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MillimeterStock Footage
Artbeats Myrtle Creek, Oregon
Artbeats provides royalty-free stock footage in HD, NTSC, and PAL—much of which was shot by the company’s own inhouse film crew, and all of which is available for immediate download. “Artbeats is pushing the creative envelope with state-of-the-art technology on film shoots,” says Phil Bates, president and creative director of Artbeats. “We were using the [Vision Research] Phantom HD camera when it was still in its infancy, and we’re actively shooting right now with our own [Red Digital Cinema] Red [One] camera.”
The aggressively pursued new Red One footage line is the first of its kind, offering royalty-free footage with resolutions higher than HD (3K and 4K) for download purposes. Artbeats also offers the raw Red .r3d files, which give editors an endless number of options, allowing for flexibility in colormatching, panning, zooming, scanning, and rotating.
The company adds to its ever-growing plate of creative resource offerings with a new biweekly video podcast for both novice and expert motion designers that provides professional tips to help optimize creativity. Each episode demonstrates specific techniques in Adobe After Effects for editing video projects in innovative ways. The podcast is available on the Artbeats website as well as iTunes.
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BBC Motion Gallery New York, New York
BBC Motion Gallery offers more than 500,000 hours of footage covering natural history, sports, news, locations, art, music, celebrities, and historic events. The company boasts a vast catalog of high-quality imagery that was originally shot for broadcast programming, rather than purely for use as stock footage. “While we embrace digital delivery to satisfy all customers’ requests and needs, what sets us apart at BBC Motion Gallery is our standard to provide the highest production value available,” says Senior Vice President Jan Ross.
Besides continually gathering clips from BBC programming, BBC Motion Gallery is the exclusive representative for CBS News, and it has recently signed a new agreement to represent all of The Hollywood Reporter’s celebrity footage. New content, such as movie premiere footage and interviews, will be available for distribution 3 hours to 4 hours after filming, and the company will feature an average of three to four new events per week.
Blacklight HD archives from Europe, Africa, and the Americas complement historic and modern CCTV footage from China, while HD NHK material expands beyond Japan in the coming months to include coverage of the Ganges River, the Amazon River, the Czech Republic, the Sahara Desert, Victoria Falls, the Rocky Mountains, Nigeria, and South Africa. The highlight films collection includes HD aerial footage of Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East, covering areas of natural beauty in addition to conflict zones and divided communities.
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Bennett-Watt HD Productions Issaquah, Washington
From feature-length movies to travel and cultural documentaries, the husband-andwife team of Jim and Kelly Watt is constantly adding new high-definition footage to an extensive library. “I’ve personally lensed well over 2,000 hours of HD footage in Asia, India, Spain, Argentina, Ireland, and Chile—plus every state in the United States,” Jim Watt says.
A recent trip to Tanzania for three weeks of filming will add a substantial amount of African animal clips, in addition to people and village scenes. The Watts have been shooting HD for eight years, and they spend most of their time on the road, so the company’s website does not always reflect the most current footage available. Be sure to contact Bennett-Watt for its newest additions or any custom footage requests.
Bennett-Watt also offers a unique collection of edited, ready-to-air segments in the form of its award-winning Discoveries… series, fly-fishing programs, and its Sweet Addition original cooking series.
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Creatas Footage Peoria, Illinois
In addition to all of the classic royalty-free categories of lifestyle, business, health, and education, Creatas—a division of Jupiterimages—offers content that illustrates concepts and metaphors in less-available royalty-free categories such as archival, time-lapse, and wildlife.
Creatas can enhance creative options with expressive, diverse content from highly regarded and varied stock footage brands such as Corbis, Redhot, Reel Life, Rocketclips, Rubberball, Triangle Images, and Wavebreak. The company also offers its own premium Bigshot, Creatas, and Thinkstock Footage brands. To add international flavor to its growing mix of content, Creatas will expand its reach to even more stock footage brands this year.
Registrants can download HD and SD watermarked copies of any of the clips at no charge to get client approval before purchasing. Many of the clips are grouped into titles and offered at substantial savings over single-clip pricing.
“We believe that the quality, the variety, and the value of our footage all lead to a bright future,” says Dave Hill, stock footage content director for Jupiterimages. “Not just for broadcast and corporate customers, but as advertisers look to add motion to their web ads, stock footage will lead the way.”
