What's with the trend of re-releasing clips?

[mark88]

I've noticed numerous studios doing this on clips4sale?

Is business this bad that you have to go back to page 40 in your studio, pick a clip, then re-upload it to page 1 as a new clip?

Comes off a bit dishonest in my opinion

 

[Fat Bastard]

I find it humorous thinking most of the Cal Star models are grandmothers by now.

 

[shark]

It does save newer potential customers the effort of searching through years of production. Several producers have hundreds of pages in their studios, dating back over a decade.

 

[CapturedDoll]

Making money aside... maybe they just consider some vids really good and worth a relook.

 

[The Tickle Room]

I re release clips in a foot only or ub only clip way after because people complain they cannot afford clips or want a clip for one particular reason.
Some also do it for multiple formats since some people live in the stone age and need a WMV file.

 

[Hemmen]

Making money aside... maybe they just consider some vids really good and worth a relook.

Very good point. One thing I don't really get, though, is changing the model's name for a re-release; granted, I've only seen that once, but I still don't get the thought behind that.

 

[tkltoy]

It also keeps your company near the top of Clips4Sale, since it tends to go by recent updates. If a company releases one new video a week but re-releases 3 others, that's four times it gets bumped.

In other words, it's good business sense.

 

[ChicagoDavid]

C4S previously had an autofeature that said if you had previously ordered the clip. Now that's gone. So at least part of it is an intentional attempt to trick some people into ordering the same clip they bought years ago a second time, by accident. Changing the name? That's also the most likely explanation. (Though one could argue that if you don't remember getting the clip, you're buying too many!). Some also can legitimately rerelease by doing some modern video magic to improve the video quality (though I don't understand why that's possible). Ginary does it very honestly -- she says "released clip" if that's the case, in the description.

 

[duderino84]

I've noticed numerous studios doing this on clips4sale?

Is business this bad that you have to go back to page 40 in your studio, pick a clip, then re-upload it to page 1 as a new clip?

Comes off a bit dishonest in my opinion

Needing money I'd say is probably a factor. I doubt they can really improve the raw video footage being the reasoning.

 

[Master&ticklee]

There’sa new crop of fetishist that were in grade school when the clips came out. Gives those people a chance to see good content. I’m glad Calstar which was before my time rereleased their oldies.

 

[turtleboy]

It also keeps your company near the top of Clips4Sale, since it tends to go by recent updates. If a company releases one new video a week but re-releases 3 others, that's four times it gets bumped.

In other words, it's good business sense.

This is the reason it happens. It's not just tickling stores, many of the C4S top stores do this as a way of maintaining constant updates - sometimes several times a day - without actually releasing all that much new content. It's supposed to be against the rules as it's basically just a way of spamming the system and keeping your store on the front page. C4S keeps making announcements about it threatening action, but they never really seem to follow through.

Last year they announced that all store owners would only be allowed to release a maximum of two versions (i.e. sizes/formats) of each clip and that clips would be deleted if store owners were caught violating the rules. Nothing has happened since though and the practice continues.

 

[The Last Laugh]

I sometimes delete and re-upload old clips, but not with the intention of actually re-releasing them. I've been making tickling videos since 2002, so a lot of my stuff is really old and, in many ways, painfully outdated. There isn't much I can do about the resolution or picture quality aside from some minor tweaks, but there are other things I can change. For instance, the copyright/URL info. See, I shut down my personal website a couple years ago, having decided that it had outlived its usefulness, but this resulted in a little technical problem: all of my clips included the site's now defunct URL in the copyright info at the end. It's still the case for many of them, actually. As you can imagine, it's not very useful for guiding potential customers to my store. A lot of my older clips also still include an old logo that I haven't used for many years and that I would like to get rid of completely, eventually. So I've been very gradually updating a large portion of my back catalog using different intro and copyright still frames. I'm also converting all of my clips to the MP4 format (my standard used to be WMV).

Problem is, as far as I'm aware, C4S doesn't allow me to simply edit a clip entry and replace the old video file with an updated one. I can change a clip's title, picture, description, preview, order, price, etc., but not the actual video file itself. So I have to delete the entire entry and create a new one. Because of this, people may notice old clips being "re-released" on my store from time to time. But I don't do it to make them more visible in the hopes of increasing my sales, this spamming the system. It's just that it's the only way I know to update old content. I don't even change the order in which those clips appear: if the original clip used to be on page 53 of my list of clips, the new version remains in the exact same position. I don't post it at the top of my store as if it was a new product. The vast majority of people probably don't even notice anything.

