PRORES vs PhotoJPEG

Hi,

I've been doing stock footage for about 2 years now and I've come to conclusion that PhotoJPEG is utter crap for such works. But it's still main used codec on all stock sites. So I'm kinda curious, why is such codec acceptable for "high quality" footage in professional production? I even had some clips denied on other sites because of codecs stupid color bending. How can I shoot high quality footage, if the sites deny my footage because of their codec limitations. Isn't the point of stock footage to get highest quality?

Therefore I started working with Prores encoding. It gives 422 10bit color space and the ending results are really top notch. BUT, I get such big files sizes, that I was wondering if anyone would even consider working with such footage. The size ratio is absurd, if the PJPEG was about 200-700MB in size, the Prores in same length is 2-7GB. I have no trouble to upload such mass, but what about customers and editors working with such files? Is it even any advantage to my high quality files?

Any conclusion on such matter?

With bandwidth and storage costs we are stuck with PJPEG until a better compression codex is developed. No agency can afford to store individual footage at several GB each. Many prestigious production houses use the PJPEG using stock from here and all other agencies. They seem happy. When internet speed increases and storage cost decrease I'm sure file size will be secondary to better quality large file sizes. Even those shooting 2.5k or 4k, the limitations on file size require most to be converted to JPEG.

Do Pond5 then reenconde to PJPEG codec, or they leave it Prores? I didn't yet get any feedback that my files are too big.

Pond5 keeps the original codec. No reencoding is done.

Ionescu is correct. Whatever codec you upload to us is kept in its original codec.

My question is Meatster, what dimension, frame rate, data rate, etc. and length are your clips to create such huge files? It's roughly 1 GB for 1 minute of 1080p ProRes 422 footage, correct? It increases obviously for 422 HQ, 4444, etc., but still should be a more manageable file size when creating video to be uploaded.

Maybe others have more opinions on codecs and file sizes like Don has said. Please weigh in if you do!

Ryan
Pond5 Crew

Great information, but worrysome about the file sizes... I upload 1080p/25fps with about 10-25second long clips and they take up to 2-5GB of disk space. It's nuts. Not to mention 4K files that can go up to 11GB.
I choose Quicktime and Uncompressed YUV 10bit 422 option, but there is no quality option for maybe getting lower size. Should I choose anything else for maximum quality and maybe lower file sizes?

It is huge difference between PJPEG and this Prores encoding, so it would be stupid not encode my raw files in to something quality.

What program are you using for your conversion?

Ryan,
have you looked at doing conversions on your side for costumers, similar to revostock? It seems like that would help all contributors and also open up to the world marker more if buyers see frame rate as a large part of buying decision.

Meatster, as others have said, your ProRes files shouldn't be that big. My 17-sec ProRes clips are approx. 310mb. Must be a setting.

But I'd like to interject another question: I'm curious if there are buyers out there who do not use, and cannot import ProRes files. And it's only been in the last year and a half or so that Pond5 has begun accepting ProRes (I believe). While photoJPEG and motionJPEG seem to be universally importable.

I wonder if anyone who has been uploading ProRes files as well as one of the JPEG formats has noticed a preference for one over the other. Or any thoughts.
-Bob.

Yes Scott it's been talked about. Conversions to different codex or frame rates would be a great marketing tool. Not sure I would want conversions to smaller sizes but RS codex conversions would be great. Only need to store the original format and make auto conversions as buyers select which format they need.