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EcoFootage.com Cupertino, California
As awareness of the importance of climate change issues and the rise of a diversified green economy grows, EcoFootage.com strives to supply high-quality, affordable, royalty-free video stock footage that pertains to these planetthreatening matters.
Subjects are divided into easily browsed categories on the company’s website through a comprehensive topics page.
Categories include sustainability and communities; land use and smart growth; global warming and air quality; water and wastewater; renewable energy and fossil fuels; green design and building; transportation alternatives; food, agriculture, and fiber; biotechnology and food; sustainable agriculture; forests and forestry; recycling and solid waste; toxic and hazardous materials; urban greening; and nature.
EcoFootage.com also features a helpful resource directory for producers of educational video, television, film, digital media, advertising, display video, and online video. The website contains links to other resources; useful equipment; skills training; funding, marketing, sales, duplication, and distribution information; as well as preproduction, production, and postproduction services.
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FootageBank HD Venice, California
FootageBank HD, which specializes in high-definition content, recently launched footagehead.com, a new royalty-free division dedicated to meeting the content needs for online and mobile platforms with more than 10,000 new clips and more coming weekly.
“Early on, we recognized the value of HD footage, which allowed FootageBank HD to prepare for the high demand. With an eye on the future, we anticipate the same need for programming and tools to create content for podcasts, webisodes, or anything in the mobile media space,” says Paula Lumbard, founder and president of FootageBank HD. “Two years ago, we saw our clients’ emerging need for affordable web-accessible HD content and decided to build out this new venture in an effort to meet their needs.”
Mostly shot with the Panasonic P2 and Sony XDCAM cameras in 2008, this footage has been created with FootageBank HD’s client base in mind. All the footage is offered in its native codec without compression. The HD 16:9 widescreen format is immediately downloadable and royaltyfree. Footagehead.com is offering the clips at one price point and at a rate less than other HD royalty-free sites.
“It is our intention to be the leader in serving the growing demand for downloadable 16:9 content in digital files created with the new mobile HD camcorders,” Lumbard says. “We are seeing growth in this market around the world and expect demand to continue as the consumers of media more and more turn to their mobile ‘third screens’ for their entertainment.”
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The Footage Resource Napa Valley, California
The Footage Resource has made new stock footage additions to its premium royalty-free HD library, offering an expanded business collection with a variety of corporate scenes (both formal and casual) as well as industry-related content including gas stations, oil refineries, nuclear power plants, alternative energy, transportation, real estate, and finance-related footage.
In the nature and geography category, more ocean scenics, landscapes, and popular travel destinations have been added. Also, check out the company’s ever-growing selection of lifestyles and entertainment scenes ranging from beauty and massage, health and medicine, dating and romance to firework extravaganzas and spectacular animated flag backgrounds.
The company’s website features broadcast-quality highdefinition stock footage starting at $5. The site is designed for quick and easy searching, and all clips have instant previews. One can purchase individual clips or entire collections, and selections can be downloaded directly from www.thefootageresource.com. Once you register for a free account at the site, you can instantly download one HD stock-footage clip for free.
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Getty Images Seattle, Washington
Recent additions to the Getty Images catalog only further back up its claim to providing the world’s largest variety of royalty-free commercial footage. With partners such as Warner Bros. Entertainment, Discovery FootageSource, the Jane Goodall Institute, Universal Studios, and AP Archive, Getty Images covers diverse categories of news, sports, celebrity, lifestyle, wildlife, locations, and cultures.
One80 is a new and unique rights-ready collection filled with surprising conceptual footage created with high production value, relevant subject matter, and exceptional creative direction. The collection features more than 2,500 clips created with expert art direction that is often difficult to reproduce, such as cutting-edge sports action, aerial footage of hard-to-reach locations, fully model-released crowds, and conceptual lifestyle shots. One80 challenges the perception of generic stock, and it is continuously updated with fresh content reflecting the visual trends of today and tomorrow.
“The critical selection and ongoing creation of new content for One80 will be tightly married to what our top creative customers are looking for, and more importantly, to the highest standard of delivering how that need is visually conveyed,” says Jamie DiVenere, director of creative services for footage. “This special collection takes our production expertise and applies it to something new for the stock footage industry.”
