Free high def stock footage

K

ksk

New member
Hello all,

I've started getting interested in DVX, HDV and other high quality new standards. I would be interested to set up a free (and royalty-free) repository of high definition stock footage. But before jumping into doing that, I would just like to check if there will be people interested in this, and what kind of people.

So if you use stock footage in your projects or know people that do (and even if you don't!) I would be interested in your opinion and advices.

Thanks,
G.
 
Of course I've thought of the bandwidth, that's why a bittorrent-like solution could help.
With at least a decent connection on a server to guarantee download speed when few users are downloading the torrent. And for the impatient maybe direct-downloads, but those wouldn't be free (bandwidth is cheap so that won't make those downloads expensive at all, but multiplied by the amount of users I guess the bill would be pretty big if I had to pay it myself :))

But that's just at the planning process. I'm talking about this to see if there would be enough users interested in that to come up with a proper business plan/study of market to knock at investors doors. It's a business even being free and royaltie-free. It wouldn't be the first website that offers a free service and still makes money out of it (I'm thinking hardware shop on the same website for example, but I have other options in mind), at least to pay the people actually producing the footage.
 
bluestar said:
Well you wouldn't be the first, there are tons out there.
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Providing free and royalty-free pro stock footage? I would be very interested if you have links, because everything I've found so far was either good quality but very expensive or free but very amateur/low resolution.
 
i like the idea of using file sharing programs like limewire or bittorrent.
Limewire has the function where you click on the URL and it starts the file search in limewire. I also believe Shareaza would be a good choice as well.
Let me know how this idea goes....

(I'll have tons of HDV footage from Tokyo once I get my camera fixed)

also, how about a mediawiki with a filmmakers glossary? Wikipedia.org has a decent one, but it might be nice to have one with more specific information and more limited to television and film production.

just a random thought
 
Well software-side, i've thought BitTorrent could be a good solution as a protocol, but that I would develop custom software (I'm from a software dev background). A custom bittorrent client with advanced preview search and browsing through the website's catalogue functions. With satellite applications like a search OS X dashboard widget, for example. Focus being on making it very easy to find what you need.

I'll have a closer look at limewire and shareaza as I don't know much about those, thanks for the tip.

The other point would be that people could submit their own footage to get published and potentially get paid for it. OK you may think "yeah but how the hell do you think this is going to work money-wise?", but discussing this here is part of studying how succesful it could be.
 
also, try checking Revver at http://www.revver.com/

but it's not for royalty free footage. It's more for pure entertainment independent video if I'm not mistaken. They ad advertising onto the beginning (and maybe end) of the video to pay for bandwidth. They also share this revenue with the person who owns the content.

Possibly you could set up a system like you talked about earlier. Put up advertisements on the download page somehow to help defray some of the bandwidth costs, and reward those videos that are downloaded the most with a share of the revenue their video generates. This would encourage people to upload/share, and increase the likelihood of getting good quality stuff on the site, cause people would want to be rewarded for their filming exploits.

Also, I'd incorporate a good search engine and organizational structure of course, always a must when I'm looking through a stock footage library.

Lastly, try looking at Creative Commons licenses. They can be royalty free, but the best thing is they're even more flexible and can allow possiblities that might fit your business idea.
 
Sorry, one more thing. I believe any BitTorrent file would be accessible by anyone with ANY BitTorrent client. Not sure if there's a way to change this because BitTorrent is some sort of open source license (I believe) and any software that incorporates this code has to be open source as well, which means it's difficult to create a proprietary network with it.

ok, that's it.

cheers,
david
 
Thanks for the ideas David! I thought of advertisement as a good income possibility. Especially because it can be targeted advertisement, as the people using stock footage are likely to buy editing software, cameras, etc.

I'll check on bittorrent, I remember seeing some video game companies and websites providing custom bittorrent clients. And I don't really mind the custom client being open source as well, that always help people pointing out where it's badly written or even correcting it themselves. I think providing an all-proprietary solution wouldn't be good, people would be happier to have the choice to use the custom client, more adapted to the stock footage download or keep their favorite bittorrent app.

And other companies ripping off the custom software because it's open source wouldn't do too much harm to the business. Most of the valuable work is in the footage after all, the rest is just a tool to distribute it.

I'll have a look at how I can set up a creative commons license for that purpose. The main issue is to let people include the footage in any work that they sell or not, but not let them distribute the original footage itself all over the place. Because if people put the stock footage on all the p2p networks, that means no traffic on the website and no money back on the investment. Of course if the website and the footage is popular it will end on p2p networks without the website's authorization anyway, like all interesting content and software does. But at least a proper license would help fight against that with legal actions.
 
Right, exactly.

And in the long run, I think the majority of your customers will be medium to large production houses that can download the footage to try it out, then won't mind licensing it if they decide to use it because they have a budget for this kind of stuff.

As for the problem of people sharing it on P2P networks, check out the link I gave you before, revver.com . Somehow (sorry, I'm not a tech guy), they put an advertisement at the end of a clip (the beginning would work too) and use this to count the number of times a file is played. Then, they can charge the advertisers for the correct number of impressions, and can reward the content owner with a portion of this revenue.

With their system, as long as the advertisers message is getting played with the file at the end, revver.com knows about it somehow and counts this as an impression. For them, it doesn't matter what site it's played on. Same is true if it's on a P2P network. Play = Pay. Seems like something worth looking into.

I think your biggest stumbling block will be file size and delivery. If I'm working for a production house in Tokyo, and I need some HD footage of the Eiffel Tower (say, a simple Pan shot) for a French bakery commercial I'm doing, I don't have all day to wait for sources to become available or to look through options. Even a heavily compressed format like HDV takes up at least 25 mps (again, not a techie, please check this), so a ten second pan shot will be approx 250 mb. And as we all know, downloading a 250 mb file can vary depending on the amount of people sharing it, etc.

