Digital Video - July 2008 - (Page 37) Q& A STOCK INTERVIEW BY NELS JOHNSON visited re iSTOCKPHOTO CONTRIBUTOR CHAD ANDERSON EXPLAINS THE PROCESS FROM THE INSIDE OUT. to enjoy and prosper in this emerging market. DV: In business and workflow terms, what’s the difference between traditional stock video production and Web-based video wrangling? Who does the indexing of your work on the iStock site? What time drains did you NOT expect? Chad Anderson: Ten years ago, I produced CD-ROMs with 30 broadcast-quality stock animations. I was the animator, the representative, the packager and the delivery guy. I sold a few of them on eBay for $200 but it didn’t make sense for me to spend so much time on the offline parts. I might make a thousand dollars, but it would take me maybe a month. In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, you would get phonebooksized catalogs from stock photography companies. They were beautiful but not cheap to print. Going through them was a real pain — not quite the same as big clear images on the screen faster and with search capability. The same goes for video. On iStock, I do all the key wording and descriptions of each file when I upload them One thing that can still be time-consuming, depending on how you approach it, is uploading different-sized video files when dealing with multiple gigabytes, even with a very fast Internet connection. The process that iStock has for uploading finished clips that are then available online, keyworded, ready for sale and download, is the most streamlined system I’ve seen. Another nice thing the iStock technology will do if I upload a clip at, say, HD 1080p, 30fps per second, is automatically create a corresponding group of down-sampled clips at various resolutions and file formats, including Windows media and MPEG-4, for example. I’ve found different perceptions about the nature of stock video online just because customers have an easier time getting what they want and searching through it first. Do you think they appreciate what they’re actually getting in a dv july 2008 VIDEO H ow has digital technology changed the video industry? Dude, next question, please. So let’s expand the proposition to include global broadband networks to which high-quality packetized video is just another data type available for high-speed transmission to (and utilization by) everyone from indie filmmakers to corporate creative departments. What we’re talking about here is digital stock video, a growing market and online community in which practitioners are finding serious retail opportunities and fresh ways to supplement their income — if not change the focus of their businesses. One top purveyor of the stock video revolution is iStockphoto (an independent subsidiary of Getty Images). iStock started the micropayment category in stock imagery in 2000, and began soliciting video artists in 2006. It now boasts near 100,000 clips, adding several thousand a month. They are created by artists all over the globe and sell for between $10-$50 per clip. iStock is a user-generated content site, with three million plus members. iStock sees a file downloaded from its site every 1.4 seconds, and shares 20-40 percent of the royalties with the artists who created each file. iStock paid out more than $20 million in 2007 to its artists and states that many make a solid part-time or full-time living from their portfolios. Here, key iStockphoto contributor Chad Anderson speaks about the opportunities for dedicated shooters and DV technicians www.dv.com 37 http://www.dv.com
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