Motion Array does not give artists an FTP endpoint. Every asset goes through the submissions tab in your artist profile, one package at a time, against a pool of submission slots that empties as you upload and refills as curators work through the queue. Reviews can run two to three weeks, so the workflow here is shaped by waiting rather than by throughput.
The application gate comes before any upload
You cannot upload to Motion Array until you have been accepted as an artist. The marketplace runs an application form, and the help centre points every prospective contributor at that form before anything else. That is the first break from microstock habits: on an FTP-driven agency you open an account and start submitting, and review happens per file. Here review happens to you first, then per file.
Once you are in, set up the parts that have nothing to do with files. Under My Seller Details you add a profile photo, a header image, a bio and your unique profile URL, then a payment method. Motion Array pays through PayPal or Payoneer on the 15th of the following month, once your balance reaches $50. Earnings figures shown in the profile before that date are estimates, and the final report arrives on payment day.
No FTP, and what that costs you
Motion Array's own upload rules and submission guides describe a browser flow and nothing else: the submissions tab, a category dropdown, drag-and-drop fields for your files, a summary screen, a Submit for Review button. No FTP or SFTP endpoint is published for artists, and there is no bulk uploader. If your routine is to drop a night's work into an FTP queue and walk away, this is the agency that breaks it.
The practical consequence is that Motion Array cannot be the tail end of an automated delivery pipeline. It has to be a seat-at-the-desk job. The sensible response is to keep the metadata work automated and batched with everything else, then spend manual time only on the submission form itself, on the fields and the themes and the art styles, rather than composing descriptions from scratch in a browser tab.
What shape does your Motion Array submission need?
Walks from asset type to packaging: stock video and photos go up individually and never zipped, motion graphics with transparency need ProRes 4444 or Animation with alpha, graphics ship as a zip plus a 1920x1080 JPG preview, and music and SFX are zipped 24-bit 48 kHz WAV even for a single track.
What one submission actually contains
The shape of a submission depends entirely on what you are selling, and packaging it wrong is one of the fastest routes to a rejection that has nothing to do with the quality of the work.
Stock video and stock photos
Video is .mov or .mp4, uploaded individually and never zipped. ProRes 4444 and 422 are preferred; H.264, H.265 and Animation are accepted, and the compression you choose has to match one of the options in the submission dropdown. PNG QuickTime and JPG QuickTime are rejected outright. Minimum resolution is 1920x1080, and Motion Array asks for roughly 100 MB per ten seconds of footage. One clip per submission, with no packs, compilations, collages or edited sequences, and no audio in the clip at all. Photos are .JPG or .PNG at a minimum of 3840 px on the width or the height, one image per submission, no composites. Previews for both are generated automatically with watermarks, so you never supply them.
Motion graphics
Also .mov or .mp4, and here multi-clip packs are allowed. Anything with transparency needs an embedded alpha channel in ProRes 4444 or in the Animation codec with alpha; a file that merely looks transparent without a real alpha channel comes back. Recolours of an animation you already have approved are not accepted as new products. Packs of several files are zipped, and the archive has to open with the default unzip tools on both macOS and Windows rather than needing a third-party utility.
Graphics, icons and templates
This is the category with the most form-filling. You submit a zipped download package plus a separate 1920x1080 JPG preview, and the zip is capped at 3 GB. Titles capitalise each word and stop at 40 characters. Descriptions are one short sentence of 25 words at most, including the number of assets, followed by required bullet points that each start with a hyphen and a space and cover digital or print use, colour space, formats and aspect ratios, PPI or DPI, and whether a plugin was used; graphic templates add page or screen counts and placeholders. Icon packs hold 5 to 30 icons. A .mogrt submission needs at least 5 graphics from one file. Template project files such as .aep, .prproj and .mogrt must be named exactly like the submission title, and so must the zip.
Music and sound effects
24-bit, 48 kHz .wav files, packaged in a .zip even when you are submitting a single track, with lyrics supplied as .pdf or .txt. Alternate versions belong in the original submission rather than as separate products, and each one is named plainly: Main, Instrumental, Short, Stinger, 30s, 15s. Stems are optional and should be exported wet, with effects applied. Sound effect packs hold 3 to 15 effects. Filenames in this category are the strictest on the platform, with no spaces and no characters such as apostrophes, commas, full stops, exclamation marks or at-signs.
The filename rule that breaks whole batches
Across every category, files and filenames have to use standard Western characters. No accents, no special symbols, no non-Western alphabets. The guidance for new visual artists goes further and tells contributors to avoid special characters such as hyphens altogether. If your export preset builds filenames from a project name, a date and a client code joined by dashes, that preset needs a Motion Array variant. This is the rule most likely to fail quietly in a batch you prepared for several agencies at once, and it sits alongside the other hard limits covered in the Motion Array metadata requirements.
