It looks like RevoStock really wants to sell more footage, which is great news!
Within a few days of Pond5 adding support for embedded meta-data, RevoStock also added support. Both sites were working on it at the same time, Pond5 just beat them to the punch… But it was far from a knock out and it looks like RevoStock is up for a title fight with some recent changes.
RevoStock now accepts clips encoded in H.264, QuickTime Animation and QuickTime PNG codecs. Which means that you can upload H.264 .MOV clips directly from cameras that support it, or re-encode in H.264 which provides a LOT more data for buyers. And the Animation/PNG codecs allow you to include embedded alpha information without having to create a separate luma matte for your animation or chroma key clips.
Also announced today were new options in Flex pricing that allow for more competitive pricing. The upper limit on pricing was raised to $65 in order to attract more higher end artists and the lower limit on pricing was set at $5 (SD clips, HD clips are $10) to allow for more competitive pricing in the huge animation market where prices on other sites are typically much lower than the previous $30 floor. It’s still not “create your own price”, but it’s still much better and should allow RevoStock to compete better with Pond5 and ClipCanvas (who also recently updated their pricing). The new pricing takes effect on May 17th.
The only major feature now missing from RevoStock is optional automatic resizing of clips. If you want to sell different sizes, you still have to do all the encoding work yourself.