SD - anyone still shooting this quality?

hehehehe...

Thanks! I'm harvesting older footage at the moment, been too cold to do much shooting save the odd day here and there. I still have about 1000 BetaSP tapes to go through, a lot of motor-sports that I covered at various tracks including my home track Race City in Calgary, lots of rare footage. In reality, it's pretty good quality, even if only SD, like my instructor said at SAIT... "the most important piece of the camera is about an inch behind the view finder". I've seen so much complete crap on Youtube when it comes to shooting motor-sports, drag racing in particular, auto-iris, auto-focus, shaky handheld crap... argh! First rule of jet cars - MANUAL bloody bleeding iris! No excuses!! Night or Day, doesn't matter! Second - Use really good ear protection, full cup with inner ear protection as well, use ballistic eye shields too, more injuries from little pieces of stuff in the eye than anything else. Remember, these cars have engines with 10,000+ lbs thrust, ask Phantomewo about what a little of grit feels like with a jet engine blast. Third - No fear! don't be scared, these guys are pros, if you're not sure about their experince than back off. I knew most of the drivers and they knew what they were doing so I was comfortable being in harm's way. If you're not comfortable, get out of the way and leave it to the pros, that's why we're here. Not to sound too cocky, but that's why you rarely see these kinds of shots, otherwise Pond5 would have a ton of them.

hmmmm... looks like I went on a rant again... well, you get the idea. This shot goes back to about 1994, 17 years ago.

Stockshooter,

those shots indeed look pretty good for SD !

a classic example of where "Mr. AUTO" has NO place in the line-up ..... but only a seat in the bullpen... :)

Thanks, however I do use "Otto" my German sound engineer for the audio levels on the camera when covering motorsports, no human could possibly work those extreme levels of sound. lol...

LOL.... yep, "Otto" on the boom mic / mixer ...... gotta have him ! :-)

especially on clips like this one..... check out the people around the burn out area holding their ears.... oh.... and ya better watch out for what might come flying off those expanding rear slciks too ! Great shot....

yep... nothing like about 120db! Woohoo! Thanks for the compliment... I sure like covering drag racing....

Has anyone used software to upconvert SD to HD? My DVD player does a nice job with line doubling. Maybe that's a way to keep the old tapes going.

Last year PAL-NTSC SD were about 20% of my total sales. Enough to keep rendering in those formats. But I noticed it really dipped from the year before where SD was almost a third of sales. Still a lot of local broadcasters working in 4x3.

@time_lapse:
So do you still think it is worth the time and effort to export out and upload a PAL and a NTSC SD versions from your HD stock? Seeing that your sales in SD are historically dropping ...maybe even down to 10% by the end of this year??

I'm tossing up whether I should bother with these other formats or not. My opinion is the majority of people buying stock footage use it professionally and would have the means to downconvert from HD anyway. What is other peoples opinions on this?

The main reason I provide multiple formats is not necessarily because it's hugely profitable (although losing that 20-30% would not be good), but rather because on one job a producer might be using HD and on the next job they're using another format. I'd rather have a selection to choose from.

Most businesses run like that; a few top sellers account for the majority of the revenues and the rest provide a variety to keep the customers coming back. But it's up to you, there's a good case to be made either way...

Although I have not been with pond5 long, I have found that my SD clips out sell my HD clips by 9:1. I really don't understand why. There must still be a market for SD so I am going to shoot in both formats.

One reason SD will still sell is there is a large need for video in websites. HD is great for television but if I were a web developer I wouldn't buy a HD video
Think about the amount of new multimedia websites going online everyday.

This is the main reason I wish we had automatic downsizing. Your 9 to 1 sales is what I've been saying. We are missing a huge amount of sales to other sites that do auto downsizing.