Exclusivity vs. NON-Exclusive

For more information on shooting/selling stock footage check out my other posts:
GETTING STARTED
KEYWORDING
WHAT SELLS?

Should you be Exclusive with one stock footage website or should you be non-exclusive and post your footage to many sites?

I want to offer some different scenarios that make sense in regards to Exclusivity; the scenario that makes the most sense for you will depend on who you are, and what your reasons are for shooting stock footage.

Scene #1 - You are Exclusive with iStockphoto.com. iStockphoto is really THE premiere royalty free stock footage site currently. If you choose to be exclusive, do it with iStockphoto. To see the full benefits of being exclusive with them go to their Exclusive Program Page

If spreadsheets, data entry and business managent scares you and you want to spend the majority of your time shooting then exclusivity makes good sense, at least when you are starting out. If you choose to only sell through one website then it is not vital to keep records of all your keywords and descriptions, and theoretically you could rely on iStockphoto (or whoever) to keep all of your footage backed up on their hard drives, as long as you don't plan to use your own footage or sell it anywhere else. If I were exclusive, I would still choose to keep proper records and back-ups incase I changed my mind, or iStockphoto went out of business or something. (see my posting on Organization)

To make the most of being exclusive, you have to be shooting constantly, and really focus on shooting high-quality, unique footage. Always have something in the queue (iStockphoto takes about a month to review footage before they post it for sale). Ideally a few new clips of your footage would be accepted every day. New exclusive footage gets posted to the "New Footage" Section of iStockphoto and it gives your entire library more exposure, and potential to sell.

Also, be active on the iStockphoto website. Comment on other people's clips, write in the message boards, make friends with other contributors. Build/organize "light boxes" of your footage.

The downside of being Exclusive is that, in most cases, you do not have as much potential income. It would be the equivalent of being in a band and selling your CDs at one record store. Even if it is the best record store, they have a limited number of customers that shop at their store. Even if they put your CD in the front window of the store, and they give you a bigger percentage of the sales you just won't have as many sales as you could if you distributed your CD to 100 different record stores. Now if you were creative/driven enough to come out with 100 CDs, and they were really good, then you could create a loyal fan base, and the customers would buy ALL of your CDs, you could make good income, and no one would ever call you a sell-out.

In summary, if you are more of a purist, you don't need to make the most money possible, and you want to focus on shooting footage... Give exclusivity a shot. If you don't like it, you can change your mind down the road.

Scene #2 - You are NON-Exclusive and you post you footage library to multipul stock footage sites.

There are 4-5 good stock footage sites that sell consistently, and 40-50 that sell next to nothing. If you choose to be NON-Exclusive you want to sell footage through as many GOOD stock footage sites as possible, and maybe test the waters in a few up-and-coming stock footage sites. The stock footage world is dynamic, a new stock footage website could start up today, and in a year they could dwarf all the other sites. It's good to keep your eyes open, and try new sites out once in a while.

To make the most out of being NON-Exclusive you should really think of your stock footage as a business and you should constantly be uploading/keywording footage. Organization/record keeping is VITAL (see my post on organization) Where an Exclusive stock footage producer just needs to upload each of their clips 1 time, a non-exclusive producer will never be done uploading, the more uploading, the more potential sales. I upload footage to the best selling sites first, then work my way down the list. If I ever have 100% of my library uploaded to all sites, then I'll open an account with a new stock footage site and test the waters.

The reasons for being non-exclusive, besides having more potential income, is that you can get more mileage out of your library, the income is more consistant/predictable, and there are an infinite number of different ways to increase your monthly income besides just shooting more footage. I have a demanding career in Post Production right now so I don't get to shoot as much as I'd like. Being non-exclusive, I can leave a bunch of clips uploading at home before I leave for work in the morning. I can keyword a few clips on my lunch break, or a few here or there in the evenings. With an organized keyword/descriptions database I can even recruit other people (employees) to help me get more clips online, and increase my monthly income.

This is a "Sell Out" method of selling stock footage, but that is what stock footage is all about. I have no shame putting my cd in as many record stores as possible, there are a lot of people in the world that need to hear my music.

In summary, if you are organized, somewhat business savvy, don't mind a little data entry work, and you are driven to get the most money possible out of your stock footage then NON-Exclusive is the way to go.

