Merging Formats - How is the that done here?

I hope it shows at least all formats & price when people move pointer on thumnails.

My biggest income is from $5, 320x240 clips(more than 50%)... It's like I lost all the visiblity of my main products line from my custmers. Many of my clips were charted in lowest price ranking but not any more? I probably have many negative effects from this...

Showing only the highest price means showing only the worst price choice for your customers.

I agree. 80% of my sold shots have come from sizes smaller than HD. A customer might not know to click and see the other versions if they don't know they're there.

What I would suggest for Pond5 is to change the way products are handled in the database. Instead of having all formats be stand-alone products which are "associated", there is another approach.

Show a generic clip of the shot with no size or price information. This is the "product". Then the sizes are "attributes" of that product, not unique products themselves.

It's rather like selling a T-shirt that comes in small, medium and large. The sizes are not products, they are attributes of the same product. A good DBA will be able to engineer a scalable solution for this. This style of product architecture would be ideal for the auto-downsizing we've been discussing.

Dear time_lapse,

However, if you only sold HD clips, then 100% of your income could come from HD clips. This simple arithmetics can easily be manipulated.

At the end of the road, we want to sell at lower prices, to attract more customer. But we don't want people to say about us that our clips are cheap. Let's forget about the honor. Let's just sell 1 size at a lower price!? After all, each customer who buys a clip can resize his clips according to his actual need, just next to trimming and gamma modifications. This will resolve the big headache and overhead involved with resizing.

To make long story short, I suggest to leave things the way they are today, and to reduce the prices. Sorry for being a sociopath (Dictionary: individual with a personality disorder characterized by aggressive anti-social behavior and a lack of moral responsibility).

Hi Wide web!

It's not so much a matter of pricing, but rather that the customers are people too. Just like us, many don't want to or aren't able to do the conversions. Since they are paying (and I am getting paid) I'm ok with doing the work for them in return for higher sales.

Trust me, time_lapse, if a buyer can add sound to your clip, if they can trim the length, they can easily "save as" to another format. Same program does all the work. Every teenager can do that today. Changing the format is just another way to lower the price without losing face.

Here's a reply to my initial post from Jason:

"If you what to waste your time uploading three versions of the same clip go ahead and you don't need any bodies permission. But since P5 can convert an HD clip to what ever size or format a customer needs why do it.

A 10 sec clip can be anywhere's between 100-500Mbs and take up to 1 1/2 - 3 hours to upload or less depending on your uploading speed.."

As I read on I admit I am little confused. I am unable to find any automatic downsizing function (for the buyer) to NTSC or PAL or any other conversion. Since the search function is tabbed for HD, DV etc at the start of the search, I didn't do the curator request thing for merging all versions of my files. Either Jason is not correct, or I am missing something.

There is currently no automatic downsizing, and what P5 (I guess) are doing is just helping clients with clips that they can´t use, sending them a different encoding but most likely in the same format, as they can´t just "downscale" the sales price along with the clip. That would be against the set the price yourself policy. Most clients, otoh wouldn´t want to pay for a Big Mac (HD) and get a Cheeseburger (SD).

For merging your formats you should contact P5 directly to see if it´s possible. Has something to do with the file names if it can be done automatically.

What I would like to know is, if downconversion to SD will definitely come and if yes, if until this is technically established it could be offered by P5 as a service on demand. I am thinking of something like

-artists enable the downconversions they like in the edit page of each clip and set a price
-P5 state publicly on the clip page that downscaled versions can be provided
-the fist time a client requests it, P5 charge a little fee to the artist (that is fair I think as we could also upload the SD version ourselves. So they have money to employ some students doing the conversions :).
-then, this versions is stored on the server and the next time the split can be again 50/50.

Any opinions?

Cheers,
Stefan

Thanks for the clarification.

I think your idea, Stefan, would definitely be a money maker. I am a istockvideo contributor and the VAST majority of my income there comes from down conversions to web formats. I's day 3/4s. There is a large market for this and Pond5 is not tapping it. To restate, I don't see any advantage to merging formats, if the majority of buyers are seaching for HD, DV or PAL in specific.

Dale, if the vast majority of your clips sold at istock are web formats why not just upload multimedia here?

Sounds like a good idea. Just looking into it...