Stock Video Specs & Metadata: 9 Agencies Compared

A still photo is close to portable. You shoot a JPEG, you keyword it once, and most agencies will take it. Video is not like that. The same 60-second clip is legal at one agency, four seconds too long at another, and too big to upload at a third — and the keyword list that is considered thorough on Pond5 is considered stuffed on Adobe Stock. This page puts the specs and the metadata rules for nine agencies side by side, so you can prepare one delivery instead of nine.

Every number below comes from the agency's own contributor documentation, linked at the bottom. Where an agency does not publish a number, we say so rather than guessing — footage specs change, and a confident wrong figure costs you a re-export of a whole shoot.

The technical specs, all nine on one page

Containers first, because that is the easiest rejection to avoid. Every agency in this table accepts a QuickTime .mov or an .mp4. Only three accept anything else, and one of them (Pond5) explicitly refuses a re-wrapped .mp4 that did not come out of the camera that way.

Two things in that table are worth stopping on. The first is that the 5-to-60-second window is not universal, it is just common. Depositphotos will take a three-second clip that Adobe, Shutterstock and Pond5 all reject. 123RF takes two minutes and Vecteezy takes two minutes, which means a long observational take has exactly two homes on this list. If you shoot long, cut a 60-second version for the majority and keep the full take for the two that want it.

The second is Alamy. Alamy sells footage, so contributors reasonably assume they can supply it — but Alamy's own contributor help states that it has closed the video application process for individuals and is currently sourcing footage from agency partners only, with a promise to announce when individuals can submit again. If you have been waiting on an Alamy footage approval, that is why.

Codecs

Codec lists are where the agencies genuinely diverge, and where a batch export set once and forgotten will quietly fail at one agency for years.

• Shutterstock publishes the clearest list: PhotoJPEG, Apple ProRes (422, 422 HQ, 422 LT, 4444), H.264, PNG, MPEG-4 Visual and Apple Animation (RLE). It also accepts H.265 but says plainly that it does not recommend it. REC 709 is the preferred colour space.
• Pond5 ranks its codecs by preference, and the ranking is the useful part: unmodified camera-native codecs first (R3D, AVCHD, ProRes, DNxHD/DNxHR, XDCam, MXF, M2TS, HDV, DV, DVCProHD), then ProRes variants, then DNx, then H.264/H.265, then PhotoJPEG, and finally Animation or PNG for alpha-channel work. Motion JPEG, AVI and a non-native .mp4 are refused outright.
• Dreamstime prefers a QuickTime .mov carrying PhotoJPEG, and is unusually strict about frame size: it wants a standard 720p, 1080p, 4K or 8K frame, not an arbitrary width and height. A cropped timeline that exports at 1912×1076 is a rejection waiting to happen.
• Depositphotos has by far the widest list — PhotoJPEG, Motion JPEG-A/B, DV, HDV, DVCPro, H.264/AVC, DivX, Xvid, SVQ1, several MPEG-4 variants, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, WMV2, WMV3 and FLV — paired with the lowest resolution floor on this page. It is the most forgiving destination for older or oddly-formatted material.
• Getty Images and iStock work in .mov or .mp4carrying ProRes, Photo JPEG or H.264, with ProRes 422 HQ as the quality reference. Getty's complete technical sheet sits behind the contributor login, so treat the codec family as the guide and check the sheet itself before a large delivery.

Audio: the setting most contributors get backwards

Stock footage is bought to be cut into someone else's edit, under someone else's music. The audio you captured is usually a liability, not a bonus — and the agencies say so in different strengths.

• Pond5 is the most direct: it prefers audio removed before uploading, with exceptions for editorial content and clips where the sound is the point — a historical speech, wildlife calls.
• Shutterstock says clips should not contain audio unless it enhances the clip or the clip is editorial.
• Depositphotos accepts ambient sound that is part of the scene, but is firm that you must own it — and that is the real risk. A café scene with a radio playing in the background carries music you did not license, and that is a rejection at every agency on this page.

The safe default is to strip the audio track on export and only put it back deliberately, on the clips where the sound genuinely adds value.

Keywords: the counts do not just differ, they point in opposite directions

This is the part that no single agency's help page can tell you, because each one only describes itself. Put the numbers next to each other and a real conflict appears.

Read the two extremes together: Pond5 asks for 40–50 keywords on every clip, while Adobe prefers fewer than its own 49 cap and weights the first ten. Vecteezy caps you at 30 regardless of what you think the clip deserves. A single 45-keyword list is simultaneously correct for Pond5, over the limit for Vecteezy, and diluted for Adobe.

So the honest answer to "can I keyword a clip once and send it everywhere?" is: you can write the conceptsonce, but the list has to be ordered and cut differently per destination. Order the strongest, most specific terms first — that satisfies Adobe's weighting and survives every truncation. Then let the export decide how far down the list to cut. That is exactly what a per-agency export is for, and it is why we cap at 49 on the Adobe file and 50 on the Getty one from the same reviewed keyword list.

There is one more per-agency transformation that catches people. Getty keywords are controlled-vocabulary terms with Getty's own syntax — Train - Vehicle, One Man Only. Those are correct at Getty and meaningless everywhere else, where buyers search plain words. If you tag for Getty and then reuse the same list on Adobe or Shutterstock, you ship dictionary syntax to an agency that has no dictionary. The terms have to be rewritten to natural wording on the way out — Train, Man.

