Pro res or photo jpeg

I have been uploading apple pro res is photo jpeg a better option any help would be great thanks

Photo jpg is not a better option.
Prores is at the very least much less compressed.
Plus 4.2.2 10 bit if that’s what your camera shoots.
Photo jpg is 8bit . So depends on what you want to upload.
Some say buyers don’t care and that may be right.
But personally I care.

Go ProRes or go home.

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Do you acquire files in ProRes? In other words, does your camera record files in ProRes? (I think some of the Blackmagic Design cameras have that option.)

I would upload in whatever the camera's native format is. Set the camera to the highest possible quality setting (up to ProRes or something similar) and upload that. If it's 150 Mbps MPEG4, then upload in that format. Don't convert it to something else and upload that.

There are other options as well, such as recording on an outboard recorder. That might have ProRes or some lightly compressed format.

Hi thanks for the answers i shoot in avchd from a panasonic 920 and convert to pro res so i will stick with the same thanks again

I think there is no benefit for converting your avchd to prores, which is have way more compressed format than prores.
Will be better if you just upload it with your native format. You can save your time.

This is my thought about uploading the native format of your camera.

If your camera shoots mp4 at a compressed bitrate, that's the best your footage will ever look.

Then you color grade it and render it back to the same compressed bitrate now you have a second generation of compression. Maybe not a lot but no denying its there. Then the customer buys your footage and puts it in his production and renders for a third generation of compression.
So I render prores, which takes out at least one of those generations (or more if I'm shooting RAW).

By the way, I record RAW with my C200 or on other cameras using an external recorder in ProRes. But even if I'm using the internal codec of my a7sII I'll render Prores for the above thoughts.

If there were another codec that (ALL) stock sites accepted that was just as uncompressed as ProRes I'd move to that.

Thanks for the great answers

Actually, a reason to convert AVCHD files to ProRes is to make potential buyers think that the quality is better than it actually is. I'm sure more than one person plays that game... I wonder how it translates into sales?

If you color correct your footage, and you are starting in AVCHD, then you would be foolish to render back to AVCHD for export to stock sites. Has nothing to do with what your camera records, but rather the integrity of the finished product, and its resilience to further processing. If you are doing no color correction, even then you should not encode to the limitations set by your camera, as the codec you furnish should be robust enough so that the client does not have to endure hapless attempts at homebrew compression.

And remember that bit rate by itself does not determine quality. The efficiency of the codec also plays a big part. Different codecs perform significantly differently, with widely varying bit rates. Sometimes it even depends on your subject matter and level of detail/colors.

As for sales, all I seem to sell of late is older mostly PJPEG work, $199/HD. The newer stuff is uploaded as a mix of ProResHQ (which is lots better than the vanilla ProRes, but bigger filesize due to less compression) as well as h.264, which is only up for reasons related to my internet suckage. It does not seem to matter what the source is, what it was encoded to, or any of that wonderful fun technical stuff. What matters is the content. All that matters is the content.

And yes, I do care about my work, and maintain high quality (at least PRHQ) "masters" if not also the original (shooting in RAW adds up, so sometimes I don't). It's just that a lot of my good sellers were shot in HDV, encoded to PJPEG, and that's that.