Song Vegas and Digital Juice

[John Rofrano]

I was waiting to see if anyone who has actually subscribed to Digital Juice would answer but I don’t see anyone posting so I’ll give you my comments based on past experience.

[Linda Long] “I have been considering changing to Digital Juice. I’ve read so many negative things I wanted to get some feedback from anyone here who is participating in their “lifetime subscription” for $299. I understand that 10 gb per/month is the limit. Most files I download from videoblock run less than 50 mb. I don’t know what kind of file sizes are at DJ but I don’t need to be able to download more than 20-50 at the very most per month, if that. Their content looks really like an improvement over vb to me from what I can see.”

What negative feedback did you read? I am not participating in their service. I am a former customer.

I own thousands of dollars of Digital Juice content that I’ve purchased over the years. If you can download all of that content for $299 that’s a great deal. I will say that sometimes a single library would be delivered on 24 DVD’s and at 4.7 GB per DVD, that means some of the libraries are 100+ GB in size just for one library. So it seems it would take you almost a year to download a single library 100+GB at 10GB/mo that I purchased for $24. Of course, you may only want one or two items from that library so you might actually download far less and be perfectly happy.

As far as quality goes, Digital Juice motion graphics are very high quality. I’ve used them a lot and they really add production value. I can’t say the same for their older SD stock footage which was unacceptable at times. The newer HD footage is good but there is not enough variety. Their music was hit and miss. Good for the later stuff but the earlier stuff was low quality as well. If you are just interested motion graphics and the newer music elements, you should be very happy with the quality. Their foley libraries were excellent as well. I bough all 4 volumes of those.

They do offer Vegas Pro projects for a very small amount of their content but most of it is for After Effects so I wouldn’t purchase it expecting a lot of Vegas Pro projects. They deliver their content as Photo-JPEG or PNG QuickTime files and their Juicer application will convert it to any format you want so I wouldn’t worry about using the formats in Vegas Pro. They are completely compatible. I’ve even dragged and dropped the content from the DVD’s right onto the Vegas Pro timeline without converting and it played back fine. I wouldn’t worry about compatibility at all.

My only concern would be the longevity of the company. They started out selling content. Then they went to a monthly subscription with a minimal fee per download. Now they are trying a lifetime membership. It sounds to me like they are “grasping at straws” if you know what I mean. If they went out of business next year, that $299 “Lifetime” subscription would be very short lived. If you look at the business model, how do they continue to operate once everyone has paid $299? Are they really going to get that many new members each year to be able to keep the lights on? I don’t know. That’s why I didn’t subscribe.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[Linda Long]

There are lot of negative threads on forums all over the internet, most of which are from 2014. I didn’t find much recent but I did go ahead and subscribe and I don’t see any issues. I think it is perfect for what I am doing and they have a lot of types of content that videoblocks doesn’t have.

I realize they may not last long but if they last 3 years I would spend that money anyway with vb, if they last a shorter period I will still have downloaded more than money’s worth.

TY!

[John Rofrano]

[Linda Long] “There are lot of negative threads on forums all over the internet, most of which are from 2014.”

I think back in 2014 was when they had a pay-as-you-go model that wasn’t a good deal at all. They advertised it as everything for only $1 each. What they didn’t tell you is that one song which came in 15 sec, 30 sec, 45, sec 1 minute and full length were $1 for each file so if you wanted a song in all of it’s lengths you were paying $5 a song. Given that they use to sell 18 songs for $24… $5 a song was not a good deal! On top of that there was a yearly fee. Perhaps that’s where the negative reviews came from.

Like I said… I’ve spent thousands on their content over the years and looking back, I’m sure I’ve spent at least $300 a year leading up to that amount so paying $299 once and getting to download whatever you need is a still good deal. Enjoy!

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasstsoftware.com

[Andrew Lenczycki]

I would reiterate most of what John has said. Like him, I have purchased a LOT of DJ products over the past 12 years. I did join the Lifetime Membership club (which philosophically I am opposed to). As I recall it was a $299 buy-in when you joined, but there IS a $99 ANNUAL fee as well, so this explains how they plan on making money after everyone has purchased their lifetime memberships.

As John says, I’ve had no problems with importing the various types of projects and files. I am NOT a professional, I only do this as a hobby, so my demand/need for large amounts of content is not there, but it is GREAT to logon, do a search and find the exact file or files I need for a project, download them and begin work immediately.

Andrew Lenczycki