Stock Footage 101
Buyer's Guide

Brent Holland
June 2008

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Being a jack of all trades is one thing, but being a video producer who can also create your own animation, graphics, music, and stills is just downright impossible for most of us. Well don't worry, there's a whole world of already-made content out there just waiting to be part of your special production. Let's explore the wonderful world of Stock Footage!

Wikipedia describes stock footage as "film or video footage that is not custom shot for use in a specific film or television program." In other words, it's just video that has no story, no beginning or end, just footage. Stock footage has been around for years and was largely used by news organizations, documentary filmmakers and movie studios. One of the largest producers of stock footage is the US government, producing hundreds of hours of content from NASA, the military and other organizations.

In recent years, as video production has become more popular, stock footage has grown into a thriving industry, making the lives of video producers worldwide much easier. And it offers an opportunity for even the most amateur of video producers to join in on the action, get their work out to the public and even make a little money in the process. Most stock footage is broken into two categories: rights managed and royalty free.

Rights Managed:

Rights managed basically means that the owner of the content reserves all rights and sells licenses to use the content on an individual basis, based on the intended use of the content. Rights managed content is usually very high quality material and is generally quite expensive. For example, if you wanted to use Beautiful Day by U2, you would purchase a special license from Capitol Records to use the song. The intended use and target audience would determine the price. Using the song for a local commercial would obviously cost less than using the song in a blockbuster film.

Royalty Free:

Royalty free is just what the name implies: you can purchase the content and use it as often as you want without paying royalties. Royalty free content is typically much more abundant but varies widely in quality.

Stock content comes in several flavors most commonly: Video, Music, Graphics and Still photos.

Stock video is fairly new to the stock content game but has quickly become a top resource for video producers and production houses. It used to be that stock video content was only available to professionals through companies like Getty Images for a hefty price. But, thanks to companies like Digital Juice and iStockvideo, stock footage has become much more readily available and affordable.

What use is there for stock video? Let's say you're putting together a commercial for an extreme sports company, I know it's rare, but go with me on this one. The video calls for a shot of a guy jumping out of a plane, and you're thinking it's just not in the budget to get skydiving lessons, then find someone to model as a skydiver, all just to get that three-second shot. A quick search at iStockphoto.com shows 46 results for skydiving video at an affordable purchase price and 123 results from fotosearch.com. Now you can finish your project for about the same price as a couple of DV tapes. I'd say that's economical.

Stock video is there to make your life easier, so use it. Don't feel bad that you're using someone else's footage, feel fortunate that someone else is out there doing all the tough work for you and making you look good.

For most of us, the phrase "stock music" creates images of cheesy '80s instructional videos and terrible music that's heavy on the saxophone and electronic drums. The truth is, unless you had lots of money to spend, that's really all that was available for a long time. But, within the last decade, the world of stock music has undergone huge improvements. As audio recording equipment has become cheaper to purchase and easier to use, more and more musicians are recording great music, recordings which are then available for video producers to use and benefit from.

Stock music is now affordable and plentiful, and can also be customizable. SmartSound is one of several companies offering easy-to-use tools to take existing production music and customize it to fit your production perfectly.

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