release an update is is one step forward and two steps backward. They say they are going to run their ideas by some of the contributors before releasing them but as far as I know they never have. I have now spoken with SS (they contacted me) 4 times in the past 5 months about different updates they are looking at doing and wanting my opinion as to what I think would make it better (and I know they are getting in touch with many other contributors). Several of the other sites have also called me in the past 3 months. It appears that most sites are trying really hard to work with the contributors to make things better. Everywhere except Pond5.

Anyway, I'm over it now. I've just reset all my expectations of Pond5 to the bare minimum. As least this update didn't significantly hurt my workflow because as you said, you can at least set the prices in the actions menu. We only had to wait 3 or 4 months for that feature to be implemented.

Ok, guys and gals.

With no notice to help calm our nerves I have found that in the "preference" you can now set what percentage from 4K to HD you want. I have not tested it yet to see if the prices sticks or not.

So it really would have been nice to start a thread and describe the great changes instead of just making changes with no idea how and why. It looks like they did the right thing ... just lacked communication.

Thats good to hear. I hope in the future they will allow us to type in an exact number as an option rather than trying to figure out exact percentages. Pond5 could avoid so many problems if they ever thought to communicate with their contributors.

so is there no way to make my HD clip not 50%? or is there a setting I can change to make it what I want?

Right now I'm doing 4k at 149, and hd at 69. so I guess 74.5 is fine too... but I still want control over it.

Dapoopta,

You can change the percentage in the preferences section. They have created a new thing at the bottom where you can enter in the desired percentage. I am interested to see if everything still resets after being accepted or if it will hold that percentage.

@jakerbreaker - It shouldn't reset, no. But if it does, then of course contact us and let us know.

I'm glad you're all helping each other figure the new system out. I'm sorry I haven't had much information to share about these updates and upgrades. I'm only authorized to share particular things at particular times, and often I don't find out about this stuff until the same day you guys do, so please don't take my silence as a sign that I don't care about you. I totally do. :)

Yes, the preferences option is how you can control the pricing. And it should apply to all downconverted items, pending and otherwise. Though it is true that there's no way to manually set the prices for each downconverted item, you can uniformly base their prices on their 4K counterparts with this setting. I'm afraid I don't really know why we went this route, but if I'm able to share anything about the whys, I'll be sure to. I highly suspect it's actually a technical limitation, having to do with how our system handles the downconverted items, but that's just my intuition.

There are still lots of things that need attention at Pond5, so while we're going to keep an eye on how this new system works out for you all, I wouldn't expect any major changes to it anytime soon. We of course still want your feedback, especially actionable feedback, and we definitely want to know about any problems, obstacles, or bugs you encounter.

If you're not sure what actionable feedback is, just remember the I Statement Template: "I ... because ..."

So, I'd wager that for a lot of you, your first actionable feedback would sound like this: "I don't like the new downconversion pricing system because it still won't let me manually set exact and unique prices for those items."

Rest assured, that one has already been communicated to the team. But if you have more, please keep it coming. Thank you gentlemen!