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Global ImageWorks Haworth, New Jersey
New for 2009 is Global ImageWorks’ new database, which includes more than 10,000 digitized video clips, with additional videos added weekly. Representing various filmmakers, journalists, and private collections, Global ImageWorks (GIW) is a deep content library that features digitized videos that run an average of 3 minutes to 5 minutes in length, allowing clients to view and select the footage in its original context. The company also encourages clients to contact them for personalized service and to request footage that is not yet viewable online.
GIW has announced exclusive representation of TV’s first talk show, The Joe Franklin Show. Joe Franklin is listed in the Guinness World Records book as the longest-running TV talk show host in history, having interviewed more than 500,000 guests. Archives include interviews and performance footage of Bill Cosby, Billy Crystal, Jay Leno, the Ramones, Marcel Marceau, Bing Crosby, and “Weird Al” Yankovic, among others.
“We are thrilled to be able to bring this collection back for licensing. It is such a kick to see these historic early interviews,” says President Jessica Berman-Bogdan.
GIW also features new material shot behind the Great Wall of China, plus additional global conflict footage of the persecution of Iraqi Christians, as well as the blood diamond trade in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The company has brought in additional HD and 4K Red Digital Cinema Red One camera footage to include aerials, landscapes, people, cultures, and world destinations. Global ImageWorks now also represents unique extreme footage of human interaction with bears, sharks, and alligators that is incredibly compelling.
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HBO Archives New York, New York
Director of HBO Archives Max Segal predicts that more than twice the amount of HD footage will be made available this year as compared to 2008. Last summer, HBO Sports made a complete transition to HD. Led by Emmy-winning magazine shows Real Sports and Costas Now, HBO’s HD cameras have been all over the world. Overseas productions have gone to the Philippines, Scotland, Wales, London, Jamaica, Beijing, and Austria, with trips to Dubai and Mexico in the works. At home, they have been capturing iconic images from Nashville, Tenn.; Boston; New Orleans; Phoenix; Los Angeles; Manhattan, N.Y.; and Brooklyn, N.Y.
The HD development goes deeper, including storytelling images relating to prison, energy, finances, education, baseball, rodeo, air travel, religion, global warming, and boxing. HD cameras on Nov. 4, 2008, in Times Square captured the excitement of Barack Obama’s presidential win.
Starting in 2009, HBO Archives will be developing 35mm-to-HD second unit and outtake material from original HBO Films. The first movies will include Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Live from Baghdad, Stalin, Pancho Villa, and The Rat Pack. Additionally, HBO Archives is accessing original 35mm March of Time documentary films from the 1930s and 1940s to transfer to HD. Stories recently transferred cover Palestine, Nazi Germany, New York and its Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and summer theater groups. Crusade in the Pacific, a 1951 26-part landmark television series on the war in the Pacific from 1931 to 1951, is also going through an in-depth restoration and will be made available in HD.
The HBO Archives website now features footage and text online database searching, as well as low-resolution video downloads, free research, and free screeners.
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Mammoth HD Evergreen, Colorado
Mammoth HD specializes in royalty-free and rights-managed visuals in an all-digital pipeline, from Red Digital Cinema Red One and HD cameras through leading-edge 3D animation and motion-graphics applications in HD formats. Current formats include Red 4K, 3K, 2K, and HD formats 1080i, 1080/24p, 720p, and HDV. Plans for 2009 include offering 5K-, 6K-, and 9K-quality images and expanding the company’s popular vertical footage for signage and digital displays.
Award-winning cinematographers, videographers, photographers, 3D animators, and motion-graphics artists from around the world add new material to the library every month. The Mammoth HD Library now features more than 700 collections and more than 350 hours of single-clip material.
Recent additions in the Lifestyle Gallery additions feature: Showertime, Poolside, Women’s Faces, Women’s Fitness, Babies, Kitchen, Home Computing, and Personal Dancing. The Medical/Healthcare Gallery additions feature: Hospital Care, Bedside Care, Heart Attack, Doctors, Surgeons, X-ray, and CAT Scans.
Red galleries have expanded to include 4K Chicago aerials, cityscapes, skylines, and downtown, plus 4K footage of Los Angeles aerials, downtown, Hollywood, Hollywood Hills, freeways, and traffic.