Submission slots, and why uploads stall
Motion Array limits how many assets you can have in review at once through submission slots. When your slots are full you can still prepare and save assets; they sit in the profile under a new tag and can be submitted the moment a slot frees up. Nothing is lost, but nothing moves either, and a contributor who plans around a fixed daily upload target will find that the target simply does not apply here.
That is the structural argument for front-loading the metadata work. If files are going to wait for a slot and then wait again for a curator, you want them arriving at the queue already described, tagged and categorised, so that submitting becomes a matter of pasting prepared fields rather than composing them under time pressure.
What happens to a Motion Array submission after you press Submit
The stages a Motion Array submission passes through: waiting for a free submission slot, the editable window before a curator is assigned, a review that can run two to three weeks, the Needs Work loop, and payment on the 15th of the following month once the balance reaches $50.
Review, Needs Work, and editing after the fact
While an asset is still waiting and no curator has been assigned, you can change its metadata or delete and replace the package and the preview through the cogwheel menu on the submission. If that edit option is missing, the asset has already been picked up, and the only route left is an email to the content team quoting the slug number shown in the review submission panel. There is no self-service way back in once a curator holds it.
The response worth understanding properly is Needs Work. It is not a rejection: a curator is sending the asset back with specific changes, and hovering the exclamation icon next to the asset name shows what those changes are. You fix the file or the fields and press Submit for review again. Treating a Needs Work as a final no and abandoning the asset is one of the easier ways to lose work that was close to selling, and the wider pattern of what curators actually object to is set out in the Motion Array rejection reasons.
Two flags that change what you earn
Two checkboxes on the submission form affect the commercial outcome rather than the review outcome. Usage Rights marks the asset editorial or commercial, and the new-artist guidance tells visual contributors to use the editorial-only option where it genuinely applies instead of hoping a commercial submission slips through. The Free flag makes an asset available to free-trial users, and assets marked Free earn no royalties at all. Neither is a formality, and neither should be left at its default out of habit.
Fitting Motion Array into a multi-agency routine
Because the submission itself is manual, the only part worth automating is everything upstream of it. A workable pattern looks like this: generate titles, descriptions and keywords for the whole shoot in one pass, embed them into the files as IPTC and XMP so they travel with the originals, export a CSV for the agencies that read one, deliver automatically to the agencies that accept FTP or SFTP, and keep a separate worklist of the Motion Array submissions still to be typed. The metadata is the same metadata either way; only the delivery differs.
That split is what Rastock AI is built around: AI metadata generation plus FTP and SFTP delivery to 10+ agencies, with per-platform banned and mandatory keyword rules and a rollback when a batch goes wrong. Motion Array is not one of the FTP destinations, because there is no FTP to deliver to. What the pipeline can do is make sure the file you hand-submit already carries clean, policy-checked metadata before you open the submissions tab. See how the pipeline works, or start on the 14-day free trial with no card required.
Frequently asked questions
Does Motion Array support FTP uploads?
No. Motion Array's artist documentation describes a browser-based submission flow only: you open the submissions tab in your artist profile, choose a category, fill in the metadata and drag your files into the form. There is no published FTP or SFTP endpoint and no bulk uploader, so Motion Array cannot sit at the end of an automated delivery pipeline the way an FTP-capable agency can.
How long does Motion Array review take?
Motion Array tells artists that reviews can take two to three weeks. That is considerably longer than microstock photo review, and it is why submission slots matter: an asset occupies a slot for the whole time it sits in the queue. Planning a fixed daily upload volume does not work here. Planning a steady pipeline of fully prepared files does.
What are Motion Array submission slots?
Slots cap how many assets you can have in review at the same time. When they are all occupied you can still prepare and save new assets, which appear under a new tag in your profile, but you cannot push them into review until a slot frees up. The effect is that your upload rate is set by how fast curators clear your existing queue rather than by how fast you work.
Can I edit a Motion Array submission after sending it?
Yes, until a curator is assigned to it. The cogwheel menu on the submission lets you change metadata or delete and replace the asset package and the preview. If that edit option is not there, the asset is already with a curator, and the route is an email to the content team quoting the slug number shown in the review submission panel.
Why do my Motion Array filenames keep failing?
Every file and filename has to use standard Western characters, with no accents, no special symbols and no non-Western alphabets. For music and sound effects the rule is tighter still: no spaces and no punctuation such as apostrophes, commas, full stops, exclamation marks or at-signs. Export presets that join fields with dashes or carry accented place names are the usual cause.
What does the Free flag do to my earnings?
Marking an asset Free makes it available to Motion Array's free-trial users, and assets marked Free earn no royalties. It is a visibility decision rather than an administrative one, so it belongs in your per-asset thinking instead of being left checked out of habit.