Dan Robinson
Most places are accepting digitized footage now via hard drive, CD or FTP. Most prefer this to tapes since it saves them in ingest time. I like it too, as it makes my life easier - making tape dubs can take up an afternoon. In the end, it all goes into a computer nowadays. In fact it has been a long time since I've shipped a tape.
For older formats, as long as your capture device is up to spec, the digitized result should be pretty close to the original master in quality. A good way to do this is to hook the old camcorder up to a newer DV camera with the analog cables, dub it to DV, then ingest with firewire as you would normal DV footage. Believe it or not, I've actually licensed some of my old VHS-C footage from pre-2001 that I digitized, archived and cataloged just for the heck of it. You never know what a producer will like.
And yes - the screener fee weeds out the window shoppers. Make it hefty (at least $150 or more per half-hour of video), stock footage is a specialty business! Stay far away from anyone who balks at screener fees or standard license rates. Making a screener usually takes an hour or two of your time. I had a prospective client once that wanted me to send over 14 hours of screeners for free. That would have been about two full work days assembling clips and recording them to 15 tapes. I passed on that one.
For older formats, as long as your capture device is up to spec, the digitized result should be pretty close to the original master in quality. A good way to do this is to hook the old camcorder up to a newer DV camera with the analog cables, dub it to DV, then ingest with firewire as you would normal DV footage. Believe it or not, I've actually licensed some of my old VHS-C footage from pre-2001 that I digitized, archived and cataloged just for the heck of it. You never know what a producer will like.
And yes - the screener fee weeds out the window shoppers. Make it hefty (at least $150 or more per half-hour of video), stock footage is a specialty business! Stay far away from anyone who balks at screener fees or standard license rates. Making a screener usually takes an hour or two of your time. I had a prospective client once that wanted me to send over 14 hours of screeners for free. That would have been about two full work days assembling clips and recording them to 15 tapes. I passed on that one.
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