Still, I think the idea is a good one, with a lot of promise. A File Sharing system is definitely a way to go I think. Also, another thing to think about is that production houses will want some sort of guarantee that the footage is royalty free. For example, what if I'm a 16 year old kid, and I rip some footage of the Eiffel Tower (using my previous example) from a movie and upload it as my own content to your servers, trying to make money.

If it's a well-known movie, people will probably notice it and see that it's not this person's original footage and file a complaint. But a problem arises if it's a small movie and no one notices until after someone has used it in a commercial, etc. Then, the production company that uses it will be held responsible for using unlicensed content (because the 16 y.o. didn't have the authority to license it out) and the client will be very unhappy about this.
For this reason, it seems like a good business model for a stock footage company to follow, but it will become increasingly difficult if you're licensing others' footage, due to the fact that people will use it for broadcast and they have to be absolutely positive that they're purchasing a license.

ok, sorry to drag on about this, but I think it's important to think about. Also, I'm definitely not trying to dissuade you. I still think it's a great idea and would love to brainstorm more for you!

cheers,
david
 
d-mac said:
As for the problem of people sharing it on P2P networks, check out the link I gave you before, revver.com . Somehow (sorry, I'm not a tech guy), they put an advertisement at the end of a clip (the beginning would work too) and use this to count the number of times a file is played. Then, they can charge the advertisers for the correct number of impressions, and can reward the content owner with a portion of this revenue.
Click to expand...

I know some video file formats can automatically open web links, but most video players have this option disabled by default (and that's understandable, imagine opening a video and having 50 ad popups appearing!). The link could be a page counting hits. In addition to that if the video is converted to another format the link thing is very likely to disappear in the conversion, and even if the video still contains the ad, there's no way this can be tracked. But maybe they use another technique I'm not aware of.

A very simple way of doing it would be, for example the website www.fantasticbananas.com advertises in the video. At the end of the ad, instead of telling people "visit us at www.fantasticbananas.com !" the advert would say "visit us at freehd.fantasticbananas.com !"
The subdomain freehd.fantasticbananas.com would redirect to www.fantasticbananas.com (or whatever fantasticbananas wants), but the company will be very easily able to count how many people visited using the freehd.fantasticbananas.com address. That means they would know how many people visited the website thanks to the ad (considering that some people will use www instead of freehd even if they have seen the ad, which makes the count not so accurate). But I don't see a way to know how many times the ad has been viewed.

d-mac said:
I think your biggest stumbling block will be file size and delivery. If I'm working for a production house in Tokyo, and I need some HD footage of the Eiffel Tower (say, a simple Pan shot) for a French bakery commercial I'm doing, I don't have all day to wait for sources to become available or to look through options. Even a heavily compressed format like HDV takes up at least 25 mps (again, not a techie, please check this), so a ten second pan shot will be approx 250 mb. And as we all know, downloading a 250 mb file can vary depending on the amount of people sharing it, etc.
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That's why I thought people could pay a small fee (to cover bandwidth costs) to get fast direct downloads if they need the files quickly (the free p2p being of course still available for people that can afford to wait). I've checked my hosting company's plans and for a volume of 300GB of bandwidth per month this can be as cheap as 0.5$ per GB. Of course if paid-for direct downloads are very popular that would mean higher volume and even cheaper price per GB.

d-mac said:
Also, another thing to think about is that production houses will want some sort of guarantee that the footage is royalty free. For example, what if I'm a 16 year old kid, and I rip some footage of the Eiffel Tower (using my previous example) from a movie and upload it as my own content to your servers, trying to make money.
Click to expand...

Yes this really can be an issue. I guess a solution could be to ask people to send their submission through post with a tape containing the all original footage before editing and a signed contract where they accept to be held responsible if they are not the owners of the content. That will slow down things as many people couldn't be bothered sending that by post, but will greatly reduce the number of 16yo kids trying to trick us :)
Of course that doesn't prevent from someone stealing the original tapes, or an employee from a company trying to make money with the company's footage. But that means much more effort will be needed in order to cheat, reducing considerably the amount of cases like this.

But anyway the stage where the website would accept user submissions would be for later, once the webiste is already established and the system has proved to work well without user-submitted footage (meaning the company is strong enough not to crush at the first legal issue with stolen user-submitted footage).
 
So what starts out as FREE STOCK FOOOTAGE turns into

"That's why I thought people could pay a small fee"

AHA!
 
John_Hudson said:
So what starts out as FREE STOCK FOOOTAGE turns into

"That's why I thought people could pay a small fee"

AHA!
Click to expand...

The footage remains free, you pay for the fast delivery. It can be compared to all the webshops letting you choose between free 2 to 5 days delivery and next day delivery for a fee. And again, that's for the impatient that want direct download. Bittorrent will remain available for free, with in-house servers to sustain decent upload rate.
 
You know what I think would work really well? Contacting other DVXUsers and asking if anyone has or could get footage of the type you are looking for but are unable to get yourself. Then one day, I could return the favor if someone needed, say, shots of cornfields or something. Just a thought.
 
HorseFilms said:
You know what I think would work really well? Contacting other DVXUsers and asking if anyone has or could get footage of the type you are looking for but are unable to get yourself. Then one day, I could return the favor if someone needed, say, shots of cornfields or something. Just a thought.
Click to expand...

That's actually a great idea! :thumbsup:

Way to go, Horse!


-Robert
 
Ought2bCommitted said:
That's actually a great idea! :thumbsup:
Click to expand...

I figure that it would work just as well as anything, but without the hassles of setting everything up.

That way, you can also specify aspect ratio, scene file settings, etc.

I'd be willing to shoot some stuff for people. No big deal.
 
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