Something has just happened to me that has me extremely puzzled. And it's something that's very rare too. I actually got a rejection at Dreamstime. As you know, DT accepts just about anything. I honestly can't remember the last time I got a rejection there but it was probably over two years ago. And I could probably count my total number of rejections at DT with just one hand.

And the reasons for the rejection are bizarre. "The image is overexposed." I disagree. The subject (an insect) is correctly exposed. I bracketed different power settings on my speedlight and selected the most pleasing exposure for submission. The background may look very light in appearance but that's because it's white. Pure white. And there's certainly nothing wrong with a white background as you'll find many of those in microstock images.

The other rejection reason is: "Poor lighting." I say nonsense. I used off-camera flash positioned at roughly 45 degrees from the subject and I also had a diffuser to soften the light. Additionally, I also used a reflector to bounce light back into the shadow areas. As a result, my invertebrate subject was evenly illuminated by soft lighting. I have no idea why DT regards this as poor lighting.

My gosh, is this a sign that DT is becoming more like SS? I haven't had any photo rejections from SS for a little while but Ive heard of many other contributers over there complaining about ridiculous rejection reasons. Actually, by the way, this very same image was accepted by SS. Ive also submitted it to Adobe Stock but haven't heard back from their review team yet.

Regardless, I'll resubmit it to DT and see what happens.

23.976?

That is accepted by all agencies, and used in many professional productions. You might have seen "23.98" in that list, which is just a lazy way of writing 23.976. You don't have to convert anything.

Woops! Ah yes it is 23.976. Yea maybe it was "23.98" that I saw in that list. Good to know I don't need to do these conversions anymore.

Yea the footage plays smoothly. There's no stuttering or anything like that. And the bitrate is decently high. According to the properties within Shotcut, the original footage is 16:9 so no worries about the aspect ratio when converting it to HD. Though the frame rate was 23.something fps (can't recall exactly) and I converted that to 24fps. The reason I did that is because the camera's frame rate is not in the list of SS' accepted frame rates. Though Ive done this very same conversion quite a few times in the past and it's always looked normal in playback. Ive never had a rejection for it by any of the stock agencies.

I'm using a Windows 7 pc.

Since I shoot star trails on film, Ive never bothered with such software. An old camera with mechanical shutter will give me a 7+ hour time exposure with no batteries and no noise.

Great image, Uncle Pete.

I currently have a dilemma concerning stock footage. Not too long ago, I recorded some 4k footage of some news worthy content (I guess I should say potentially newsworthy.) However, the laptop that I usually use to edit 4k video is being repaired and so I don't have access to it. So I'm forced to use my 9 year old pc with only 4GB of RAM and old processor. I seriously doubt it could handle rendering 4k video files so the best I could do is render HD files from 4k footage. But a weird thing happens when I do that. I currently use Shotcut for editing stock footage and I always use a two pass render for optimum quality results. Though at least one of those passes will fail (and I get a big red X to indicate that.) Ive attempted to export this particular video so many times and what happens is that either the first render pass will fail or the second one will. Or sometimes both passes will fail.

Though surprisingly, when I play back the exported file, the video looks completely normal. I don't see any issues. Though logically, there must be something not quite right since I repeatedly got failed render passes. So the question is - should I submit or not? Just wondering if there might be some kind of issue that's invisible to me but might be apparent to an editor working with the clip on a timeline.

I also took some photographs of the very same subject that I recorded footage of. And one of those photos sold through SS over week ago. I couldn't find whereabouts the image was used though I'm assuming it may have been featured in a news article. I'm probably thinking now that this is old news and so I'm likely too late in trying to submit the footage of the same newsworthy subject. However, this morning, another one of my photos of the same subject sold through SS. So there could be hope yet.

Though like I mentioned before, there could be some technical issue with my edited footage that I'm not aware of. Cos according to Shotcut, what I have is a failed video export. And no matter how many times I render, I get those red Xs and the fail messages.

I'm not really in a position to say much as I have an extremely tiny video portfolio on less than a few sites. Though I will say that P5 is doing significantly better for me than SS with regards to video sales. I actually can't even remember the last time I had a video sale on SS. It would have been a long time ago.

This morning, I was able to log into the SS main website as usual no problem. Though I can only log into the forum temporarily to view the list of sub forums. As soon as I click on a particular sub forum like Contributor Experience, I'm logged out again. Don't know if it's a technical issue or if I'm being punished by SS for some reason. As far as I know, I haven't been suspended. And I notice that contributors who have accumulated a significant number of red arrows are no longer posting on the forum. Coincidence? Maybe they get an automation suspension when their popularity ranking gets too low. I haven't had any red arrows for a while (I'm still in the green as far as I know.)

Just curious if anyone else has gotten this or something similar? I just got a sale notification from Pond 5 via e-mail though as it turned out, it wasn't really a new sale after all. Apparently, it relates to one of my videos that previously sold before. This one has sold three times in the past. Someone paid extra money to upgrade to another kind of license for it's usage. This particular license is called a 'Netflix Premium License.' I got $15.84 for it. Judging by the name, I assume the clip's going to be used on Netflix.

Thankyou both of you.

make sure automatically send payout when balance reaches $25 is selected

I thought I recall reading that the minimum payout was $50 on P5. I made significantly higher than that with the four sales so no worries.

Dont waste your  time

I should have taken your advice. Another one of my posts over on the DT forums has mysteriously vanished. This time, there was no e-mail notification informing me of it's removal. All I was doing in that post was explaining the difference between commercial and editorial images to a newcomer to stock photography. Then the next time I visit the forum - bam! Gone! This is ridiculous.

With my first four sales on P5, I'm well above the minimum payout level. Though what happens now? I guess the payment is not automatic like on SS. Do I have to notify P5 that I want my payment?

I haven't used Stocksubmitter in a while and used it again just recently to submit some editorial content. And I just noticed that I got a rejection on Shutterstock for a video I sent through Stocksubmitter. This particular rejection was for the editorial caption. I checked the metadata of the file within SS and noted that the editorial caption which I had typed into the description field on Stocksubmitter was not copied over into the description area on SS. What happened instead was the title was copied over on to the description area - hence the rejection. This is quite surprising. Since SS uses descriptions rather than titles, I thought the description field from Stocksubmitter would be copied over. It's annoying too because Ive since submitted some other editorial videos and I guess they'll be rejected for the same reason. I guess the only thing I can do is copy and paste the description / editorial caption into both the title and description fields on Stocksubmitter.