http://www.firstshowing.net/2013/vfx-company-rhythm-hues-protested-last-nights-oscar-ceremony/

http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/an-open-letter-to-ang-lee/
 
http://thinkinganimationbook.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-piece-of-pi.html?m=1

Most VFX artists work 100 hour weeks with no health insurance and no rights; many ending up in the hospital, sick from the ludicrous stress put on them to perform. VFX companies are lucky if they can make a 5% profit working on any tent pole films and inevitably all fail and go out of business with margins that slim. There are no unions and since this is now a global issue, no chance to form one. The famous "tax subsidies" that Studios chase from state to state and country to country is not a tax at all but millions of your hard-earned tax payer dollars "given" to the Studios for their films in hopes that it will bring in income & employment for their communities. It rarely does. I know character animators working on Tent Pole films for $12 per hour while carrying $100,000 school debts. The latest scam before Digital Domain went bankrupt was to get 30% of their films made by free labor through students. In India the VFX studios can legally insist their local artists work 3 feature films for free to "prove" themselves before they begin paying them. Most are let go after the third film. That mentality and financial success could easily begin being applied here.

Quote from: meldayus on February 27, 2013, 20:17

I know it's probably a little early, but has anyone heard back since submitting a link to their portfolio in reply to Bruce's email the other day?  I'm talking about the email which invited interested contributors to reply with a link to their portfolio, not the email which invited submission of 10 files which people who were contacted earlier seem to have got.

I haven't heard back yet.

Same here.

Had my first $0.25 download yesterday.  Ironically, the same image also sold on BS yesterday for $1.00.  It'll be interesting to see if the dollar sales disappear and the subscription sales take over.

Yesterday I uploaded some images via the web site (http).  After they came across I selected edit but I got a 505 server error message.  Waited a couple of hours, went back in to edit and the images had come on through.  Everything was fine after that.

I'm getting "Internal Server Error" when I try to move an image from upload (http) to edit.  Everything else seems to be working OK.

I had to change my answer.  I now save files at Q12.  not because I can see a difference but because there is no reason not to.

Agree completely.  I save my master images as TIFF files only because they appear as thumbnails while PSD files do not.  If any editing needs to be done, it is always on these.  The JPEG file that is to be submitted is always saved at quality level 12 because, as Leaf says, there's no reason not to.  Memory is dirt cheap.  I've a two terabyte HD in my computer along with multiple terabyte external drives for back-up.  And with high-speed internet, uploading is rarely an issue.  The only time I've had to resort to lower quality on my JPEG's is when the file size is too large to meet the agency's limit.  I had a JPEG file that I wanted to upload to Alamy, but it was around 75mb at quality level 12, even though it was only 5000 x 5000 pixels (very high color saturation).  Had to save it at level 10 to get it small enough to meet Alamy's maximum limit.

Given the potential danger of any model released image on IS making it's way to Google for free and uncontrolled distribution, I've taken down all of my images with people in them.  Just not worth the risk, seeing as I had assured my models of the restricted usage where their images could be displayed.  And, yes, the MR policy at IS was a royal PITA and for that reason alone I hadn't loaded anything new for the past two years.

I agree we need both side of any story in order for each of us to make up our own minds.  The problem I see is not so much that two sides are expressed, but rather how they are expressed.  Straight forward facts, or clearly noted personal opinions, are fine.  Emotional responses and name calling are not.  In several instances, insults are not expressly stated, but thinly implied.  Keep in mind that each of us can only relate our own personal experience.  If I say sales are up, that's just my sales, not necessarily everyone's experience.  If someone state's that their sales are down, I can/should not tell them that they are full of it as they are stating their own experience.  After a while, if more people say things are doing well, we can imply that may be the general drift for that topic.

So, please continue to state your personal thoughts and experience; but, lets do it in a respectful manner.  Anything else only alienates others from giving your input any credence.

Do you need a Facebook account to be considered for this?  I've deliberately avoided all social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) as I've enough distractions in my life without adding more.

As to cherry-picking people's port via their e-mail, how would this be done?  I do use the same e-mail address at all agencies I upload to, but how can you identify these sites and your individual port solely from an e-mail address?

Ok, then people at IS realize Getty made a deal with the Devil. Yes, more accurately put.

Actually you were right the first time.  IStock made a deal with the devil and the devil is Getty.

Apart from the decrease in total files, has anyone been noticing what the waiting approval file numbers have been doing?  I failed to write down what the waiting number was at the outset, but the last posted number here was 63951. I do know it's been climbing and is likely even higher by now.  Going strictly by memory (a dangerous thing at best) I believe this number is close to 4000 images higher than it was at the beginning.  If anyone has such records, it would be interesting to see if that figure is comparable for a similar period of time or different in one direction or another.  Have others been uploading more than usual in an attempt to take advantage of the decrease in high quality images which are/have been taken down?

OK I can see this is deteriorating so here's a couple that are pretty sad.

What do you call a cow with no legs?  .... Ground beef.

What do you call a prostitute with no legs?  .... a night crawler.

Quote from: w7lwi on January 26, 2013, 14:36

Early last year I had occasion to review my portfolio and was shocked to discover about a quarter were marked RM.  These images were all up elsewhere as RF.  How these got in as RM I don't know. 

I would guess these images, if you marked them correctly upon uploading, may have people in them without MR. Even if the people are just dots in the image, you have to mark that there are people in it and that automatically will make an image RM. If you didn't mark and they find, they will change it. I would expect however they would send a note, even as an alert.

No, no people of any sort.  And since Alamy changed them to RF as I requested, that confirms to me that I made some sort of mistake when I uploaded them.  All good now.