I could see how the announcement could be slightly confusing. As it looks like we may be responding to complaints of unsatisfactory feedback, by just removing it entirely, but I can assure you that’s not the case.
I should start off by explaining how feedback for Stock Footage has worked up until now. If/when a Reviewer finds a Stock Footage submission to be far outside of our general quality standards, they issue a hard rejection without any additional feedback, and the system will send out a notification email to the author. This letter will only contain the standard rejection copy and no additional feedback. It’s been this way for many years. Only when an item is closer to our threshold, but still not quite acceptable will Reviewers also include some general notes detailing specific issues that are preventing the item from being accepted. It’s that level of feedback that we’re going to stop providing at an item by item level, as a trial.
Stock Footage is very different from other Video categories like After Effects Project Files, in that many of the issues identified cannot be easily fixed without going out and physically reshooting the entire clip. Project Files or Video Templates on the other hand, are easier to modify, or fix to improve issues we identify, without having to scrap the entire project and start over. Having a one-size-fits-all approach to rejection feedback across all Video categories is not ideal.
Because many Stock Footage authors do not look at our rejection feedback, we’re temporarily eliminating feedback on all hard rejections. If an issue is determined to be something that the author can easily fix in post, the item will still be soft rejected, with rejection feedback explaining what needs to be corrected. The change to hard rejections will eliminate a lengthy step in the review process, and allows us to process submissions much faster. So in turn, you will notice a shorter review window after submission.
We’re also in the process of making large changes to our guidelines and help center articles. By improving them to better explain our quality standards, authors will have a much clearer picture of the most common issues, to easily identify what could have caused their file to be rejected. These improvements will be rolling out soon.
And lastly, the general hope in all of this is to improve things for the better. So if there’s ever a situation where you have a submission that gets rejected, you want to know the reasoning, and the new guideline documents aren’t sufficient, we’re happy to provide feedback upon request through the support system.