Titles and descriptions are not one field

Every agency asks for "a title", and every agency means something slightly different by it. These rules cause more silent underperformance than spec rejections do, because a badly-shaped title does not bounce — it just never ranks.

• Shutterstock has one Description field that acts as the visible title. It must be English, a complete descriptive sentence of at least five words, with no special characters, and it must not be a comma-separated list of keywords. Up to 2,048 characters. One or two categories are required.
• Pond5wants 40–80 characters, in English, precise enough to name what is actually happening. Their own worked example is "African Oystercatcher Bird Feeding in Estuary, Eats Worm, Wide Angle" — species, action, place, shot type.
• Vecteezyrequires a unique title per file, and asks you to leave out the obvious padding: no "4K", no "footage", and no subjective words like "beautiful".
• Adobe Stock takes a Title field and no separate description, and its guidance is that titles must not contain commas. A title written as a comma-spliced sentence needs rewriting for Adobe specifically.
• Dreamstime wants title, description, keywords and categories on every file before it is properly findable.

The practical consequence: a title long enough for Pond5 is usually too long to be a good Adobe title, and a Shutterstock description written as a sentence will not fit Vecteezy's "no padding words" rule if it opens with "Beautiful 4K footage of…". Write the sentence properly once — subject, action, place, shot — and trim per destination rather than writing four separate blurbs.

Filenames are the quiet cause of failed imports

Bulk metadata is matched to media by filename. Nothing else. Which makes the filename rules — the least glamorous part of any spec sheet — the thing most likely to make an otherwise perfect CSV import zero rows.

1. Pond5 rejects filenames with spaces, dashes, commas, special characters or accents. This is stricter than anywhere else on the list, and it means a filename that works fine at Shutterstock can be refused at Pond5. Sort it out at export time, not at upload time.
2. Dreamstime matches filenames exactly, including case. Clip_01.MOV and clip_01.mov are two different files as far as the importer is concerned.
3. The extension has to match what you actually uploaded. If you delivered clip.mov but your CSV says clip.mp4because you transcoded a preview along the way, the row attaches to nothing. This is the single most common cause of "the CSV imported but my clips are still blank".
4. A leading or trailing space in a filename cell is invisible and fatal. Spreadsheet editing introduces these constantly.

The CSV shapes, and the two encoding traps

Five of these agencies take a bulk metadata file. The columns are not interchangeable, and neither, it turns out, is the file encoding.

Two encoding details are worth knowing because they are invisible in a text editor and cost a full re-import when you get them wrong.

The byte-order mark.Dreamstime expects the Excel "CSV UTF-8" flavour, which carries a byte-order mark at the start of the file. Getty's ESP and Shutterstock's importer match on the first header cell, and a byte-order mark glues itself onto that first header — so the same file that Dreamstime wants is the file that makes ESP fail to find the file name column. One agency needs it; two break on it.

The trailing newline. Some importers — Getty ESP and DeepMeta among them — drop or truncate the final record when the file does not end in a newline. The symptom is maddening: everything imports except the last clip in the batch, every time, with no error. We hit this in our own exporter and now force a trailing newline on every file we write.

And one date detail, because footage carries dates that stills often do not: Getty's ESP expects MM/DD/YYYY. DeepMeta is more permissive and accepts ISO among other formats, but since the same file is often submitted to both, the American order is the one that works in both places.

A delivery workflow that survives nine agencies

1. Export once, at native settings. Native resolution, native frame rate, no upscaling, audio stripped unless it earns its place. That single master satisfies the technical half of every row in the first table except the file-size caps.
2. Check the size caps before you queue an upload.A 4K master over 3 GB is fine at Shutterstock and Vecteezy, and too big for Pond5's HD tier and for Adobe. This is the most common reason a delivery stalls overnight.
3. Cut a 60-second version if the take runs long. Keep the full-length original for 123RF and Vecteezy.
4. Fix filenames at export. No spaces, no dashes, no accents, consistent case. That one habit makes the same name legal everywhere.
5. Write the metadata once, in concepts. One accurate sentence and one strongest-first keyword list per clip.
6. Let the export do the per-agency work. The cap, the column names, the vocabulary rewrite, the category, the encoding — all of that is mechanical, and doing it by hand across five CSVs is where the errors come from.

If you keyword footage in bulk, the last step is the one worth automating. Our stock video keyword tool reads the clip, writes the title, description and keyword list, and then emits each agency's file in its own shape — including the caps, the vocabulary differences and the encoding traps described above. The broader per-agency layout for stills is in our guide to stock agency metadata formats, and if you are still deciding whether footage is worth the effort at all, we compared the economics in stock photo versus stock video.

Sources & further reading

• Shutterstock — What are the technical requirements for video?
• Shutterstock — Description and keyword best practices
• Adobe Stock — Technical requirements for video submissions
• Adobe Stock — Contributor upload guidelines (file size limits)
• Pond5 — How to prepare your footage for upload
• Pond5 — Master your metadata (titles and keywords)
• Getty Images — Preparing your content (contributor login required for the full technical sheet)
• Dreamstime — Stock video requirements
• 123RF — Guide to uploading footage content
• Depositphotos — Requirements for uploaded files
• Vecteezy — Contributor checklist
• Alamy — Contributor uploading help (video applications closed to individuals)