Multimedia question

Playing around a bit with the salegt:0 search, I have figured out that until today we have 773 clips sold in NTSC-DV, 668 in HD, 161 in PAL-DV and 23 in Multimedia. Some of them did of course sell more than once.

To be able to estimate these figures, we would need to know how many of these 4 formats are in the P5-Database. However, what seems to be clear is that Multimedia in its current form is not a real seller, probably due to the fact that it is somewhere in the middle of nowwhere:
-not good enough for being broadcasted, at least not over the whole screen
-too big for web use in the case of 640 x 480 resolution
-still too expensive for interesting "daddy at home" who rather prefers going to Youtube and colleagues grabbing stuff for his home video for free, accepting very low quality (if he knows how to do it of course :).

So I was thinking: maybe it would be better NOT to try to stay as close to DV as possible with 640 x 480, charging 10 USD, but instead give the clips a real web resolution like 400 x 300 with pjpeg as codec and go well below this line, close to 5 USD. We don´t need the 10 USD they charge at IS for small web because we get much better comission here, and I think this is one of the reason P5 does that (apart from being nice :), as they know that a place like IS still has a better position in the market due to their photo business and the higher number of clips in their gallery.

I have many clips from a world and a south amercia trip I did years ago, each of them 6 months, with subjets that until now nobody has uploaded anywhere, but they have been taken with Digital 8 cams and are mostly handheld, so I´d actually prefer to stabilize them if necessary and upload them as Multimedia. Despite of being very strict and using only 1-2% of the clips, I still could upload between 500 and 1000 clips I guess.

But this would be quite a lot of work, so my question
-to those who have experiences with "small web" sells is: Do you think it´s worth it?
-and to P5: Are you interested in increasing your database with this kind of clips, or do you prefer to stay with "state of the art SD" as the principal basis, so that I save this time and go filming?

Thanks for any feedback!

Greetings,
Stefan

I have a few (500) clips at IS and what I can tell you from my experience there is that small web used to sell in the early days, but now it's almost exclusively full size SD. Especially for live footage, but also for most animations.

Thanks Ulrich! So it seems that things wouldn´t really work the way I described it.

Well, there would be another, more agressive way to address the demand for "web able" clips that should exist because Internet video is rising and professional editors asked to do a promotion video only for the web can´t afford to infringe copyrights:

Creating a large pool of clips in VCD standard and doing a similar kind of subscription model they have at SS for the photos. The file sizes are absolutely comparable (2,5 MB for 15 sec). The clips would also fit for private people who are allright with VHS quality.

Anyway, as a first consequence, I´ll leave the old tape where it is and grab my cam now :)

Greetings,
Stefan

Well for me $10 for any kind of video, photo or art work isn't even worth pushing the start button on the camera or turning a computer on. As in the other forum, what is your time and equipment worth. If you feel $10 is all you can get then you must be a volunteer and your equipment stolen ... just kidding. Make it worth while for yourself, the price is secondary to that question. Best of luck.

Don´t worry Don. Everything purchased legally (for altogether 1800 EUR :)...

As I said, I have the clips already and the question now is if I can use them for stock in a way that at least sells and does not only increase my gallery? If not, no problem. Certainly I wouldn´t go back to Hawaii or Australia with the intention to shoot multimedia clips for 10$ or less...

Same for you: best of luck!

Stefan

Try putting several shorter clips into a single clip and then price it accordingly. You may have some good opportunities if you put something like 4 different 5 second views into a single clip, that may indeed make it worth while for you and a buyer. Try a couple and give us a link to them.
Don

Do you mean just stick clips together in full size or a sort of "trailer" with several windows of smaller clips?

I already applied the first solution at SS with some success (especially multiple short scenes of big events seem to be attractive).

The latter approach would look more sophisticated but limit a buyer to exactly my product...

I would attempt to keep the same subject bundled into the main clip but using several different views, angles, perspectives. If each view is 5-10 seconds and bundled into a single 30 second clip that gives a buyer a cross section of which one to use. This may work if you already have taken the videos and can't get back to take full length clips. Hope it works for ya. Don

Thanks again Don. That´s what I am doing with newer clips (at SS. Here I can upload them individually).

For the older takes it mostly won´t be possible to do it exactly this way, but combining some shots with kinds of an overall theme like e.g. "Mayan temples Palenque, Mexico" would work.

I will see. Remembering what Ulrich was saying about IS and small web maybe it would be better than converting them into MM in the first place.

Stefan