Stock footage - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Stock footage, and similarly, archive footage, library pictures and file footage are film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

or video

Video

Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...

footage

Footage

In filmmaking and video production, footage is the raw, unedited material as it had been originally filmed by movie camera or recorded by a video camera which usually must be edited to create a motion picture, video clip, television show or similar completed work...

that may or may not be custom shot for use in a specific film or television program. Stock footage is of beneficial use to filmmakers as it is sometimes less expensive than shooting new material. A single piece of stock footage is a "stock shot" or a "library shot". Stock footage may have appeared in previous productions but may also be outtake

Outtake

An outtake is a portion of a work that is removed in the editing process and not included in the work's final, publicly released version. In the digital era, significant outtakes have been appended to CD and DVD reissues of many albums and films as bonus tracks or features, in film often, but not...

s or footage shot for previous productions and not used. Examples of stock footage which might be utilized are moving images of cities and landmarks, wildlife in their natural environments and historical footage. Suppliers of stock footage fall into two categories; rights-managed and royalty-free. Many websites offer direct downloads of clips in various formats, both compressed and uncompressed. QuickTime

QuickTime

QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...

is a popular standard now in use for NLE

Non-linear editing system

In video, a non-linear editing system is a video editing or audio editing digital audio workstation system which can perform random access non-destructive editing on the source material...

applications such as Avid, Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro.

Historical Overview

Stock footage companies began to emerge in the mid-1980's, offering clips mastered on Betacam SP, VHS and film formats. Many of the smaller libraries that specialized in niche topics such as extreme sports, technological or cultural collections were bought out by larger concerns such as Corbis

Corbis

Corbis Corporation is an American company, based in Seattle, Washington, that licenses the rights to photographs, footage and other visual media...

or Getty Images

Getty Images

Getty Images, Inc. is a stock photo agency, based in Seattle, Washington, USA. It is a supplier of stock images for business and consumers with an archive of 80 million still images and illustrations and more than 50,000 hours of stock film footage...

over the next couple of decades.

Stock Footage In Movies and Television

Stock footage can be used to integrate news footage or notable figures into a film. For instance, the Academy Award

Academy Awards

An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...

-winning film Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump is a 1994 American epic comedy-drama romance film based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Winston Groom. The film was directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright and Gary Sinise...

used stock footage extensively, modified with computer generated imagery to portray the lead character meeting such historic figures such as John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy

John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....

, Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon

Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...

, and John Lennon

John Lennon

John Winston Lennon, MBE was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founding members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music...

.

News programs use film footage from their libraries when more recent images are not available. Such usage is often labeled on-screen with an indication that the footage being shown is file footage.

Television and movies series also often recycle footage taken from previous installments. For instance, the Star Trek
Star Trek
Star Trek is an American science fiction entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. The core of Star Trek is its six television series: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise...

franchise kept a large collection of starships, planets, backgrounds and explosions which would appear on a regular basis throughout Star Trek's five series and ten films, being used with minimal alteration. This kept production costs down as models, mattes, and explosions were expensive to create. The advances in computer graphics in the late 1990s and early 2000s helped to significantly reduce the cost of Star Trek's production, and allowed for a much wider variety of shots than previous model and painting based visuals.

Some series, particularly those made for children, such as Teletubbies
Teletubbies
Teletubbies is a BBC children's television series targeted at pre-school viewers and produced from 1997 to 2001 by Ragdoll Productions. It was created by Ragdoll's creative director Anne Wood CBE and Andrew Davenport, who wrote each of the show's 365 episodes. The programme's original narrator was...

, reuse footage that is shown in many episodes. Meant for a young audience, this approach increases viewers' familiarity between shows. This introduces problems such as the requirement to, for example, wear the same clothing and inconsistency can sometimes become a problem. When cleverly filmed it is possible to avoid many of these problems.

Many broadcast shows use stock-footage clips as establishing shots of a particular city, which infer that the show is shot on location when in fact, it may be shot in a Burbank

Burbank, California

Burbank is a city in Los Angeles County in Southern California, United States, north of downtown Los Angeles. The estimated population in 2010 was 103,340....

studio. One or two establishing shots of an exotic location such as the Great Wall of China

Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is a series of stone and earthen fortifications in northern China, built originally to protect the northern borders of the Chinese Empire against intrusions by various nomadic groups...

, Easter Island

Easter Island

Easter Island is a Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian triangle. A special territory of Chile that was annexed in 1888, Easter Island is famous for its 887 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapanui people...

or French Polynesia

French Polynesia

French Polynesia is an overseas country of the French Republic . It is made up of several groups of Polynesian islands, the most famous island being Tahiti in the Society Islands group, which is also the most populous island and the seat of the capital of the territory...

will save production companies the major costs of transporting crew and equipment to those actual locations.

Stock footage is often used in commercials when there is not enough money or time for production. More often than not these commercials are political or issue-oriented in nature. Sometimes it can be used to composite moving images which create the illusion of having on-camera performers appear to be on location. B-roll is also another common term for stock footage and is used in reference to film making.

Stock footage appearing on television screens or monitors shown in movies or television shows is referred to as "playback." In Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, or simply Anchorman, is a 2004 American comedy film, directed by Adam McKay and starring Will Ferrell. The film, which was also written by Ferrell and McKay, is a tongue-in-cheek take on the culture of the 1970s, particularly the then-new Action News format...

which features the actor Will Ferrell

Will Ferrell

John William "Will" Ferrell is an American comedian, impressionist, actor, and writer. Ferrell first established himself in the late 1990s as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live, and has subsequently starred in the comedy films Old School, Elf, Anchorman, Talladega...

who stars as a San Diego news anchor, the studio purchased archival 1970's clips from San Diego stock footage firm New & Unique Videos. The playback footage of a hurricane featured in Disney's Smart House

Smart House

Smart House is a 1999 Disney Channel Original Movie about a young computer whiz , his widowed father, and his little sister, who win a computerized house that begins to take on a life of its own — the life of an overbearing mother . The movie is based on the short story The Veldt by Ray Bradbury...

came from the vaults of the same San Diego firm.

Corporate Usage of Stock Footage

Companies throughout the world use stock footage in their video productions for in-house meetings, annual conventions, seminars and other events. It has become popular to videotape interviews of CEO's and other VIPs using a green-screen backdrop. When the green is keyed out during Post-production

Post-production

Post-production is part of filmmaking and the video production process. It occurs in the making of motion pictures, television programs, radio programs, advertising, audio recordings, photography, and digital art...

, stock footage or stock shots are inserted, to impart a particular message.

Public Domain Footage

One of the largest producers of public domain stock footage is the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

government. All videos produced by the United States military, NASA

NASA

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...

, and other agencies are available for use as stock footage. There are a number of companies that own the copyrights to large libraries of stock footage and charge filmmakers a fee for using it, but they rarely demand royalties

Royalties

Royalties are usage-based payments made by one party to another for the right to ongoing use of an asset, sometimes an intellectual property...

. Stock footage comes from a myriad of sources; including the public domain, other movies and television programs, news outlets and purpose-shot stock footage.

HD Versus SD

Betacam SP, VHS and early digital footage was shot in Standard Definition, in 4:3 aspect ratio, whereas the more contemporary format, HD, has a 16:9 aspect ratio, like film. From the earliest days of the emergence of HD, there has been an ongoing controversy about whether HD would dwarf and eventually snuff out SD footage. Many stock-footage companies and producers were concerned that their libraries would become irrelevant.

Stock footage companies