After many years of investment in stock video footage, we can confirm that is possible to live from stock industry income. If we had resources, information and moral support from the start, we would raise our stock value and database sooner. But learning many good and bad things through the years will help us grow and even share our experience with other contributors or buyers.
Stock video industry is a full time job where everyday is fulfilled with tagging clips, planning new footage, editing, uploading and copy-pasting data to other agencies. It depends on the workflow you establish, but in any way you can’t avoid shooting new footage and put a lot of mind resources to correctly tag (title, description and keyword) stock clips.
We currently made over 10.000 stock video clips that are online and selling. Monthly we make about 200 new clips that are shoot, edited and tagged. We had to establish own file server for constant (24/7) uploading of finished files to other agencies even if we are absent. Our database of stock video files is already 7 TB in hard disk size.
Currently our main video equipment is Sony A7s mirrorless camera in combination with Atomos Shogun for 4K video. For photos and HD video we use Canon 5D Mark III in cDNG format. With our shooting we use slider, jib, tripod or brushless gimbal.
Life is stock. Stock is life.
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