Selling HD footage as "sample" footage to HDTV manufacturers, etc?

[Tom Lowe]

I'm planning to shoot a 5- to 7-minute timelapse short this summer and enter it at fim festivals. Someone mentioned to me a while back that companies like Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, etc, sometimes buy "eye-popping" short-form HD videos to use as "samples" for their HDTVs. I guess this is for in-store displays and convention booths and that sort of thing?

Does anyone know about this market? How would you even submit your footage to them?

thanks

 

[Mark Thorpe]

I would imagine a good start point would be to look up the name of their marketing manager / director and send in an investigative email, ask directly to the people who make decisions.

Cheers,
Mark.

 

[Michael Brennan]

Hi Tom,

They dont pay much if anything for use of material at trade shows.

If you can get in with TV manufacturers for point of sale then there is scope.
Ive shot point of sale glossy pics for Thomson TVs, they looked at my f900 stock footage but the boffins didn't like what the noise from HDCAM did to their in set processing. So we have been shooting SRW1 and Viper. They pay commercial rates. They have realised that it is impossible to shoot a wide range of HD material and keep it first rate and lately have done a contra deal with Discovery for branded Discovery pics.

In the early days of HD many of the major TV set manufacturers simply did not understand the value of stock footage and were aghast at the cost of making a 5 minute HD demo of good material.

A polish broadcaster who wanted to showcase HD to investors paid good money for quite a longform selection of around 8 minutes.


Panasonic Broadcast asked me to setup a interesting shoot at a sponsored sport event with different HD cameras, wasn't a shootout as much as exploring how different cameras could be used on location. They paid corporate rates.

Sony may drop you a box of tapes for use of pics for trade show material, their point of sale is corporate rates.

My tech advice is to keep the noise level as low as possible.
Biz advice suppliment timelapse with some generic B roll of live action to offer at a discount to pad out the screen time.

Hope this Euro perspective helps

Mike Brennan

 

[Tom Lowe]

Hey thanks, Mick. I will try to watch the noise!

Sorry for such a stupid question, but what exactly do you mean by "corporate rates"?

Mark, maybe we can throw together my timelapse, your Red underwater stuff, and grab some footage from another reduser or two, extract $50,000 from Sony or Panasonic, then go blow it all on 2 months of scuba and beer-drinking in the South Pacific. Well... we can dream.

 

[John Hunt]

Back in the early days of HD when we were shooting 1035i, we were contacted by a monitor company who needed trade show footage. We supplied them with a lovely montage of beauty shots in return for "borrowing" one of their compact HD field monitors for a couple years. It was a pretty exotic device in the late 90s. No cash.

Keep your options open - maybe a barter deal will work well for you.

John

 

[Pawel Achtel]

I'm planning to shoot a 5- to 7-minute timelapse short this summer and enter it at fim festivals. Someone mentioned to me a while back that companies like Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, etc, sometimes buy "eye-popping" short-form HD videos to use as "samples" for their HDTVs. I guess this is for in-store displays and convention booths and that sort of thing?

Does anyone know about this market? How would you even submit your footage to them?

thanks

It is a funny market, but I did sell a few HD loops for this purpose. I just put all the information online and wait:

http://achtel.com/Demo/

Don't expect big volumes. You rather want to price it high and have the ability to negotiate down for a small fish. For larger clients it is not price sensitive, just difficult to deal with bureaucracy. I managed to score both.

Hope it helps.

 

[Bob Franco]

Lola race car?

Lola race car?

Hey John Hunt! Is that a Lola sports 2000 racer?

 

[Petr Dvorak]

yep shoot some eye-poping HD footage for Sony with Red :w00t:
I bet they wil love it ...

 

[Tom Lowe]

yep shoot some eye-poping HD footage for Sony with Red :w00t:
I bet they wil love it ...

HUSH!!!!! :bleh:

 

[Lexicon]

I think few if any TV makers are still using sample footage from third parties to sell their TVs. One thing I've seen is that at stores like Best Buy and Circuit City, they are no longer playing the random HDTV footage reels like what Toshiba and Sony first had on hand when they were demonstrating their respective disc formats on their sets. By and large, all I see now are constant loops of the Blu-Ray or DirecTV 15-minute infomercials with the occasional movie actually playing.

 

[John Hunt]

pls forgive the off-topic...

pls forgive the off-topic...

Hey John Hunt! Is that a Lola sports 2000 racer?

Hey Bob - yes, that's my Lola 592S Sports Racer - 2 liters and 900 lbs of fun!

John

 

[Phil Bates]

From my experience, this is not a big market. We like to have our demo footage shown at trade shows, but the most we can hope for is a watermark or credit.

Phil
www.artbeats.com