Thanks for the review and [future] videos!

Do you have any words on how the T2i performs at night (comparing with your HF11)?
I have an HV30, and am trying to see how the "vDSLR"s perform

Thanks,
adijr

Absolutely stellar in comparison.  I still need a faster Prime lens for perfect night shooting, but in some test shots of stars, the moon, and some video of a train stop there was at least 75% LESS noise than my HF11 which is horrible for shooting at night.

I headed out tonight to shoot some video at a local electrical power plant.... I love the way the smoke looks when lit up from below on a clear night.

Has anyone moved from an iPod Touch to an iPhone?

I currently have an iPod Touch with a ton of apps on it and I'm getting an iPhone 3GS this weekend.  I'm wondering if there is an upgrade path, or if I am gonna have to re-purchase all of my apps.

For me personally... I used to buy from StockXpert and Dreamstime, but now I just buy from Dreamstime.  In fact, 100% of the income I generate on Dreamstime is spent on buying credits.  They make is SOOO easy and level 1 image prices are extremely attractive.  I am always buying newly uploaded stuff there for my blogs.

A friend of mine works at an agency that has an iStock subscription.  So they mostly get their stuff from iStock.  But they will do "one-off" purchases of images at other sites if they can't find what they are looking for on iStock.  With the economy the way it is, however, their "outside iStock" budget is fairly limited these days.  So later in the month they'll sometimes have to make do with stuff on iStock even if it's not a perfect fit.

As noted in the article, there are MANY variations of H.264 and many of them are extremely efficient and provide MUCH MORE color data than PhotoJPEG or MJPEG.

The reason why most stock sites only accept limited codecs is because of a support issue with end users.  For a short time, Pond5 accepted any codec you could stick in a .MOV container.   But they kept having to convert the footage for users who didn't have ProRES or other codecs used.  Once they offer the ability for "end users" to re-encode footage on the server before downloading, artists will FINALLY be free to upload better and more detailed footage.

Several variations of H.264 are definitely PREFERRED for better color.  And in fact, the new 3D file standard uses two H.264 "channels" and many modern theaters with digital projectors receive previews, commercials, etc... in H.264.

And, as the article points out, the responsibility for license is the "end user", not the artist or the footage site.  Although nobody is even talking about this except for some legal people.  The patent owners know that if they actually enforced those types of agreements, the entire industry would move to another format and they'd lose millions.

Quote from: Achilles on January 06, 2010, 08:31

Fd-amateur, why do you make up stories without checking first? The account you're referring to has been inherited and proper legal documentation has been provided. Consequently rights were transferred properly and revenue is paid accordingly.

umm can you please tell me who inherited the account because im his daughter. and unless it was his other daughter, my sister, that person has no rights to the account

This is a very UNFUNNY hoax...

hi guys!
hope that there`s some expert in after effects who could help me with my first application at istock...

i tried to render my files as a quicktime with Mpeg 4 codec....and also with H264 codec...

I don`t know what I`m doing wrong but always the uploading dialog on the istock homepage shows the error message that the files are not MP4 files....
(the requirements are to submit quicktime MP4 h264 files for the first application)

would be nice if someone could help me with this....

Use the QuickTime H264 codec, NOT the Adobe MP4 or H264 codec.  They're buggy.

Moron, there's already a thread for this...

SS came yesterday.  Expecting one from Pond5 in the next day or two.

Quote

I think iStock/Getty cares as much about what we think as Fotolia

I don't really think that any site/agency cares about what we think. Why should they? We're just wallets with cameras...

Not to mention that most contributors roll over... Sure, they complain, but none of them are willing to give up existing revenue by removing their portfolios.  As a whole, the MS sites know they run the industry the way they want.

My files showed up within minutes of being uploaded... 

Now I'm just waiting on review (been nearly 10 days now).

Since being laid off over a year ago, MicroStock has become my full time job and then some (I spend about 80 hours a week on it).  But life does rear its ugly head and intrude on my work time...

My daughter is in her school band, she takes piano lessons and voice lessons, and she's in girl scouts (my wife is the scout leader), so she takes up a lot of my time (thankfully).  My wife works for a local radio station so we get free tickets to stuff all the time (went to a hockey game last night, going to a basketball game tomorrow night, concert next week, etc.).  I used to say no whenever she'd ask me to do all this stuff, but now I say yes most of the time.  Partially because it forces me to take a break from my "work" and mostly because I'm learning to enjoy the time spent with my family (recovering work-a-holic).

My concern about exclusivity is with cycles and copycats...  My experience this past year is that most times when sales are down on one site, they are up on another.  It's really kind of crazy...  If I was exclusive and a site experienced a slowdown with no other site to pick up the slack, I lose revenue by putting all of my eggs in one basket.  I'm sure it might be different if I had proven sellers that are fairly consistent each month, but I gotta believe that well will eventually dry up and stuff that us selling consistently now will eventually slow down and stop as the asset gets older.

Another problem I've run into are people who can't think for themselves and search the exclusives on sites for ideas, duplicate those and upload them to the other sites.  If you are hoping that you have something unique and that if buyers want it they WILL find you to buy your asset, that may not be the case.  They may find a copycat on the site they are already at and buy that instead.

I deal primarily in stock footage, not photos so the market and buyying patterns may be completely different.

Perhaps things like this are going to force us to remove images from the cheapo sites or force them to raise their prices to keep us.

While I think a number of artists will probably remove their collections from the lower-priced sites, history has shown that as a whole the microstock artist community rarely does anything together. If it had, the current pricing structure would not be in place and artists would have more clout in the industry.

The agencies are in control, so the best thing to do is just keep on producing new content and get it online...