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.

To my complete surprise, one of my posts was recently deleted on the forum over at the Dreamstime site. I was replying to a poster who had just recently joined DT and was asking how to get some sales and views. For the last few days, this person has had a total of one photo in their portfolio. And it's still currently one photo. My reply was as follows: "Adding more photos to your portfolio would be a good start."

Not long after that, I received an e-mail notification informing me that my post had been deleted. And possible reasons for deletion can be any of these things - "We delete duplicate posts, posts in other languages than English, spams or any post that may be considered as violation of the message board rules."

Obviously, my post was written in English, it was not a duplicate post or spam and did not break the rules which are outlined below:

https://www.dreamstime.com/thread_4521

All I was doing was offering helpful advice in that thread started by the newcomer. Logically, the only way to get sales is to have a decent sized portfolio containing quality images that are useful to clients. Having more than one photo in your port is certainly a step in the right direction if you do want sales.

These DT mods are really out of control. Some of them, especially the female mods, seem to be on a power trip.

By the way, I have had other posts of mine disappear from the DT forum in the past but I did not receive e-mail notifications about them.

I only joined SB a short time ago and had uploaded 70 videos there. I'm about to delete them all. I joined Pond 5 at about the same time and have a similar sized port over there and have had a few sales as well. No sales on SB at all. Well, my relationship with SB was brief and non-eventful.

So you "know that SS are not happy about contributors submitting content that is already in their port", and when you've submitted duplicate content SS "says that this photo is already in my port and doesn't accept it", but...  you "don't recall reading that rule" that they don't accept duplicate content? I would of thought it was obvious from your experiences, whether you'd read the rule or not?!

I think you're getting confused. I was referring to instances of submitting content that was previously in my port. Not submitting content that also existed in my port at the same time. I had no intention of submitting another copy of the same image that was already in my port and keeping both of them in there. And yes, due to those rejection reasons, I learned that SS did not want to have more than one copy of the same image in someone's port. Regardless, I don't recall reading that this was some kind of strict rule that one had to abide by when signing up and that violations of this rule would lead to the disabling of a person's account.