jdogfunk100 It's counter-intuitive to reduce the value of a service. Most companies improve their features, not take them away. It just makes no sense at all. It's just a big 'F-You' to your customers.

Removing useful features and customer value while also increasing prices (pay to download original quality videos..) usually means one of two things..

Bad finances, cutting costs

Fattening up ready for a sale

🤷

      jommy
      Yup, loans taken out with ridiculous terms. Not being able to make the vig so they give up points in the business. Their new "partners" flex on them pretty hard so they scramble to both generate quick revenue/reduce costs and to try and find some way out of the situation they got themselves into.

      BTW: I have a treatment script for "SLR: Behind the Bros" if anyone is interested.

          I really relied on these contact sheets to properly pick out a scene I want to watch.
          Discovery is much harder without them; restoring contact sheets would help me use SLR more.

          fuccaneer You'd think that if things are bad for them financially they would be trying to keep subscribers, not pissing people off by taking away useful features that we like.

          DVR is as stubborn as the day is long so I have little doubt that contact sheets are gone for good.

          I've had annual subs for at least 6 years now, and I have always used and relied on the contact sheets to help me choose which scenes I wanted to DL. I hate the site without them, the short preview vid and 4 promo pics are useless so I simply won't be renewing.

            Not many things would make me stop supporting SLR, but this is one of them. Bring it back, this was a very stupid decision. I think you massively underestimated how much these are relied upon for shopping scenes. Many trailers don't show all the content in a scene. This was a very anti-consumer move. If it won't be included on the new site either, I'm officially done with SLR.

            fuccaneer none of that. Just optimizing transcoding flow for faster releases. Surprisingly CS takes significant rendering time and slows release process.
            Also every feature takes some maintenence and qa costs - it's important we can justify it.

            Anyway let me see if we can move it down the list so we can release videos without CS and generate it separately later on without holding scene release

                doublevr Surprisingly CS takes significant rendering time

                I'm not buying that. 48 downscaled screenshots of a scene is something a script could do in minutes. That's a drop in the ocean compared to the video encoding you guys have to do.

                doublevr Also every feature takes some maintenence and qa costs - it's important we can justify it.

                It's a stable feature that hasn't seen any significant change is years, what possible maintenance and QA would be needed?

                      doublevr Anyway let me see if we can move it down the list so we can release videos without CS and generate it separately later on without holding scene release

                      Thanks. That middle ground would be appreciated.

                        Sounds to me like they're working on the margins. IOW: they have a punchlist of a bunch of tiny little things that either slow the process by 0.01% or increase resource costs by 0.01% and they're trying to fix them all in hopes of having a decent combined positive effect.

                        The problem, of course, is that each of these changes must be considered on its own to determine the 2nd order impacts like "does this change worsen the user experience". We all know that SLR doesn't do that very well--its easier to make a snap judgment then look for some number to justify the decision.

                        And now we get to maybe the crux of the matter: the tech bro mantra of "move fast and break things". This lack of caution and the tendency to gamble that the end result will be worth pissing off some customers. IMHO this kind of mentality has so permeated tech that they use it even in inappropriate situations like this -- this is the unwritten second part of the mantra "move fast and break things; then go back and fix them later".

                        It's getting fixed. Should be back online within a few weeks or up to some few months.
                        Moving it to ai so you can expect some hottest frames and intelligence

                          doublevr Moving it to ai so you can expect some hottest frames and intelligence

                          I'm not convinced that you understand why people use it. Nobody uses it because they want to see the hottest frames – that's what the promo shots are for. People want to see how the video actually plays out.

                              Hairsational Exactly, contact sheets are essentially a visual description of the action and what plays out over the duration of the scene. Tags might say "Cum on body" but where exactly? On her feet? On her stomach? On her tits? A contact sheet will show me so I don't need to guess. Or a tag might say "pussy closeups" but then there might only be 8 seconds of actual closeups in the whole scene, so in this instance the tag is a bit misleading. Contact sheets show me the majority of positions and rough estimate of time spent in those positions, visuals, etc, and also video specs such as bitrate and runtime. The tags, promo pics and preview vid can be misleading and not accurately show what is in the scene. Some studios use promo pics that aren't even in the actual scene.

                              I use a small paid program called VTM (Video Thumbnails Maker) and it can create contact sheets in seconds. I can add a batch of 10-12 vr videos and create contact sheets for all of them in under a minute. How is SLR currently creating contact sheets if it "takes significant rendering time and slows release process"?

                                  doublevr > "Moving it to ai so you can expect some hottest frames and intelligence"

                                  First off, thanks for listening to our feedback! Glad this feature is returning.

                                  AI powered contact sheets sound like a great idea, let's be honest, a fixed timestamp often results in extreme repetition, and often misses some of the most unique moments. HOWEVER I get the argument others are making against it.

                                  Could you perhaps generate both? And let people use whichever they like? If you're already generating one, we're talking about a trivial amount of compute/storage to generate the other.

                                    I just find it crazy they removed it for videos they already had it on. Why? There is no good reason for it. Are you trying to save pennies from the little bit of storage taken up from these images lol? I can no longer shop scenes with confidence, so I've completely stopped buying. I always thought SLR did things right by making them accessible to all logged in users, unlike many sites where they conceal it from you unless subscribed.

                                    I have never used contact sheets. I don't even know how to find them.
                                    I always just clicked on the video so it would start playing and then skip forward to see how things changed. Are contact sheets a lot better than this method?
                                    Also if it is a cost thing and people seem to like and use the contact sheet then I can think of lots of things SLR does that surely cost way more but I bet nobody uses. How much is SLR investing into CGI porn? How about server space for flat that nobody asked for.
                                    I just want what made SLR good 4 or 5 years ago. All the things they had then, like well made good 3somes. (all the time not just 1 every 3 months).

                                      rerun119 > "I don't even know how to find them."

                                      On the 'photos' tab, right below the four standard sample photos, there used to be a button called 'all photos' (or something?), if you clicked on that it would take you to the contact sheet. VERY useful when you want to quickly browse a scene.

                                      I'm sure it saves SLR way more bandwidth than it costs to generate/serve, so it's a good thing for everyone that they are bringing it back.

                                        rerun119 That's really surprising. Have you never gone to a scene page on the website and clicked the buttons?