New Wondershare Filmora Pro

PatR · Dec 29, 2018

Some of you may use Wondershare Filmora for video processing. I have been using v8 for sometime and find it to be useful, but fall short of features that are needed for working up video files. Wondershare recently released v9 that provides a few small improvements but still lacking in areas. A couple days ago Wondershare sent out an e-mail notification of their latest release; Wondershare Filmora "Pro", with a "retail" price of $199.00 but with a $99.00 introductory offer.

Looking at the advertising videos it appears the new "Pro" version fills a lot of the previous gaps they have had in color grading while providing some nice tools for scaling. Because of that I downloaded a trial version in order to work with the program to determine if I wanted to buy a copy. Thus far I'm finding that some of the advertised features do not seem to be available in the trial version but as my time with the program has been quite limited I could be wrong.

Somethingp of significant interest is found in the EULA, or end user license agreement, that must be agreed to before the download completes. In the EULA it specifically states that Filmora Pro cannot be used for commercial purposes unless the user has obtained a Filmora Pro commercial use agreement from Wondershare. Bear in mind they have named this new version Filmora "Pro", which at this point seems to be a bit of an oxymoron as it is not to be used for commercial purposes without a special user agreement. As my intent for the use of any image processing software includes commercial intent I sent an inquiry to WOndershare's support team asking about the terms and conditions of a commercial license to use Filmora Pro. Their most informative (tongue in cheek) response is copied below. The text color and bold highlight is my doing. Bottom line, if you are a commercial operator or someone that generates ad revenue with your videos at YouTube you probably want to steer clear of the Filmora Pro software. From my perspective releasing a new product and naming it "Pro" but failing to allow commercial use without a commercial license which is not available is a pretty idiotic thing to do. So have a laugh if you find it as amusing as I do.

"Dear Customer,

Your ticket in the Wondershare Support Center has been updated. The record of your ticket is as below:

===========================================================
Hi,

Thanks for getting in touch. This is Will from Wondershare Software support team.

Unfortunately, we don't have the business license for Wondershare FilmoraPro now.

If you have any other inquiry, please feel free to contact us."

Regards,
Will
Support Team
Wondershare Software
http://support.wondershare.com

Eagle's Eye Video · Dec 29, 2018

From that response, I can only deduce that Wondershare also developed the CGO3 app as well...

jio · Mar 4, 2019

I have the same question. After checking the end user license agreement, I found no mention of commercial purposes. I think we can use it for commercial purposes as no such declaration...

FlushVision · Mar 5, 2019

I use Filmora (but not the pro version) and have been using it to produce videos for my clients since mid 2017. With my version I have never come across any reference to whether I can or can't use it for commercial purposes. Do you know if the 'commercial purposes' issue you refer to only apply to the Pro version?

jio · Mar 5, 2019

@FlushVision In your case, I feel like you should use commercial license (guess you are making money from this kind of video). You can submit a ticket to their support team to ask them.

Prizm · Mar 25, 2019

Sheesh, unless you work for a company that hired you to create videos for said company, then I wouldn't stress about it. And really, how is anyone going to prove what editing software you used for your videos?
Your $3.00 that you earned from YouTube is safe.

Well actually, that depends on the other part of the EULA: the effects and music tracks provided by Filmora. If anything, that is the part you should be worried about. If you're wanting to monetize your YouTube videos, you need to make sure that any music tracks you use are royalty-free. That's not going to be the case with most (if not, all) tracks that Filmora offers. It even says that if you do purchase a commercial license, then you still can't use most of their music tracks for commercial purposes.

YouTube will probably detect the track and disable monetization for your video, and whoever actually owns the track will get the money instead (If Filmora were clever, they would own the tracks and get paid for every person that uploads a video with their music ?......wait, that's probably true ?).
At worst you'll get a YouTube copyright strike, but most music owners these days prefer to just take the money.

So basically, if you want to monetize YouTube videos, then find or purchase royalty-free music separately. And make sure you keep evidence that you have a license for royalty-free use, even if it's just a screenshot of the details. Usually the good royalty-free sites will give you a PDF or something with the license details. There's been a few times when I've had to provide this proof to YouTube because months later they suddenly detect that I've used licensed music.

I wouldn't stress about sound effects though, I've never heard of any YouTube videos getting pinged over sound effects (much harder to detect). It's always the music.

FlushVision · Mar 25, 2019

Prizm said:
Sheesh, unless you work for a company that hired you to create videos for said company, then I wouldn't stress about it. And really, how is anyone going to prove what editing software you used for your videos?
Your $3.00 that you earned from YouTube is safe.

Well actually, that depends on the other part of the EULA: the effects and music tracks provided by Filmora. If anything, that is the part you should be worried about. If you're wanting to monetize your YouTube videos, you need to make sure that any music tracks you use are royalty-free. That's not going to be the case with most (if not, all) tracks that Filmora offers. It even says that if you do purchase a commercial license, then you still can't use most of their music tracks for commercial purposes.

YouTube will probably detect the track and disable monetization for your video, and whoever actually owns the track will get the money instead (If Filmora were clever, they would own the tracks and get paid for every person that uploads a video with their music ?......wait, that's probably true ?).
At worst you'll get a YouTube copyright strike, but most music owners these days prefer to just take the money.

So basically, if you want to monetize YouTube videos, then find or purchase royalty-free music separately. And make sure you keep evidence that you have a license for royalty-free use, even if it's just a screenshot of the details. Usually the good royalty-free sites will give you a PDF or something with the license details. There's been a few times when I've had to provide this proof to YouTube because months later they suddenly detect that I've used licensed music.

I wouldn't stress about sound effects though, I've never heard of any YouTube videos getting pinged over sound effects (much harder to detect). It's always the music.

Years ago (around 2005) I uploaded a video to YouTube that was not drone related. It was a video of fireworks on New Year's eve/day shot from a cruise liner off the coast of Maderia. I thought it appropriate, given the content of the video, to set it to the theme song from Fireball XL-5. Shortly after uploading it I received a message to the effect that the music was copyright but they were allowing it to stay uploaded since the video was not monetized and the music was appropriate for the video. That's the closest I've ever got to falling foul.

These days, with my drone videos, I tend to use free-to-use music from Youtube's own music library and have only once or twice used anything from Filmora's library. I play it careful these days.

Prizm · Mar 25, 2019

Yeah, that's what usually happens these days: YouTube send you an email saying the music in your video is copyright, but that you don't need to take any action. If your account has monetization enabled, they disable monetization for that particular video. Other than that, your video is not affected unless the copyright owner decides one day to revoke permission to use it. Then you'd probably have to replace the track with YouTube's own music or something.

In the early days, they were really trigger happy with copyright strikes. Then YouTube started partnering up with the music companies, and music strikes became rather uncommon. I've had a few strikes years ago. Last time I checked, the strikes aren't permanent, they're on your account for about 6 months. It used to be that if you had three strikes in that time period, your account got disabled. I don't know if they're more lenient these days or not.