Associating clips

A quick question if I may on associating clips.

I try and shoot (as far as I can) at 24/25 and 30FPS. I have no idea if that hurts or hinders my sales but I have just had a bunch of clips approved with a note from the curator suggesting that I associate certain clips.

This actually would be a fair amount of work so I wonder if people think it is worth it and if Pond 5 prefer this option. I should stress these are "similar" clips and not identical. As an example:





Thoughts appreciated

In my opinion you can't associate these clips because they are different. From my experience, RS or IS would reject 2 clips and accept only one, because they are too similar.
On P5 you can show all similar clips in Description field as you do now.

So they would be rejected "elsewhere" even though they were shot at different frame rates for different markets?

I was floored when at NAB you told me you shoot the same thing at different frame rates. Frankly, I think it's overkill and I bet no other agency outside Pond5 would permit this.

And it may be just a matter of time before Pond5 puts a stop to it too.

RS actually lets the user decide on the frame rate (and codec) on demand when purchasing. This is they way it should happen, rather than doing it manually like you do.

I appreciate what you are saying and the other site that I upload to, which mainly sells to the European market only gets my 25p/50i material.

One of the companies I work with sells a sports show around the World and it is a constant source of problems for them when they have material that is shot in 60i which they have to convert to 50i (they are in the UK) and then the finished programme is converted back to 60i for clients in Japan, Canada and the US. The quality of the material that has been double converted is not great, even with very expensive standards converters! Converters are improving but they still prefer source material to be native 25p/50i.

When I was filming the Bellagio fountains I got chatting to a guy (between displays!) who was shooting it in 3D and he was shooting at 24p as the majority of his work ended up on Blu-Ray.

Obviously if P5 said they would offer the conversion to buyers and so only wanted 1 frame rate then that is what I would supply but if you look at this map of World TV standards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PAL-NTSC-SECAM.svg then assuming that countries that are PAL and SECAM (same frame rate, different method of colour modulation) adopt HD at 50i and the NTSC countries adopt HD at 60i then far more of the countries of the World will be 25p/50i. Obviously that is not the whole picture as the US market is, almost certainly, far larger than any other single TV/Video/DVD/Blu-Ray market but I think it would be foolish to assume that in years to come places like India, China and Indonesia would not be as large, if not larger.

Useless fact of the day - if you take a World map and draw a circle that encompasses China, India and Indonesia then there are more people living inside that circle than in the rest of the World put together

Determining what frame rate to shoot is a touchy subject. But in the example you gave with the client from Japan, your method of providing multiple rates wouldn't help as they would have to edit the project twice, in 60i AND 50i to avoid having to convert the end project from 60i to 50i then back to 60i. I doubt any agency would want to do that. And what are the odds of you repeating the SAME action in your 24, 25, AND 30 frame rate clips?

I say shoot in one format and if the buyer wants the clip bad enough, they'll figure out how to convert it.

Hi OD

I think you misunderstood the example! The UK company produces the edit masters in 50i so they prefer to source 50i/25p footage from around the World. This way when the send a copy to Japan it is frame rate converted to 60i so only one conversion. If the source was 60i then the would have to convert to 50i, do the edit and then make the 60i copy so 2 conversions.

Looking at one of the artists here with the largest number of clips for sale Spotmatik they have 30,758 clips online of which 26,658 are HD at 25 FPS out of a total of 429,641 HD 25FPS clips. So they have a little over 6% of the entire 50i/25p clips for sale on P5.

That may be one of the reasons they have good sales (ok and the fact they have a very diverse collection with great production values!).

Ah, understood. That said, I'm sticking with 30fps and the occasional 24fps myself.

If someone in London wants to use one of my shots, they can convert it. Of course, if TV isn't the intended platform delivery, all this frame rate talk is mute (so long as they don't try to mix formats on one timeline).

Absolutely!

I am not saying I am correct in this, but shooting the different frame rates doesn't take anywhere near 3 x the time of shooting / editing / keywording. Some people upload SD downconverted clips of their HD material - I draw the line at that, everyone has different ideas on the best way to drive sales (hopefully!).

TE

I shoot 30fps (29.97) on everything. from the SS map it seems like the stuff is selling everywhere, and a lot in europe. So they must be converting it to what they need.

Is it hard to convert from various frame rates? Is there one that is 'most' universal?