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.

Steps

1. Shoot video footage with my Canon Powershot SX530 HS or Canon EOS 800D/T7i camera.

2. Trim/edit video with Avidemux so that the footage is not more than 60 seconds long, minimum 5 seconds. Set "Video Output" and "Audio Output" to "Copy" and "Output Format" to "MP4 Muxer" and save.
   

3. Open output file from 2. above in VirtualDub2. Post-process the input video with the necessary VirtualDub2 video filters.

4. Saving the video file as H.264 in the MP4 container in VirtualDub2 is a 2 stage process. See here for the steps and the parameters to set - couldn't figure out a simpler way, sorry.

5. Open saved .MP4 video file from 2. above in MPEG_Streamclip.
   
   Under menu option "File", select "Export to QuickTime".
   
   I use the following settings. I try to set the video bitrate of the output .MOV file to approximately match the value of the bitrate of the input .MP4 file by tweaking the "Quality" parameter. A bit of an trial-and-error here, so a few attempts may be necessary here. From 2. the bit rate is about 30300 kbp/s.
   

   
   
   

6. Check quality of encoded video. Re-encode if necessary if the output .MOV video is unsatisfactory due to banding, artifacts, etc.

7. (Update 9th November 2019) Check it there are any black blank frames either in front or at the back of the output video. Cut them out with VirtualDub2 if there is any.

8. Upload to Dreamstime with Filezilla into the "video" directory/folder.

Update (1st December 2019)

Steps 5 and 6 involving MPEG_Streamclip are not needed anymore since H264 encoded MP4 videos are accepted by Dreamstime.

Update (7th February 2020)

Updated my workflow as I now use VirtualDub2 for video processing - they have more video filters. Avidemux though, has better video navigation options compared to VirtualDub2. So I still use Avidemux for video trimming.