Anyway, I just wanted to explain one of the many possible reasons for the phenomenon brought up by the OP, at least as far as my own store is concerned.

 

[Phineas]

though I don't understand why that's possible

It's possible for a multitude of reasons.

For one thing, producers may have upgraded their software to allow for better processing. F'rex, back when I was muddling around with video editing I had a very basic suite that did little more than let me muck with sliders. Now that I do FX work I have a full package that does white-balancing, noise reduction, recoloring, and a whole host of other effects, and the end results are like night and day. Sometimes you have a really good clip that needs some retouching, and it's worth doing because we all know how the community loves to cry about video quality.

It's also possible because maybe the original clip was recorded in a particular format that C4S doesn't support, and the conversion caused a loss in quality. Newer software packages (and more experience from the producer) allow for more accurate recoding.

Finally, Clips4Sale's technical specifications for allowable videos - bitrate, length, file size, etc. - have changed over the years. A clip that was originally squashed down to low-res in order to be uploaded at all can now be re-released in its original, hi-res format to be enjoyed anew.

Technology and experience marches on. It'd be a shame if we couldn't re-process old works to make them better than they were, IMHO.

 

[duderino84]

It's possible for a multitude of reasons.

For one thing, producers may have upgraded their software to allow for better processing. F'rex, back when I was muddling around with video editing I had a very basic suite that did little more than let me muck with sliders. Now that I do FX work I have a full package that does white-balancing, noise reduction, recoloring, and a whole host of other effects, and the end results are like night and day. Sometimes you have a really good clip that needs some retouching, and it's worth doing because we all know how the community loves to cry about video quality.

It's also possible because maybe the original clip was recorded in a particular format that C4S doesn't support, and the conversion caused a loss in quality. Newer software packages (and more experience from the producer) allow for more accurate recoding.

Finally, Clips4Sale's technical specifications for allowable videos - bitrate, length, file size, etc. - have changed over the years. A clip that was originally squashed down to low-res in order to be uploaded at all can now be re-released in its original, hi-res format to be enjoyed anew.

Technology and experience marches on. It'd be a shame of we couldn't re-process old works to make them better than they were, IMHO.

How far can things be improved? From my understanding you can manipulate the conditions that the source material was recorded (the camera, lens, light exposure, e.t.c) but how much can be improved? Not sure. I know with audio you can process things throughout, but if you're trying to make a sound completely different, the source material dictates how far you can go.

 

[The Tickle Room]

How far can things be improved? From my understanding you can manipulate the conditions that the source material was recorded (the camera, lens, light exposure, e.t.c) but how much can be improved? Not sure. I know with audio you can process things throughout, but if you're trying to make a sound completely different, the source material dictates how far you can go.

I used to use cyberlink and it was not fun. With my new editing programs I can fix brightness and contrast problems while color correcting which really fixes clips up, but I really do not like bringing out all old clips when I have new and better models ^_^

 

[ChicagoDavid]

Finally, Clips4Sale's technical specifications for allowable videos - bitrate, length, file size, etc. - have changed over the years. A clip that was originally squashed down to low-res in order to be uploaded at all can now be re-released in its original, hi-res format to be enjoyed anew.

Technology and experience marches on. It'd be a shame of we couldn't re-process old works to make them better than they were, IMHO.

Now THERE is an explanation I can understand of improved quality of an older clip! I still think there should be a rule that one indicates "rereleased."

 

[Phineas]

How far can things be improved? From my understanding you can manipulate the conditions that the source material was recorded (the camera, lens, light exposure, e.t.c) but how much can be improved? Not sure. I know with audio you can process things throughout, but if you're trying to make a sound completely different, the source material dictates how far you can go.

The answer is almost always "it depends". Like, take the following two images that I shot at a local punk show. The first one is the original. The second is the same image with a slight Curves adjustment, which brings out the "mids", or middle range of image colors. (Curves is the name of a particular Photoshop tool, but some video software has it as well.)



