Note: We originally wrote this post for VideoCamp Austin, but wanted to share it here. BIG Thanks to @bigmanweston, who wrote the majority of this post. We’re indebted to @daveiam, @aaronmsb, and the crew at Lights. Camera. Help. for their valuable input.
Ever wanted that little something to add to your clip but just couldn’t find it? Worried about copyrights?
Luckily, we have Creative Commons and people who like to share.
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that works to bridge the content gap between copyrighted and free material. They’re devoted to “expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share.”
What that means is that there is content out there that other producers have created and allowed you to use through a variety of Creative Commons licenses.
There are 6 main licenses:
* Attribution (CC-BY)
* Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA)
* Attribution No Derivatives (CC-BY-ND)
* Attribution Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC)
* Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA)
* Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)
If you’re going to use any content from another producer, please check with the terms of use of the original creator of the content and make sure you follow their guidelines.
Archive.org has a vast, non-profit video library of material. You can find anything from animation to WWII propaganda films.
This is an archive.org search page pre-configured to return only public domain media. The booleans are already entered in the search field. Just add “AND search term” at the end of the text in the search box. For example, if I am looking for shots of explosions that I can use without restriction, this is what would be in the search field after I added my term:
/metadata/licenseurl:http*publicdomain* AND explosion
Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone. It’s not as expansive as Archive.org, but you can certainly find content.
If you’re looking for explosions, Detonation Films offer a ton of pyrotechnical footage for free in standard definition (SD). Much of the footage is shot over black backgrounds and some even comes pre-keyed, making it relatively easy composite fun explosions into your other footage.
If your video is only going to be distributed on the web and you’re not putting a high premium on high resolution, this sight has tons of low-rez stuff for free. (And you can always upgrade for about $15 per clip.)
http://www.freestockfootage.com/
If you’re looking for stock with higher production value, Pond5 is the place to go. They’re one of the cheapest places for high-end stock and every week they give away a professionally shot HD clip from their library for free. You may not have an immediate use for this week’s clip, but if you get in the habit of downloading their freebie every week, you’ll build your HD stock library and find a use for it later.
By law, all media made by the federal government is in the public domain. As you can imagine with anything that involves the federal government and getting something for free, it is not always easy to find this kind of footage. Still, if you know what you’re looking for and willing to really dig, you can sometimes find some amazing stuff.
Take NASA for example:
http://video.google.com/nara.html
http://www.nasaimages.org/index.html
The WBGH Lab in Boston encourages video makers to submit and share footage in order to create innovative new content. Most of the clips are shared and hosted by The WGBH Educational Foundation and are licensed and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
http://lab.wgbh.org/sandbox/
And yes, Mashable has compiled an amazing list of free resources as well. We’ve pulled the list below from them.
- Open Source Cinema: A community site for creating and remixing video online, users upload footage under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License.
- Vimeo (): You can browse the videos tagged with Creative Commons or use a complex search query to search for videos tagged both “creativecommons” and the keyword you’re looking for.
- Flickr : You can use Flickr’s Advanced Search interface to look only within video content that’s Creative Commons-licensed.
Photo credit: acrib
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