Introducing FX Elements Subscription

At the end of September, we will be transitioning FX Elements away from a reliance on physical media and moving to a download-only model. That means that FX Collections and in particular FX Collection hard drives will be going away, forever. Any of our remaining inventory that is sold between now and October will not be replaced; once we have exhausted our stock for a volume, it will no longer be available for purchase.

Last Chance!

If you've been considering purchasing any of our FX Collection volumes, now is the time. We have very limited stock remaining, so please do not hesitate to get your copy while we still have units that we can ship.
 

Why the change?

We started shipping FX Collection hard drives almost 10 years ago. At that time, the idea of clients downloading hundreds of gigabytes in data was out of the question and thus we had two options, first, we could limit the file sizes and therefore the quality of our footage, or we could find an alternate delivery method for our footage. For us, the first option was never really a consideration, the entire objective of our company was to offer the highest quality footage possible. Therefore, we decided on the use of external hard drives as the best possible solution.

While the hard drives solved one major problem they created a couple of new problems in return. First, it meant that we needed to package, ship the hard drives around the world and deal with international red tape, not to mention the customs fees issue.

Second, the hard drives forced us to follow a particular structure for each collection. For each hard drive to be cost-effective, it had to include a large amount of footage. And that footage needed to be well rounded in order to be useful and appealing to the majority of clients.

These constraints could be helpful at times, but quite often they could be very limiting. For example, instead of releasing new footage all year round, we needed to wait until we had collected a sufficient amount and variety of footage to constitute a new volume. That process would take time, and create a bottleneck because in the interim, no one could purchase or use any of the new footage we had shot until the entire collection was ready to be released.

What's next?

As previously mentioned, FX Elements will be moving to a download-only model. In late September / October we will roll out a new version of the website and begin beta testing a new subscription format. The subscription will be a monthly or annual subscription and it will replace the FX Collections in spirit. What's more, with a subscription, you can build your own customized VFX collection, downloading exactly what you need when you need it – and without any shipping costs, delivery delays, or customs fees.

Our goal is to use the remainder of 2021 to work out the bugs of the new site. From our internal testing, it is proving to be a wonderful user experience, the site is overall faster and easier to use. However, we need to see how it performs at scale and be ready to quash the inevitable bugs.

In 2022 we'll start releasing new footage at a regular interval. Our hope is that the new site will benefit everyone. You the client will have full and immediate access to our (constantly growing) library of footage at a very reasonable price, and we will have the freedom to film new elements without concern for how it fits into an FX Collection. We'll spend less time doing things like cloning, packaging, and shipping hard drives and more time filming new elements.

It's bittersweet to say goodbye to our beloved FX Collections, but we believe that it will make way for an exciting future for FX Elements.