Scene #3
An alternative method would be to shoot different footage for different sites. You could be exclusive with multipul sites, and divide your library in such a way that the best clips go to the site that sells the most... or to the site that pays the highest royalties.

There is a faction of stock footage contributors that believe you will maximize your sales with fewer clips in your portfolio, clips that are the highest quality, and that have a common theme. The theory is that when a potential buyer finds one of your clips, they will be able to look through your entire portfolio and find other related clips to buy.

Whatever you do, don't claim that you are exclusive and post the same footage to multipul sites, you will get caught. Play it straight and karma will reward you. Another thing to be aware of is that you can even get in trouble for posting "exclusive" footage to Vimeo, vimeo has a clause in their user agreement that says something like, "Vimeo can re-distribute anything you post." That will violate most exclusivity agreements.

Final Thoughts:
This information WILL help you to make more money selling stock footage. When you understand what you want your stock footage business to be, you can better understand where to focus your limited time and energy. Thank you for reading, and I will be sure to include more pictures in the next post.

Happy Shooting!
HDCineman

Case Study - Classic Car Shoot

For more information on shooting/selling stock footage check out my other posts:
GETTING STARTED
KEYWORDING
WHAT SELLS?

I am always keeping my eye open for an opportunity to shoot something unique. My father in law has a completely restored 1940 Ford that I have been wanting to shoot for some time. He is a little bit protective of his car so I had some reservations about asking, but when I did he was excited to get the car out and take it for a spin. It reminded me that people with a unique hobby or interest are often eager to share, all you have to do is ask.

I could have planned better for this shoot. I only had one thought-out shot in my mind, a classic 40 Ford crusin around some s-turns up in the hills. I had a general idea of where I wanted to go for that. Then I had a bunch of still shots in my brain of close ups on the chrome bumper, the wheels, hubcaps, taillights. Shooting out of the back of another car leading the Ford down a windy road. Something through the side or rear-view mirror. Out of laziness I figured that I had limited time, and I should just concentrate on getting 1 or 2 useful shots.

Here's the gear I brought with me:

Canon t2i (550D) - $650 - This camera has the same censor as the popular Canon 7D (about $1500), the t2i's construction is a little lighter, it feels a little bit like a toy, but I just want to be able to shoot the 5184 X 3456 raw still images for time-lapse, I want to shoot shallow depth of field, I want to shoot HD 1080p, and I want to be able to shoot 60fps slow-motion. This camera has what I need, so I saved on the camera body to be able to buy the more expensive glass.

Canon EF 70-200mm f2.8 with image stabilizer - $2300
For high quality images, the most important part of your set up is your lens. You can have the biggest sensor in the world, but your lens is what projects the image of the world onto that sensor and a low quality lens will limit the actual resolution of your images. This lens is the best in its class, and a standard for many professional photographers. f2.8 allows you to shoot in fairly dim conditions for a long lens, and can give you an extremely shallow depth of field. The icing on the cake with this lens for Video is the image stabilizer, many pro-sumer video cameras have image stabilization built in, but DSLR's do not and an unstable image is unusable for stock footage. I try to ALWAYS use a tripod, however, there are many times when a tripod is not practical, the stabilizer makes a world of difference. Especially since longer lenses magnify any small movements you make with your unsteady hand. And your hand is unsteady, I guarantee it.

Canon EF-S 18-55mm f3.5 - $70 - Sometimes you have to sacrifice quality for budget constraints, I purchased this lens to allow me to shoot in the wide/normal range, it is not ideal. The Canon DSLR is a new setup for me, so I will be purchasing a few more pieces as I go along. For now, this will do.

Sachtler DV2 Sticks - $500 used - for stock footage a good fluid-head tripod is vital. For the casual hobbiest, a large tripod is inconvenient, and annoying to cary around. Anyone who is serious about stock footage will find that any temporary inconvenience a good set of sticks causes pays off when you get your footage home.





The Shoot
I was glad I didn't have any more equipment. With just 1 small bench seat, and a father in law that is damn near 7ft tall, I was happy that all my camera equipment fit in a small camera bag, and my sticks could lay in the seat between us. Less equipment is a little more casual and it also draws less attention on the side of a road from authority figures that might cut your shoot short.

