Selling stock videos is a great way to earn a side income for photographers. But what if you can’t step out right now to shoot new footage? The good news is, your existing gallery of videos that you’ve shot over the years can be a treasure trove of fantastic stock videos that can be uploaded on stock footage websites such as indievisual.in .
How can we identify which ones would be the best for this purpose? Here are a few tips to get you started:
1. What do people want from Stock Footage?
Before you start looking through your collection, get some clarity on what’s in demand. Look up categories and subcategories on various stock footage platforms (including ours) and try to anticipate what the buyers are looking for when they’re looking for such videos.
Now that you have some idea of what videos are actually going to be worth uploading, rummage through your collection to see what you can gather. Every so often, you’ll run into a neglected few seconds of footage that might be very scenic, but which might not have specifically suited the project you were then working on.
You may also look through videos that you may have used in some project earlier but you don’t mind reusing and selling as content online.
2. Scrape out 10-40 seconds from old videos.
Since the length of stock videos range from 10-40 seconds, you can easily find, cut and edit some videos which you may not have thought would be so useful. This is one of the most convenient parts of selling stock footage – the length.
40 seconds may not seem like much, but most stock footage buyers are looking for multiple such clips that they’ll bring together to create their narrative/story.
3. Edit Edit Edit.
Editing is going to be your best friend when it comes to scraping out parts from your video gallery. You may even find a few videos you might have taken a few years back, which would provide great value if it wasn’t shaky or the angles were right. That’s when editing comes to your rescue.
- You can stabilize, cut, zoom in, decrease or increase the speed and even color-correct the videos as and when needed.
- On top of that, now there are many apps and websites that help you enhance the quality of your videos.
4. What Does your Video convey?
A good stock clip will convey one particular thought/story/feeling/place, rather than trying to tell a full story – the buyer will stitch together multiple 20-second clips to tell the complete story.
The same clip can serve different purposes. For example, a clip of a wind turbine can work well in a story about India’s energy mix; about the progress of a particular state, or of India as a whole; about global warming and the response required; about modernization. Clients have their own needs that they’re trying to fulfill, that we can’t even envision right now, so the more choice we give them, the better.
5. Technical requirements
Make sure you check whether those videos meet the technical requirements of the stock footage website you want to sell on.
Many times people edit, colour correct and do everything in their power but when it comes to uploading stock footage online, their clips get rejected at the very last moment.
Indievisual has three options for quality of the video – 720p, 1080p and 4k. Some websites might only accept 4k.
6. Quality over quantity
It is always better to focus on quality than quantity; you don’t need to rummage through your hard drive and keep digging till you find 1000 clips to be uploaded – one good clip could get more downloads than 20 average ones.
Since uploading is not the only task, there are steps like clearly categorising and describing with keywords, many times you may get lost in the pile of videos that must be uploaded but may not end up providing as much value to you or the buyers.
7. Old might be gold
Old videos might not seem relevant to you, but they can serve a great value to someone purposely looking for the videos from the particular time frame when you shot it.
Several times it’s easy to doubt whether a video taken a while back may not be very useful. But again, if the video tells a story and meets the technical requirements, you should definitely try and make use of the opportunity.
When it comes to organising and repurposing your video gallery, the possibilities are endless. Play around and see what comes out. Make sure you maintain the requirements and not just sort out videos to increase the number of uploads!