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Oddball Film+Video San Francisco, California
For 20 years, Oddball Film+Video has been the definitive source for eclectic, offbeat, and unusual footage. With an archive of more than 50,000 film and media elements in 16mm, 35mm, and HD, Oddball houses thousands of historic newsreels, television commercials, movie trailers, TV news outtakes, B-roll, educational films, lifestyles of the 1960s and 1970s, world events, medical, and science/technology films, as well as contemporary footage of the United States, Asia, and India.
Oddball does deep research and specializes in finding hardto- locate footage for award-winning documentary and feature filmmakers such as Gus Van Sant, Ridley Scott, and Spike Lee, as well as companies such as the BBC, Canal+, and CNN. Recently, Oddball has acquired more than 1,500 historical special-interest subjects including footage of Los Angeles in the 1940s, stranger-than-fiction curiosities, quirky science and inventions from the 1930s and 1940s, and HD footage of California wildfires and exotic locations in Northern India. Currently, the company is building up an archive of HD animation for use in web and online media projects.
A clip-searchable online database and an inhouse database with thousands of QuickTime clips make immediate viewing and download easy.
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Reenactment Stock Footage Richmond, Virginia
In 2008, during its first full year in operation, new stock footage supplier Reenactment Stock Footage has added more than 100 hours of HD royalty-free historical recreation footage to its library—including two large-scale American Revolution combat events and footage from a recent Battle of Gettysburg reenactment. Rather than the antique footage available from most stock footage suppliers, all of the footage available from the company’s website is from brand-new, authentic historical reenactments.
“There is no other exclusive repository of newly shot historical reenactment footage available anywhere else for use in film, television, and documentaries, and this year has shown me that the need can only grow as budgets are trimmed,” says footage creator and manager Kevin R. Hershberger. “Producers at varied budget levels creating historical films and documentaries can find fresh footage from me, and licensing several seconds or several minutes of my footage is vastly less expensive and less time-consuming than shooting it themselves.”
Hershberger has been making awardwinning films since 1999, and he is known nationally for his strict level of authenticity and attention to detail. He is also proud of the you-are-there quality of a majority of the footage, where cameras are imbedded in the action.
Plans are under way for large-scale Civil War and Revolutionary War reenactment events in 2009, as well as shoots covering both World Wars, German and American infantry and armor in action, and a new collection of HD Jamestown 1607 and Native American footage. If that doesn’t cover your needs, Hershberger can also fill special orders for the reenactment of your choice.
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Ribbit Films New York, New York
According to Ribbit Films, prekeyed greenscreen footage is rapidly changing the way the stock-footage industry works. In that spirit, the company has introduced 12 volumes of prekeyed HD clips for download on the company’s website or on DVD.
The footage is convenient and lends itself naturally to a designer’s overall creative process by offering a sweeping range of design options. From background footage, swipes, and title sequences to banners, advertisements, and any other projects where dynamic live action is called for, Ribbit’s HD drag-and-drop clips allow designers the freedom to create top-quality work quickly and easily. All a designer has to do is choose the type of footage to add to the production, purchase the volume of desired clips, select the clip, and edit the action into the project.
“We’ve seen the industry really grow and shift into a fast-paced business rather quickly,” says Navarre Joseph, president of Ribbit Films. “Since we’re already seeing our clips being used by large brands such as Adidas, Nike, Ford, and Jaguar, and since we’re getting specific requests by creative agencies, we wanted to produce these volumes of clips for them to purchase and use at their convenience.”
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Scubazoo Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia
Scubazoo is based in Malaysian Borneo, which is right in the heart of marine biodiversity—perfect for a company with a footage library that’s all about the underwater world. The company says its cameramen are in the water 365 days a year in some of the best diving locations in the world, making sure its library is constantly evolving and growing.
The world’s oceanic habitats are threatened on all sides by issues such as climate change, overfishing, pollution, and destructive fishing practices. Scubazoo has been involved in shooting environmental footage for non-governmental organizations such as the World Wildlife Foundation and Greenpeace for many years, and it has amassed an invaluable library of dramatic and emotive footage such as cyanide fishing and fish-bombing.
Some of its most recent footage includes mother and calf humpback whale HDCAM footage from the Kingdom of Tonga, a mass feeding event in the Maldives with more than 50 manta rays and several whale sharks, as well as the world’s first footage of Indonesian natives hunting highly endangered leatherback turtles.