As we headed toward the canyon, we chatted for a while then I pulled my camera out to make sure I had my settings right. I wanted to shoot HD 1080 (the highest quality video that the t2i shoots), I put on my wide lens, made sure it was clean, I checked the exposure in sun, and as we went through shadows. I rolled 20 seconds through the front windshield. Primarily to test that everything was working correctly, but I always try to shoot something that could be useful.

The shot was very shaky, but there was a nice moment when we passed a 40mph sign on the road, I'm not sure if anyone would make the connection that this was a 1940 Ford, and it said 40 on the road, but sometimes those little coincidences get people excited about the footage and it can turn into a big seller. Symbolism sells. I may try to run an image stabilizer on this footage, you never know exactly what will sell, so when in doubt, try it out.

We finally got to a spot on the west side of a hill that still had some good light on it. I jumped out on the side of the road and told my father-in-law that we could communicate by phone and I'd have him do a few passes up and down the hill so I could grab a couple different shots. With just a small bag and a tripod "guerrilla" shooting is pretty easy. The legality is questionable... technically you are supposed to have a shooting permit in most cities. It is a little bit dangerous to be hanging out on the side of a road and anything dangerous is generally frowned upon by local law enforcement. But it's not like I'm writing graffiti or something, just taking pictures.

I had a specific shot I wanted to get, but I made sure to find a shot as the car drove off to turn around.

I am always looking for shots besides the one I have planned, sometimes the best shots are impromptu. In between passes, I would run down the road a ways to change my shot up. I always strive to get quality shots, but the BUSINESS of stock footage is about quantity as much as quality, so the more usable shots the better.

One time while I was waiting for the car to turn around I noticed that a purple thistle flower and some yellow wild flowers were nicely backlit by the setting sun, and they lined up pretty well for a rack focus.

Although flowers are way over shot, I had nothing better to do in that moment. Purple and yellow happen to be complementary colors, and an interesting rack focus between the contrasting plants made for a decent supplemental shot. It also gave me an idea to rack focus from the thistle to the car as another variation on my main subject shot, it was also a good way to utilize a key feature of the t2i/70-200mm combo, the shallow depth of field gave the shot a more cinematic look.

We shot for about 45 minutes, and I probably got 4-5 shots that I was happy with, that is a pretty good day.

There were probably 100 more shots to shoot, and if I were out on my own I could have easily spent 4-5 hours with that car. I decided to save those shots for another day. I was happy to knock out a few shots, have a little fun with the father-in-law and have some fresh footage for my stock library.

As a bonus, we stopped to fill up with gas on the way home. Never missing an opportunity, I had him hold on for just a second, I quickly jumped out and framed up a shot, gassing up the 1940 Ford. To be honest, I have a feeling that the impromptu "gassing up" shot will probably end up being my best seller. It would have been easy at the end of the day to just let that one go, it ended up looking pretty nice. But who knows? The true test is when you get the footage on line and let the buyers decide.

The next step is to process these clips. In Final Cut Pro, I have selected the clips I think are the best, they were a little short so I combined two short shots into a mini-sequence to give the buyer a little more bang for their buck. There will be a coming and going shot combined in to one clip. Then I will use my thistle rack focus shot, a stand-alone wide angle shot of the 40 Ford going by, and a shot gassing up.

I trimmed the clips to be just the best part of each shot, I made sure the clips were longer than 5 seconds but less than 30 seconds. I will do some minor color correction then I will convert the shots to 1080X1920 HD, square pixels, with a Photo Jpeg Compression (for progressive scan shots) and save them into my library. The shots will be organized into my "Transportation" sub-folder and the file names will be something like, "TRN-0063 Classic Car Fillup.mov"

Next step is to plug each clip's info into my Google Doc Database (See my post on Stock Footage Organization)

Then I'm ready to upload the clips to iStockPhoto, Pond5, Shutterstock and a few others.

That's my process, for a Saturday afternoon stock footage shoot. Next, I wait for the $$$ start rolling in after a few months, and before too long my unpaid day of fun with the father-in-law turns into a healthy payout that just keeps coming year after year, and maybe if we're lucky we'll get to see the 40 Ford in the title sequence of some street rod restoration documentary.

