ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

1 month, 3 weeks ago - Howard Lewis-Baker

Hi Tina
I can offer a perspective from a buyers pov. My main work is for a company that produces a lot of videos aimed at high end/blue chip corporate clients. We have a Getty subscription and source a lot of b roll from there. However if the budget for a project is tight, we'll then default to free options - notably the free resources from Adobe Stock, Pexels, Pixabay. We have an Envato elements sub but we've found the quality there is generally poor.

The stuff we look for tends to be people in work settings, doing work things. I think most of the main stock libraries will have metrics available on most downloaded etc. There is a huge amount of noise out there so it will be difficult to cut through that - for example a typical clip we'd use is 'person working at laptop in office' type thing. Put that into a search and there be squillions of results sent back. The quality of stuff available for free is scarily good too, another factor to consider. I know that sort of thing isn't what anybody really wants to film, but unfortunately it is what people want to buy. Companies with budgets tend to want safe imagery. I try and sneak in a handheld light flooded abstract clip now and then, and see it as a personal triumph if I can get it through.

And then there's Ai (sorry). Gen Ai is already changing how we work, and I would anticipate it having a huge effect on our b roll usage over the next year. There are a large number of quality players in that field, and the ability to now create 5 second clips of b roll from a text or still prompt (and with some engines extend that to 10 seconds) means that, for me, when I'm given a script I won't have to trawl through pages of stock video trying to find the right one, I'll be able to gen ai it in seconds. I don't want to, but our company is a large commercial beast that demands efficiency. TBH I can see 50% of our work disappearing over the next 3 - 4 years or so thanks to AI.

Not, I know, the optimistic appraisal you were probably hoping for. If you study what's out there, you will start to see some gaps. I think the main thing is keep the quality high, the subject slightly left field but not enough to scare people off, and always shoot b-roll a little longer than you think, one perennial problem is clips not being long enough. In the (paying/buying) corporate sector we can't really get away with cuts every 3 seconds, we need at least 10 seconds to give us flexibility.

Hope that helps!
H