This post is written by Laurent Dambies, the author of the blog Microstock Experiment.

I recently invested in a HD camcorder (a Legria HF 200, twin of the Vixia HF200 in the USA) to get into stock footage. In this post, I will talk about my first impressions about switching from photo and video and the differences I came across during capture and editing.

Equipment and capture

The HF200 camcorder is surprisingly small and light (340g). However, it lacks a wide angle lens. Luckily, I managed to get down to a 31.6 mm (from 39.5 mm) without any loss of quality by adding a WCON 08B converter. Similarly, the TCON 17B brings the 592.5 mm to a 859.1 mm. When I shoot video, my SLR viewfinder is replaced by a very convenient multi-angle LCD screen. If a 8GB card is more than enough to record 10MP raw pictures, it’s not so much for HD videos. This forced me to upgrade to 16GB class 4 SD card. The Legria comes short in battery life since I can record only about 1h of footage. Often the battery gives up before the card is full which never happened with my DSLR. To add to my misery, replacement batteries are much more expensive than for a DSLR Camera as well.

Like for photography, I use Aperture Priority quite a lot and occasionally Speed Priority. I almost always use manual focus (which is surprisingly precise on the LCD screen) to avoid changes in focus while recording footage. This will sometimes happen when focus is set to automatic.

Photography and videography are quite similar but also very different. The big difference is that in video you have to predict the action and how it will play.

Take the basic scene of an autumn leaf on the grass:

• In photo, composition, control of the depth of field, exposure will be the main parameters before pointing and shooting.
• In video, these parameters are still there but you have to compose also with external elements like the wind and the light that can sometime make your sequence more powerful.

While I do not really pay attention to the wind while taking pictures, I learned that in video, it can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Wind can give some movement to a static scene but if you don’t have a steady tripod it can ruin all your footage.

In some ways, I found movie-making more restrictive since you cannot do vertical shooting for example and it is, with the HF200 at least, difficult to change the focus while recording. At the same time, video brings more freedom since you can pan and zoom.

Processing time

Instead of processing raw files, I now work with AVCHD which is a compressed format developed jointly by Sony and Panasonic.

I found out quickly that if the AVCHD format sounds appealing its processing can be quite a headache. Few softwares are currently capable of rendering AVCHD correctly and its conversion can be tricky: files have to be converted to QuickTime, the format accepted by all agencies. I am still working on a standard workflow but I found out that scenes with fast moving subjects are the most difficult to render properly in QuickTime. It apparently is a result of recording in 1080i (i stands for interlaced) and that computer displays are progressive. Therefore, additional deinterlacing treatment is required.

It comes to no surprise that processing footage takes longer than processing an image; even when doing HDR or panorama. Processing a 20 seconds footage can take anywhere between 4 minutes and 5 minutes depending on what filters are applied. It can be more than an hour if you speed up your videos to do timelapse.

Storing raw footage can also be an issue so an 1TB hardrive will be handy especially when you have to store these few GB time lapse videos.

Uploading

When it comes to uploading, there is a huge difference in size between footage and photos: If a 10 MP picture is between 3 and 5 MB, a 20 seconds HD1080 clip can be between 200 and 250 MB, the equivalent of about 50 pictures. Uploading 20 HD clips can become a daunting task if you don't have a high speed internet access and I would consider that a 1Mbps upload speed is the minimum to have in order to work comfortably.

As I want to upload only once, I use iSyndica to distribute my videos across different agencies. At the moment, Isyndica can deliver footages to Pond5, Revostock, AlwaysHD, Stockxpert, Fotolia and more. Amazingly, once on iSyndica, my 200 MB clips are redistributed in a matter of seconds.

Final submission

Unfortunately, there is not yet an equivalent to the IPTC system for videos which means extra work: you have to copy paste title, description and keywords in each agency. Until such system comes up, the best option I found so far is to open my video catalog on iSyndica and simply copy/paste the different fields from there.

Conclusion

Stock footage has definitely its technical challenges: processing and uploading are both much more time consuming than for photos. On the bright side, it is an opportunity to learn video capture and editing. On the money side, there are much less submitters in stock footage than in stock photography. Prices are higher so it might be a good time to enter before it becomes too difficult (see my previous post). At the time of writing, Pond5 had 200,000 clips.

If you want like me start selling your footages online, I would recommend for a start Revostock and Pond5 because they seem to be good earners for many. I will document my monthly footage earnings on the top of my photo ones, hopefully they will start soon.