Thanks for reading, Happy Shooting!
HDCineman

Stock Footage Organization

For more information on shooting/selling stock footage check out my other posts:
GETTING STARTED
KEYWORDING
WHAT SELLS?

In this post I want to offer some stock footage organization tips. I can only share what has worked best in my experience, there are probably other ways to do things and ultimately you have to do what works best for you. Even if you start off with a small library of stock footage you will want to have some way of keeping it organized, accessible, and safe.

Organization
A simple database will do wonders for your organization, I use a Google doc spreadsheet because it is free, and I can access it anywhere there is internet. Here is what my doc looks like.

Clip ID - The clip ID# contains the category code followed by 4 numbers to signify which clip number it is. AML-0036 is the 36th clip in my Animals category.

File Name - This is the actual file name I use for the clip that is stored on a hard drive. It is the Clip ID followed by a more descriptive clip name.

Description - This field contains a description of the clip. Whenever I upload a new stock footage clip I copy the description and paste it into this field for each clip. When I decide to upload that same clip to another stock footage site I don't have to re-write the description each time. It is best to keep the description fairly short because some stock footage sites limit the length of the description to 200 characters.

Keywords - I copy keywords into this field. It is best to separate your keywords/phrases by commas. Although it is best to have as many legitimate keywords as you can think of, many sites limit keywords to 50.

The above database fields are the MOST useful for organizing and reusing your stock footage library. I decided to keep a few additional columns of information that I have found useful.

Formats - I keep the video format to describe whether the highest quality clip I have is Standard or High Definition video, and whether it is HD 1080, 720 or if the clip is available in 2K or 4K resolution. I could probably include the codec/compression as well, but I have chose not to so far.

Rating - I give my clips a quick rating on a scale from 1-10. Not every clip you sell has to be AMAZING, if I only posted my 30 most amazing clips I would probably have 1/10th the monthly income from my stock footage library. To be frank, some of my footage embarrasses me as an artist; As a business man, if the clip produces some income then it ads value to the business and has a place in my stock footage library. I still find it useful to keep track of the best clips. I will spend more time keywording/describing those clips, I will use those clips for advertising purposes, or if someone needs a quick sample of my library I will be sure to put my best foot forward.

Storage Location - This will become very important as your library expands. Basically it describes what drive a clip is located on.

Accessibility - You want to have easy access to your footage. I end up using a lot of my own footage for different projects, or sometimes a friend or business acquaintance will ask if I have a specific clip they can purchase. I could just tell them to go on line to iStockphoto/hdcineman and check out my portfolio. But I would rather have 100% of the purchase price, and I certainly don't want to buy my own clip for personal use.

If you can afford a high-end redundant raid drive system... more power to you. That is probably the safest way to store your stock footage library. I try to keep very low overhead with my stock footage business to maximize my profits. I have found that using an ICY Dock and plain ol' sata harddrives is a fantastic, inexpensive system.

Harddrives are cheap and the Icy Dock allows easy access to drives. I buy 2 drives each year a primary drive and a back up. All the footage I shoot/process in a year I put on a drive organized into separate folders based on media type (VIDEO, AUDIO, ILLUSTRATION) and then by category code (AML = Animal, BUS = Business, TRN = Transportation, etc.) I can easily search for clips by opening a category folder and scanning through, or I can use spotlight on my Mac (or search function on PC) to find a specific clip.

An additional tool I have found useful is Adobe Bridge, this was developed more for photography, but it works well for video as well. I don't like the way it keeps keywords, but if you have access to it you may find it useful. I use it when I am up loading footage to a new stock footage site to help manage which clips I have uploaded to which site. If you are uploading via FTP you can drag clips directly from the Bridge window into the FTP program.

Safety - It is important copy all your footage to a second back-up drive incase the primary drive fails. Also, if you're using the yearly drive system, you should plug the primary and back-up drives in periodically and check the media. Then every few years you should move old footage to new drives. The value of your footage will outlast any harddrive.

I know organization isn't as exciting as getting out there and shooting new footage, but when you start to see the earning power of your footage increase tenfold because you are organized you will be glad you took this information to heart.

Happy Shooting!
HDCineman