My Stock Video Workflow

I just started shooting stock video recently, and I must say I am enjoying it. I think I am a fool if I were to ignore stock videos as the payout is much higher when compared to stock photos. As far as I could gather, we are talking about tens of dollars here for stock video sales against cents for stock photos. But still, the content matters.

Workflow

This is what I do before uploading my videos to Dreamstime. My workflow if you will.

Dreamstime prefers Quicktime .MOV container files compressed using Photo Jpeg. So this is what I aim to achieve here.

Software used

Avidemux, VirtualDub2, MPEG_Streamclip (I also installed KL QuickTimeAlternative 1.18 as I do not have the necessary QuickTime software for creating Photo JPegs in a .MOV file) and FileZilla.

Paddyfield Pipit

I have never seen this bird, a Paddyfield Pipit, around my house before. But they can be seem at about a hundred meters away from my home in the Jalan Sultan Abdul Jalil football field. A bit strange I think.

A rather timid bird in my opinion. Not really easy to photograph them as they get rather edgy when I stop and point my camera at them. Matters are made much worse now these days as the field is now fenced up and secured under lock and key. While the bird favourite usual spot is in the middle of the field. See my problem here? Not even my superzoom at maximum 250 mm focal length can save me here. The bird in the picture above (with some cropping) was about 30 feet away from me when it was taken. Not the best picture I know.

Shooting Stock Video With My Canon Powershot SX530HS

Soft at the telephoto end, chromatic aberration at high contrast areas and sensor noise. These are the reasons why I bought my Canon EOS 800D/T7i. But little did I know that my Canon Powershot SX530 HS takes excellent videos. So much so that three of my stock video footage were accepted by Dreamstime without much editing, shot at 1080p:

• Man Removing Concrete Forms From Ceiling
• Male Pink-necked Green Pigeon Preening
• Timber falling of a broken pallet in mid-air

My 'New' Refurbished Lenovo PC

I did say that I was going to get one. And I did. May 13th 2019 to be precise.

My 'new' Lenovo Thinkcentre M70e PC, configured with 4GB RAM, 500GB hard disk and an Intel Core2Duo processor running at 3.16GHz. Also included is a legal copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Pro license, a keyboard (by HP) and an optical mouse (no brand). In total, I paid RM250 including shipping. A good bargain I think since similar configured PCs cost about a RM100 to RM200 more by other sellers.