Even something as simple as properly white-balancing an image and bumping up the saturation can remove ugly tints and brighten washed-out colors... and for the more budget studios that can't afford proper lighting rigs to fill the scene with actual, natural-looking white light, it keeps you from being at the mercy of odd-colored fluorescents or red spotlights (which seem to be omnipresent at clubs and often give me fits).

Also, if you're smart enough to keep the original footage, which may have been pretty good to begin with (but had been squashed into crap by filesize limits or whatever) it's often just a matter of re-exporting it with more relaxed settings. You'd be surprised at how something as simple as altering the bitrate affects the final video in terms of picture quality and filesize.

 

[turtleboy]

It's possible for a multitude of reasons.

For one thing, producers may have upgraded their software to allow for better processing. F'rex, back when I was muddling around with video editing I had a very basic suite that did little more than let me muck with sliders. Now that I do FX work I have a full package that does white-balancing, noise reduction, recoloring, and a whole host of other effects, and the end results are like night and day. Sometimes you have a really good clip that needs some retouching, and it's worth doing because we all know how the community loves to cry about video quality.

It's also possible because maybe the original clip was recorded in a particular format that C4S doesn't support, and the conversion caused a loss in quality. Newer software packages (and more experience from the producer) allow for more accurate recoding.

Finally, Clips4Sale's technical specifications for allowable videos - bitrate, length, file size, etc. - have changed over the years. A clip that was originally squashed down to low-res in order to be uploaded at all can now be re-released in its original, hi-res format to be enjoyed anew.

Technology and experience marches on. It'd be a shame if we couldn't re-process old works to make them better than they were, IMHO.

It is true that some producers may simply be correcting/improving older clips, which is a legitimate reason for re-releasing them. However, a number of the larger producers on C4S (not necessarily tickling producers) do simply recycle the exact same clips as a matter of routine. They basically delete and then re-add them as if they are new, giving them that bump that goes with each new release. Again, this became so widespread that C4S banned the practice although it still goes on.

As for file sizes/formats, C4S have actually become stricter on this, introducing more size limits and restricting the use of older, less commonly used video formats. That said, this could be a reason for updating some older clips.

How far can things be improved? From my understanding you can manipulate the conditions that the source material was recorded (the camera, lens, light exposure, e.t.c) but how much can be improved? Not sure. I know with audio you can process things throughout, but if you're trying to make a sound completely different, the source material dictates how far you can go.

You can always adjust white balance, contrast etc. You can often lighten a shot that is too dark although it will add grain. If the source video is over-exposed, or too contrasty at the point of recording however, you can't really do much to correct it - in the same way you can't really recover sound that is distorted and clipped. You also can't really do anything to correct lens issues (such as a shot being out of focus) or truly enlarge a video (from 1080p to 4K for example) if it was actually recorded in the lower resolution.

If it's just a case of an older clip not having been edited or corrected in the first place and/or being badly encoded then you can still do a lot to fix colour, exposure, contrast, sharpness, improved edits etc. You can also export it at a higher bitrate and in a different format to adjust the quality.

 

[Phineas]

It is true that some producers may simply be correcting/improving older clips, which is a legitimate reason for re-releasing them. However, a number of the larger producers on C4S (not necessarily tickling producers) do simply recycle the exact same clips as a matter of routine. They basically delete and then re-add them as if they are new, giving them that bump that goes with each new release. Again, this became so widespread that C4S banned the practice although it still goes on.

Well, sure. I'm not saying it's the only reason. But it is a reason. My original response was geared toward the specific question(s) of why/how it would be possible to upgrade a clip's quality, not whether it was what people were actually doing. I agree that the system can be/has been gamed.

As for file sizes/formats, C4S have actually become stricter on this, introducing more size limits and restricting the use of older, less commonly used video formats.

That hasn't been my experience, but my memory could be faulty. Yes, they've ditched some file types (and seem to waffle back and forth on whether you're allowed spaces in your filenames... ugh) but the maximum filesize has definitely gone up over the years. It used to be capped at like 1.1 GB but now it's definitely higher... somewhere around 4GB IIRC (and I know this for a fact because I was able to eventually upload a video in its original format that simply wasn't possible when it was originally released). They've definitely tightened up the minimum length of the video related to the filesize, to keep people from uploading 1 minute clips that weigh in at 3 gigs.

 

[kingmaker]

I know people that do that on instagram too, it's just because the curation method is flawed.

Every platform should think about ways to push (good) old content to the relevant people.