I do a fair bit of web design from time to time and I’m often buying stock photographs and images to make the websites look more aesthetic and professional. But for some reason it never really occurred to me that there would also be a libraries of stock videos available to purchase for commercial or private use.
Well obviously such stock video sites would exist but it just never entered my head until I stumbled across ITN source.
ITN Source
ITN Source contains a library of stock videos from a number of popular TV channels.
“As well as ITN’s own news material, (including ITV News, Channel 4 News) we provide exclusive rights to the Reuters global television archive, the FOX News and FOX Movietone archives and the historically remarkable British Pathe news archive. We represent the complete Channel 4 catalogue, which includes the E4, More4 and Film4 archives, (Jamie’s School Dinners, Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights, Trainspotting) and the entire Granada catalogue (Prime Suspect, I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, Survival) which accounts for much of UK broadcaster ITV’s output.”
The layout of the site really impressed me with its flash interface which showed moving videos thumbnails when browsing for clips.
Why Stock Video
I’m sure some people are thinking “What do I need Stock video for? I can just get vids off YouTube.” Well video sharing sites like YouTube have restrictive terms of use, and it’s often not clear where the copyright of a video actually lies, so you may not have permission to use it.
Stock videos are great for people wishing to integrate videos and moving imagery into their own site, but are even more important for video producers. Amateur to professional video producers will all share a need for stock video when it is cheaper to buy an existing video for a scene, rather than filming it from scratch.
For example, if you are making a nature documentary you could pad it out with some existing nature stock footage. Or maybe you are staging an amateur comedy series in New York, but you are filming it from a studio in Dallas, so could use some stock footage to add some in-between scene clips of New York.
List of Stock Video Websites
- Stock Videos from ITN – ITNSource.com
- Free Stock Video – FreeStockFootage.com
- Flash Stock Video – InoVartis.com
- Stock Videos (copyright varies from video to video) – InternetArchive.org
- Royalty Free Stock Footage – Artbeats.com
- Nature Stock Videos – NatureFootage.com
- BBC Stock Videos – BBCmotiongallery.com
- Freely Licensed Stock Videos – commons.wikimedia.org
- Blip.tv Creative Commons video (be sure to check individual rights) – search.creativecommons.org
- WGBH Stock Videos – WGBHStockSales.org
- Getty Images Stock Video (including Warner Brothers content) – gettyimages.com
- High Definition Stock Videos – AlwaysHD.com
- National Geographic Stock Footage – ngdigitalmotion.com
- iStockVideo Stock Video – istockphoto.com
- Stock Video Footage – thoughtequity.com
- Corbis Stock Video – corbis.com
- Severe Weather Stock Video – MtHurricane.com
- HD Stock Videos – royaltyfreehd.com
- Royalty Free Stock Videos – footagefirm.com
- Animal Stock Video Catalogue – animalbehaviorarchive.org
