Strange rejections

Envato Authors Video Authors
1

Hey everybody

Do you have experiences on having items rejected on straight reasons or no reasons at all?

I have been trying to publish few Northern Lights clips.

Here is the link to the first one:

And it was rejected with a feedback like this:

“Unfortunately we are unable to accept this clip due to the issue with the quality of the video. All of the edges seem very blocky, and the focus seems soft in some areas. It’s very similar to footage that is shot with a GoPro, and while it may be suitable for personal videos, it’s not really a high enough quality for professional stock footage.”

It’s like the critique was for a different item entirely, and if it was for this item, then the reviewer is not too knowledgeable. The clip was shot with a 5k RAW-format on Canon EOS 60D, something which is not even possible even with the newest GoPros.

I tried to enquire about this from Envato, and the response was as follows:

"Hello Juuso,

Thank you for reaching out to us about your concern. My name is Leimi and I will be assisting you today.

I do apologize for having to keep you waiting for a reply from us, but we are trying our best to cater to each email that we receive from all our community members. We appreciate your patience, and rest assure that we are doing our best to reply to you the soonest.

We’re sorry to hear about the recent rejection of your item. We know that this can be disappointing.

While we are unable to provide any further feedback, an alternative way to get feedback before submitting it again is to post a screenshot or link on the appropriate Market forum. There are many talented and helpful community members who can likely give valuable feedback to you.

You should also check out this article https://help.market.envato.com/hc/en-us/articles/204067134-Rejected-Items

Should you have further assistance required, please do let me know.

Best Regards,
Leimi"

Which doesn’t really provide any other help than to post here, what I’m doing right now.

Then two items were hard rejected at the same day when I submitted them the same day. I haven’t got an example clip of the second one, but it was taken immediately after this one:

So in settings and therefore in quality it should be pretty much exactly the same, it was just longer and displayed Northern Lights longer after this clip, it was rejected without any reasons.

And the link to the third clip is found here:

And first this was soft rejected, and there was an e-mail stating that the preview video file was too low quality, and after that immediately hard rejected without any reasons. And what comes to quality, this clip is better than any of the older real-time Northern Lights clips.

So now I’m asking you if you could assist me with this. It is a shame that I can’t publish these clips to VideoHive because of wildly random rejection processes. These clips are of the same quality than all the previous Northern Lights clips in my portfolio. How should I proceed with this? Thank you!

Best regards
Juuso Voutilainen
Northlogic VFX

3

I see lots of bending effects and low quality of sampling. But mb youtube compressed video and source is ok.

4

While the footage does look beautiful, there are still technical imperfections that can be an issue for approval on the marketplace. For example, in the first clip, the flickering and inconsistency of exposure is something the reviewers look for, and a valid reason for rejection.

5

Yeah, the YouTube compresses a lot, I can upload the source files since they don’t have these artifacts.

6

By flickering and inconsistency of exposure, do you mean the effects the cars that pass by have on the footage? While I agree with you that this could be an issue, the strange thing is that I have a video with similar effects which got approved.

This is the clip:

7

On second glance, it looks like the flickering is from cars passing by, which would fall under the category of poor video composition, and is a common reason for rejection. When filming time lapse footage of the sky, try to frame the shot so that nothing on the ground can reduce the quality, such as people walking through the shot or cars passing by.

Also, time lapses should have very smooth playback. These videos borderline on choppy playback, which makes it look more like several still images stitched together in an editing program, rather than a smooth video source.

8

Fair critique. While it is an compositional error, I thought that having the horizon completely visible than just trees from here and there would be better, and I thought that the road in the composition wouldn’t see so much traffic, but I guess it was in part due to the strong Northern Lights storm happening, and also the section of the sky where the Northern Lights appear dictates pretty much the composition. And also, the choppiness is due to the interval used to shoot the Northern Lights, and because of their type. These bright Northern Lights had a fast evolution, so they rapidly change form and place in the sky. However, the critique like yours would have been much more helpful than the critique that came from the Envato review team which seemed a bit misplaced.

EDIT: And I see that why these could be reasons for rejection, even though before they weren’t. Probably they update the quality standards over time though.

9

And now I got hard rejection on a clip shot with the Sony A7s in daylight with the exact same comments:

“Unfortunately we are unable to accept this clip due to the issue with
the quality of the video. All of the edges seem very blocky, and the
focus seems soft in some areas. It’s very similar to footage that is
shot with a GoPro, and while it may be suitable for personal videos,
it’s not really a high enough quality for professional stock footage.”

Kinda odd.