What is stock footage?

Footage somebody else shot, licensed to you

Stock libraries exist because most productions need shots they cannot sensibly film themselves: a harbour at dawn, a crowded airport, a drone view of farmland in autumn. A camera operator films them once, the library sells permission to use them many times, and no buyer ever owns the clip. That last part matters. What you pay for is a licence, a set of permissions with limits, and the limits differ by library, by clip and by the tier you choose. Two people can download exactly the same file and be allowed to do very different things with it.

How the licences work

Most commercial stock is sold royalty free, which means one payment covers ongoing use without a fee each time the video airs or is viewed. It does not mean free, and it still has ceilings. Adobe Stock's standard licence, for example, allows up to 500,000 copies and use in a broadcast or digital programme with an expected audience under 500,000, while its enhanced licence, available for video, lifts that cap and its extended licence adds products made for resale. Rights managed footage is priced per defined use instead. Clips marked editorial use only may be used for newsworthy topics but not in advertising, promotion or endorsement. Creative Commons clips cost nothing and carry conditions such as attribution or no commercial use.

When stock footage is the right call

Stock is at its best for the generic and the impractical. Establishing shots of a city, weather, traffic, crowds, nature and aerial views are expensive to shoot and look much the same whoever films them. It is at its worst for anything that is supposed to be you. A clip of a smiling team in a bright office, laid over a line about your own staff, is a small untruth that viewers increasingly spot, and in an ad it can mislead about who runs the business and what it looks like. A useful rule is that stock may show the world your business works in, but never the business itself.

What to check before you download

Four things, in order. The licence tier, and whether it covers the audience and the channels you plan, including paid social and broadcast. Any editorial flag on the clip, which overrides everything else. Releases for recognisable people and private property, which decent libraries record against each clip. And the technical match: the resolution, the frame rate and the shape of the frame. A wide clip dropped into a tall video loses most of its width to cropping, and a clip shot at a different frame rate from the rest of the edit can make motion look slightly wrong.

Common mistakes

Using an editorial clip in an ad is the classic one, and it is easy to do because the clip looks identical to a commercial one. Assuming that a free download site means free for every use is the second: check whether attribution is required, whether commercial use is allowed and whether recognisable people or brands in the frame are cleared. The third is leaning on fair use. In the United States fair use is judged case by case against four factors, including how much of the work is used and the effect on its market, and a promotional video reusing a clip for its original purpose fares poorly on most of them. Keeping every licence record with the project files is the habit that avoids trouble later.

Where it shows up in the product

There is no stock footage library in the video builder here, and no licensed video is pulled into a scene on your behalf. Moving footage only enters a video when you upload it yourself, as an MP4, WebM or MOV clip of up to 200 MB, so any stock clip in your video is one you licensed and its terms remain your responsibility. Every other picture in a scene is either an image you uploaded or an AI image generated from a prompt of up to 2,000 characters, with its aspect ratio picked from eight options to suit the slot. The movement in a finished video comes from the scene layouts, the entrance animations and the pace setting rather than from filmed clips.

Questions people ask