Everything Got rejected??

I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this. I don't get much time off work and I really go nuts uploading my stock around the holidays "and other breaks" because I have more time off around this time of year. Anyways I was uploading a lot of footage and since there has been longer than usual approval times I ended up submitting like 100 clips over the past few weeks. Anyways almost everything was rejected. Ive been listing things on multiple sites for years and never had this much rejection before. The reasoning said: Clip is a non-standard resolution or is pillarboxed, letterboxed, or matted.

Here is the deal, my workflow is unchanged for 2 years now. Since I started shooting with the r5c. Im uploading in the native 8k that the Canon R5C does. Apparently that is no longer accepted?!?!

Was wondering if anyone else is going through this?

I feel like I may have made a mistake because I pulled everything out of Adobe stock since the shutter stock merger. I figured since I sale on adobe, shutter stock and pond 5 why not become exclusive. Well since the merger I have been running into problems for both sites. shutter stock sales have been going down and down. a lot of little .25 cent sales. Nothing more than a dollar like ever. very strange. I also had everything rejected from shutter stock this week too because they said I use copyright wording in my descriptions.

I was told years ago by the people running these companies at NAB in 2010 to make sure I say what Camera I use every time I write a description. So if you look at my loads and loads of descriptions they all say what camera I used. So does that mean everything will soon be rejected. Because I am sure i have a camera name in every single description i wrote. And now that's apparently wrong? seems kinda dumb. I come from the movie world and we write down every detail for every shot just in case we need to add something later or re create it. I figured knowing what camera and lens doesn't hurt for whomever buys my footage. Also it's nice to know years later when i look at old clips I can see the metadata and remember what lens I used. I have a lot of classic lenses.

Anyways a warning to anyone out there.. be prepared to have your footage rejected for info on what camera you use or lens. basically if its a brand its going to be rejected. and if you upload 8k 8192 x 4320 1.90 it's going to be rejected. which is a shame because that's literally a pretty standard 8K resolution... very strange indeed.

4k is your friend and all that is really needed for clips on P5

I have R5. Did not make any 8K yet, but from what I had read from your post, makes me wondering why and how? 8K is the now-present future, I guess. Perhaps I am wrong. What a strange news. Kind of shock ...
I always thought that having clips in 8K is for now a strategic advantage.
Thank you!

it is an advantage. Or at least it was. I've listed about 1000 clips so far in 8k. Started uploading 8k two years ago. That is a huge reason why I love pond 5. They usually are the first to except a new resolution or format. I usually can email them and within a week or two they will hit me back and say they now accept it. Years ago I used to submit side by side 3d that wasn't compressed and pond 5 was the only site that did that. I think those clips are still on here. I sold a lot during the 3d craze. in 2010-2012.

But i'm just wondering what changed in the past 3 weeks to start rejecting everything? I cant help but wonder if it has to do with shutterstock merger. The sad part is I even have a lot of that 180 degree VR stuff that's cutting edge and isn't even supported yet by editing software. I don't even want to waste my time uploading it if it will all be shot down. I traveled across the whole country getting 8K VR plates of everywhere scenic. Just a Bummer.

This was the response I get a few weeks ago

Thanks for contacting customer support!

You can upload 8K clips: up to 6GB in size. These larger files do tend to take longer to upload but if you are okay with waiting for this process, we would still recommend uploading the files as 8K files are a bit more rare on the marketplace. However, this is ultimately your choice.


If you have any other questions, just let us know!

Kind regards,
Tara
Customer Care Gladiator & Community Analyst

Also Pond5 are using the out sourced curators that Shutterstock use, so they will be adhering to strict SS guidelines, so any format that isn't 16:9 square pixels that leaves boarders or blanking could become an issue. Things are changing rapidly here I'm afraid.

That's so sad that they only accept 16:9. I'm guessing that means they only accept 8k UHD now? 7680 × 4320. Which is not great. As resolutions get bigger the difference between UHD and DCI become quit drastic. I'll put it this way, I try to put myself into the customers shoes. If I were to buy an 8k file I would want the DCI not UHD. Meaning if given the choice i'd think anyone would pick DCI over UHD. But maybe I'm the weird one?

