Digital Video Solutions: Stock Video Collecting
Question: I want to build my own stock video library from royalty-free sources to use in my productions, but I find that most of the collections are too expensive to add more than 100 or 200 clips. Any idea where I can get good quality stock video footage on the cheap?
Answer: Producers of digital video productions realize at some point that they would be best served if they had their own arsenal of stock video that they could use at a moment’s notice without having to secure some kind of clearance or rights management. Companies offering royalty-free clips to the DV professional have been around for some time, with companies such as Artbeats (www.artbeats.com) and Corbis Motion (www.corbismotion.com) being among the most popular. The average video collection runs about $600 and includes somewhere between 10 and 20 video clips. To collect the 200 clips you mentioned in your question, a producer could easily spend $7,500. This can max out most users’ budgets very quickly.
Another option, if you you’re looking to purchase just a single video and you’re on a tight budget, is iStockvideo.com. Their standard NTSC/PAL clips run $20 apiece (HD 720 goes for $35 and HD 1080 goes for $50). However, iStockvideo is still in its infancy so their collection is relatively small, but it is growing quickly.
Shoot it yourself
Many professionals who want to build their own stock video library buy a good camera and shoot their own footage. It’s the cheapest way to add a lot of clips to any collection. It also lets you get the specific subject matter that you’re interested in, without any of the extra fluff. If you’re going to shoot your own footage, check out “Shooting Your Own Stock Video Collection” for a few tips to help you get the most out of the experience.
Scavenge for free clips
If shooting your own footage is a chore that you want to avoid like the plague, you can always start your royalty-free library collection by using the “scavenger” method. Every year there are hundreds of royalty-free video and audio clips and photographic images that are given away on the CDs and DVDs located in the back of books. Smart shoppers buy these books from used book dealers on Amazon, at their local Costco or Sam’s Club, and at websites like Half.com simply to get their hands on the free clips located on the CDs. Even if you have no interest in 3D or motion graphics, a book on that subject could have a lot of free content with it, and used books that are at the end of their cycle go for as little as $5. Back in 2000 I wrote a book called Applying Adobe After Effects Studio Techniques that had more that $1,800 of free media content on the two CDs that came with the book. Even though it’s been six years, I still find it being sold on eBay, and I know it’s not for the timeless writing!
Purchase volumes to add content
The easiest way to add a large amount of affordable high-quality video clips to your own stock video library is to buy one of the VideoTraxx collections from Digital Juice (www.digitaljuice.com). There are three collections in all, with each collection containing more than 3,000 individual clips stored on over 30 DVD-ROMs. The clips are categorized into subjects such as Exercise, American History, Horses, Under the Sea, Flowers, and so on. It’s truly a massive collection, which is why it comes with a special software program that has each clip categorized with multiple keywords for easy searching and retrieval. The software can also export each clip as an AVI, MOV, image sequence, or any of the native codecs you have installed on your machine. What’s even better is that each VideoTraxx collection of more than 3,000 clips is available for only $599 (less than $.20 apiece). You can buy all three collections for almost 10,000 total video clips for $1,499. But here’s a secret tip: If you sign up for the Digital Juice email newsletter you’ll find that about once every three months they offer a special sale on the VideoTraxx collections where you can pick them up for as little as $249!
If you decide that shooting your own footage is too much work and that scavenging older books is beneath you, then pick up one of the VideoTraxx collections from Digital Juice. Volume 3 is my favorite followed closely by Volume 2 (both of these volumes even include some green screen shots for easy compositing). But if you happen to catch one of Digital Juice’s super sales, don’t hesitate to pick up all three collections. You’ll have your own personal royalty-free stock video library busting at the seams in no time.
Shooting Your Own Stock Video Collection
Here are some tips for capturing and managing your own quality footage.
1. Shoot at dawn or dusk when the light is best. Harsh daylight makes anything look washed out and lackluster.
2. Shoot multiple angles and zooms. If you’re shooting flowers, shoot them from overhead, from stem level looking up, from both sides, as you pan across, zooming in and zooming out, etc.
3. Shoot in short intervals. Use the Pause button on your camera to break up scenes based on the action you did in Tip #2. When you digitize the clips into your NLE, it will automatically segment them into individual clips ready to be tagged and exported.
4. Use a media cataloger for viewing and organizing your clips. iView Media Pro (www.iview-multimedia.com) is a commercial program that’s highly rated and was recently acquired by Microsoft. There are also a number of affordable shareware solutions available.
5. Add keywords to all of your clips in your media catalog program. Take the time to do this once and save yourself a lifetime of fruitless searching for “that one clip.” It will pay for itself 100 times over during the course of your career.
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