Perhaps my footage on Pond5 is priced too high at $59 ?

No way! Probably too low. My sales tend to increase when I raise the price at p5. Why sell below the industry standard of $79? I've tried lowering prices at P5 trying to increase the number of sales and it hasn't ever worked. Sales increase when I raise my prices back up.

I don't seem to be able to download Stock Uploader.  I log in and refresh the download page as it says to do but no download link appears.  Any ideas?

Thanks for the replies!  I thought the symbio forum had been locked to new messages.  Apparently not.  Jeeeeez, I can't keep up with it all. 

I tried them out a long time ago (before symbiostock) and purchased several of the add-on features.  It was buggy and I couldn't make it work properly.  That was quite a long time ago tho so maybe things are more stable now?

Hey Martin,

Nice looking distribution tool and exactly like what I've been looking for to distribute our video files.  If I understand the pricing, however, it doesn't seem very affordable for use with video.  For instance, right now I've got 22 video files I need to distribute that add up to approx. 6gb of data.  I want to distribute those files to 10 different distribution partners.  That becomes 60gb of outgoing traffic for just 22 files.  Those 22 files alone put me over your largest package of 30gb which has already hit a pricing point that becomes too expensive for me.  I'd need to see an unlimited traffic plan at a more affordable price point for this to work for me.

Great idea though and best wishes for your success!

Bryan

Hi everyone!

I'm still messing around with the video side trying to decide how I want to move forward.  As Jo Ann mentioned, I do have around 40 footage clips available for license directly from our symbio site ( http://crackerclips.com/?s=footage&post_type=image ).

I have a major concern that's kept me from continuing tho and that's in regards to backing up the site.  I don't want to put in the days, weeks and months to get all our footage up and running only to lose the whole thing if something goes wrong and gets corrupted or the site gets hacked.  Having the site completely backed up with an easy way to restore is crucial.  If it were only still images it's not that difficult to find a service or a way to back the site up (I've got one now that automatically backs up every file on the server every night) but with the massive files we're talking about in regards to footage it doesn't seem to be that simple or straightforward from my research.  If I were to upload my entire footage collection to date we'd be looking somewhere around 600gb worth of data.

Since I'm no expert in this area and managing something that big makes me a bit nervous I'm considering using another service to handle the actual sale and delivery of the file.  In other words using symbiostock as you see it in the link above (symbio has great SEO) but each video would be linked on the detail page to where the actual deliverable file resides.  Photodeck would be one possible solution to handle the backend.  I'd be paying monthly for the service and the storage but still be receiving 100% of the sale.  I also wouldn't be responsible for backing up the files and maintaining the database on that side of the equation.  Sure it would cost me every month but the cost would be about the same as if I were paying monthly to have all that data backed up anyway.  Also, in the case of Photodeck, I could actually send in a hard drive and have it uploaded to my account, saving me literately months of uploading.

So until I get this all figured out, the bulk of our footage will be available through the Pond5 API we set up at http://stockfootage.crackerclips.com .

I'm not sure what you mean, but take a look at this clip - not the only one like this - which is for sale directly, not via Pond5

http://crackerclips.com/image/half-dome-from-yosemite-valley-stock-footage/

And there was a discussion about the two sites which had cobbled together something here

http://www.symbiostock.org/community/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=520

Take a look at this thread in the Symbiostock forums which will fill you in on that.

http://www.symbiostock.org/community/viewtopic.php?id=714

Thank you!

It was my approach when setting up our site in the beginning to do my best to design the layout using only the basic theme and plugins.  I didn't want to make any custom CSS changes due to the constant updates and changes.  To this day I haven't made a single CSS code change.  It's not that I couldn't figure it out it's just a conscious effort to keep things as simple as possible and I'm very happy with the way our site looks.

As in most things worth doing, there can be a learning curve but nobody should let that stop them.  Using a camera, learning photoshop, lightroom, ftp clients, color spaces and understanding all the hoops one needs to jump through to submit to agencies at one time required a learning curve.  For most of us now those things are second nature.  This is a project that I took on with a long term time frame in mind.  An investment in the future of my business.  I'm very happy with the direction it's going.

The mirrored content is cheaper than I have set my Pond5 images at, so I'm not sure whether getting it all mirrored would be a good thing anyway. I thought initially we were told we were going to be able to control our pricing on both sites - am i remembering that right?

I think you're remembering correctly.  It was my understanding that we would be able to control our own pricing on Pixmac as well.

I was accepted too.  Sounds good, I'll be interested to see how it goes.

That's awesome! Congrats on your sale.

FTP is working but the images are not being pulled off the server.

Quote from: CrackerClips on October 28, 2013, 13:46

Unless you're camera is capturing uncompressed footage (which is unlikely at this point) you're working with a compressed format out of the camera.

Doesn't Magic Lantern give you the option to capture raw video?
link: http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?board=49.0

I've never used Magic Lantern so I don't know what it offers.  Sure there are ways to capture uncompressed footage but it's not very straightforward or common right now.  That said in a few years our iphones will probably be capturing uncompressed video

Edited to add: I should have said uncompressed footage capture is not very common in the stock footage world as of now.