Advantages Of Stock Footage

By Author: Erik Jonason
Total Articles: 34
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Movies and documentary directors are finding stock footage to be of great help. Inserting stock clip of a famous monument, natural calamity, nature, and animals in the film often proves to be a time & money saving affair. Let’s know more about stock footage and their use.

Stock footage, otherwise called archive footage or file footage or library services is a video or film footage that may or may or might not be custom shot for use in certain film or television program. It is of great use to film makers because it is cheap than shooting a new material.

Stock footage may have appeared in the previous production or may have been shot for certain previous productions but has not been used. Examples that may be utilized for these purposes are the moving images of landmarks or cities, historical footage or wildlife in their natural environment. There are two categories of suppliers of stock footage, namely royalty-free and rights-managed. In film making, B-roll is the term commonly used for stock-footage.

It may also be utilized in the integration of notable figures or new footage into a film. Forest ...
... Gump, the award winning film is the perfect example where stock footage was extensively used. This was modified with imagery generated by computer in the portrayal of lead character meeting of historic figures like John Lennon, Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.

Stock footage is also used by new programs; they use film footage obtained from libraries when they there are no recent images available. Footage from previous installments is often recycled by movie and television series. This was in the case of the film the Star trek franchise that kept a large collection of backgrounds, explosions, planets and starships that appeared regularly throughout their series and ten films. Archive footage is aimed at cutting down production cost since some images are too expensive to create.

Movies and films that are intended for children often reuse much footage in order to increase their familiarity inside the shows. Broadcast shows utilize stock footage to establish shots of certain city to demonstrate that the show was shot in that particular city when really it was not. Examples of exotic locations used in films are the Easter Island, Great Wall of China and the French Polynesia. Using file footage in this case will help save production companies the costs of transporting equipment and crew to these locations.

Archive footage appearing on monitors or television screens in movies is referred as playback. The playback footage for hurricanes in the Disney's Smarthouse was obtained from the Vaults of the similar San Diego firm. It has in the recent times been used by companies all over the world in producing videos for their in-house events, seminars, conventions and meetings. It is also growing popular in conducting video tape interviews of VIPs and CEOs through green screen backdrop; this is done by keying out the green during post-production and inserting stock shots or file footage to impart a certain message.

United States government is the largest producer of public domain archive footage and all the videos produced by various government agencies like the NASA or the military are readily available for stock footage purposes. There are also those companies that reserve the copyright for large file footage libraries. Archive footage can be obtained from other movies or television programs, public domain, news outlets and those shot for particular purpose.

Author of the article is associated with Stock MrFootage, the online repository of large number of stock clips of sports, nature, war, natural calamity, and several rare events.