For Example I feel like the equivalent would be if years ago when 4K was coming out that they stopped accepting 4K DCI and Only took 4K UHD. Meaning if you upload a clip 4096 × 2160 it would be rejected. so you have to crop it and re upload it to 3840 × 2160. Just seems weird to me. Like what Camera records at 3840x2160 native? And if you have that camera do you really want footage from it? :)

Maybe I'm old school and I came from the days where they wanted the clip as close to what it was recorded at as possible. now they want you to crop it, color it and export it into something new. Which is fine just at least send everyone an email stating that they are making these changes and update their website stating those changes instead of overnight rejecting hundreds of clips which has never happened to me before. I spent almost 2 weeks uploading 10 clips a day just to have everything rejected. It's not like this is a huge money maker so when you have to re export everything and upload that's a huge hit on what little profits we make. Really makes me mad. seriously double thinking if I should go back to adobe. I almost feel like they took advantage and got a lot of us to sign on as exclusive and now they are sticking it to all of us. Feels like what went down with getty images years ago. I dropped that account so quick because over night people went from making hundreds to pennies a month.

:(

I'm just assuming that this is the case, I'm the same in that I come from a film making background and camera, lens and focal lengths info was essential for post production so it makes sense to give that info on Pond5. All the 8K clips I uploaded recently were accepted but the were 16:9 ratio so no blanking on TV sets. No chance of getting true 4K and 8K ratios onto shutter stock because of the 'borders' these ratios produce on 16:9 TV's as the curators are now effectively using Shutterstock upload guidelines I think you are going to have to crop your footage unfortunately. The worrying aspect to all this is the diversity of Pond5 cliental which as I was told by a high up employer at Pond5 some while ago that the main success of P5 was film and television where professional's were using the stock footage and knew how to use 'raw' footage. SS on the other hand is geared towards marketing and Web content creators, I just hope the new owners understand the distinction between the demographics and the curators just need corrective training ;) To be honest my concentration for this year will be making fresh content for AS and leave my portfolio here as it is currently, I have enough content on here to be able to do that, and the first clip sold this year was on SS for $0.45 which works out at around 30 pence here in the UK. It cost that in electricity to upload the footage in the first place so I will be doing the same for SS also.

Yeah my first three clips sold on SS sold for .25 cents usd. I made .75 cents for three clips sold so far for 2024. Last month I sold 24 clips for 27.44 USD... Rewind 4 years. January 2020 I sold 11 clips for 103.14 USD... but sales are up! lol

Thank you, T_RoFilms for your respond and clarification.

So just updating whats going on with all this just in case it helps shed some light for others. So I managed to get just about everything to be approved by resubmitting and removing the "shot on blank camera" key words. I never changed the size. I'm still uploading at the native 8K DCI not 16:9.. I have a feeling next time i upload I might go through the same thing.

Anyways still 20 clips were rejected for intellectual infringement. It's pretty strict now. even more then shutter stock usually is. which to me seems weird. I had clips rejected for showing a city shot but you see a road in the background and you can see logos on cars driving by. The curator sent me a zoomed in shot of a toyota logo in the distance of a car. like the car was so small in the frame but because 8k i guess. Anyways That's what the curator said so expect getting anything rejected at this point. I even had a state flag rejected for copyright infringement. I guess it's owned by the country and state lol I don't know. So good luck everyone. I wonder if they will start going through our libraries and rejecting footage that was previously approved. I also had all my clips from cumbers and toltec rejected.. Which is a train from 1890s well past the public domain timeframe and is owned by the public i am pretty sure. Regardless everyone films it from public land. There is tons of footage of that train on pond5 already. so Not sure what that means. I guess forever the clips on pond 5 will be 4k because they are no longer accepting new footage from stuff like that. A lot of what i'm uploading I already have on my library but just am updating to 8k.. haha. guess time will tell. Hope this helps everyone. interested to see what happens. Let me know if anyone is switching to another stock platform. unfortunately Pond 5 isn't what it used to be for me anymore.