Envato Elements - My Experience as a Customer

This time I played the role of a client because I needed to create a short promotional film (it’s ready - you can find it on YouTube by typing “Peakstar passion”) - without much thought I decided not to look far and use Envato Elements. My post will be about authors of stock films, stock music and after effects / premiere pro designs (like logo reveal, light effects, transitions and this kind of items).

I’ve seen a lot of discussion on the forum about Envato Elements being too cheap while offering unlimited downloads. I partially agree with it - I think that the price can be slightly increased (and that’s because the quality of the offered products is really high).

I will say to the Authors from the mentioned categories this way → you have nothing to worry about.

I made my film for 3 weeks (2 min 21 sec of video). Every single element contained in it was obtained on Envato Elements - even grain effects, light and similar details → except for my logo (I created the logo myself, of course) and the lector who was hired for this recording.

After buying access for a month, I barely got around to creating it so that I could publish it on youtube during the subscription period. This is an important part of the entire subscription.

  1. In order for the video not to be blocked (or removed / demonetized) on youtube, you must publish it during the subscription period (after its expiry, the license for the materials used is lifetime, it is about the moment of publication)

  2. If you break the rule from point 1, when youtube asks for a license for selected (or all) elements included in the movie, there may be a problem with the video.

  3. Downloading files 24h / 7 misses the point in this case because their subsequent use in the movie we want to publish is quite doubtful. So you won’t download terabytes of files and then you won’t spent a month creating something… for what, for 80% - 90 % of chance for ban?

I repeat → authors from the above-mentioned sections - you have nothing to worry about.

My suggestions for Envato:

  1. Price - from the point of view of the customer who I was … gold. Perfect price. From the author’s point of view … I think it could be raised a little - so as you can see the point of view depends on the point of sitting.

  2. It would be good to add a short annotation in the file download window that the name of the project to which we download is free / we can name our product the way we want and it can be different from the name of the final video for example - this one sentence would save me 20 minutes of browsing the help center for this information - I guess other clients may have similar experience.

  3. The ability to scroll the preview of the video that we see after hovering the mouse over the selected project (we have a preview without going to the product page) - something similar to what is now on youtube - it is probably difficult to do but as a client spoiled by youtube, I missed this option a bit .

BIG PLUS for music on Elements → I checked the website of the competition (a very large and popular site with music files) - their licenses are a nightmare - 50 pages of licenses, listed how many links, how many portals etc. etc. - drama - you can read this for days and you still don’t know if you can publish your video on facebook for example.

No problem on Elements → one simple license, bright as the sun, 2 minutes of reading and you can go back to work.

To sum up:

The monthly subscription allowed me to create a short promotional video at a good price and, fortunately, without the possibility of clogging the discs with video files, because such a procedure does not completely make sense. The price from the customer’s point of view is great, from the author’s point of view, it could probably be higher (I would have no problem paying a little more).

If you survived to the end of this post… you’re Rambo :slight_smile: thanks.

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Thanks for sharing your experience!

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