With the increase in demand for this type of environmental footage with a conservationist slant, Scubazoo is expanding this area of its library. This month is the planned launch of a digitized footage and photo library for customers to browse online.
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Sony Pictures Stock Footage Culver City, California
Sony Pictures Stock Footage (SPSF) offers unparalleled access to more than 120,000 shots of the highest-quality, wholly owned, studio-produced 35mm and HD stock footage available anywhere in the world. The company’s premium collection of stunts, pyrotechnics, and other extremely difficult-to-produce footage can add tremendous production value to budgetchallenged projects. The footage is pulled from more than 30 years worth of TV and feature-film production.
SPSF also delivers clips in virtually any format (including 2K or 4K scans) and claims to offer industry-leading turnaround times. The company offers free research service as well as self-service research via its website. The entire library is searchable online and available to preview or even download as frame-accurate comp files.
If you have a corporate or digital-signage project for which a finished video is needed, SPSF has recently begun to offer custom editing on demand. Other new developments include the addition of a new extreme sports collection. SPSF uses its vast network of producers and cinematographers to produce footage that ensures the company has the most up-to-date and relevant content for the most frequently requested subjects such as landmarks and iconic establishing shots.
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StockXpert Gatineau, Canada
Stockxpert, a division of Jupiterimages, began as a royaltyfree stock-photography community. Just last year, however, the company added the availability of stock footage. Besides providing customers with affordable stock footage, Stockxpert offers a powerful tool to videographers who would like to sell their own original work.
From CGI background clips to nature and lifestyle footage, Stockxpert covers a broad range of subject matter, and the company is always looking for more. More than 17,000 video clips are available now, and the company is adding an average of more than 250 new clips every week. Multiple file formats are available—including HD, PAL, NTSC, WMV, MP4, and FLV. Whether you are looking to buy stock footage for your project or looking to earn money from your footage, Stockxpert can help. Footage clips are available for as low as $10 per clip, HD clips are available for $50 each, and the company claims to offer the highest royalty rates in the industry, with a 40 percent commission on every clip sold going to the artist.
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Thought Equity Motion Denver, Colorado
Thought Equity Motion calls itself the leader in providing access to high-quality film, video, and music to producers, offering the ability to search and preview content easily and the freedom to purchase and download full-resolution files on demand.
The Smithsonian Channel collection is the most recent addition to the library. The company offers more than 250,000 professionally-shot HD clips, which are all available online. Its content-delivery platform and custom tools are designed to work with large HD files. This means customers can download full-resolution files in minutes, not hours. Today, 92 percent of the company’s footage purchases are delivered via on-demand download.
“Our commitment to HD is long-standing. Anticipating the industry demand for highdefinition footage, we were first to market three years ago with a delivery platform capable of delivering HD online,” says founder and CEO Kevin Schaff. “Since then, we have been amassing HD content with usability in mind, driving toward a tapeless environment.”
Thought Equity Motion online collections include Paramount Pictures, MGM, NBC News, HBO, National Geographic, Sony Pictures, and the NCAA. The company offers 24/7 customer service, free research, and rights and clearances expertise to license virtually any film video or music content for use.
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WPA Film Library Orland Park, Illinois
The WPA Film Library has grown into one of the world’s leading footage sources, offering tens of thousands of hours of high-quality vintage and contemporary images.
Known for its extensive historical stock footage, WPA offers a searchable online database for customers to find the images they need. Some video is making its way to the company website already.
“WPA is pleased to announce that our entire library is in the process of being digitized and will soon be available for instant previewing online,” says Sales Director Diane Paradiso.
One of the WPA’s most popular holdings is the British Pathe Newsreel Collection, covering world events and personalities from 1895 to 1970. It also owns rights to public broadcaster WETA-TV’s archives, with coverage of House and Senate hearings from the 1970s on—among them the Waco, Watergate, and Whitewater hearings—as well as hearings on the Iran-Contra affair and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Other unique properties include extensive pre-MTV music archives; a 1950s color stock collection; vintage training films; funny video clips; home movies dating back to the 1920s; classic commercials; contemporary nature, landmark, and wildlife footage; gorgeous film footage on the spiritual, ecological, and economic significance of water; contemporary Afghanistan footage; and coverage of late-1980s celebrities on the red carpet.
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