Royalty Free Video Background

Creating Great Videos Starts with Great Royalty-Free Video Clips

In order to create terrific videos, you have to start with great video clips. Of course, along the way, a few extras need to be added to increase the value of the final video production. How you go about making an end product depends on what the objective is. The goal may be to simply create a work of art, provide a video background for a live DJ, or as an enhancement for a sales or instructional video. Regardless of the ultimate results, the three basic steps involve obtaining the starting video, using video manipulation software to turn into the masterpiece you’ve imagined, and then to output it in the form best suited to your goal.

Searching for Royalty-Free Video Clips and Stock Footage
There are three main sources of stock footage to begin a project with. First, there’s royalty-free video. This approach is preferable to paying royalties on copyrighted material because once you purchase it, there are no additional fees or restrictions. Using this technique ensures a nearly limitless variety of choices in footage, but the purchase cost can sometimes be pretty steep. A second way of getting the needed video eliminates the purchase price. There are sources like archive.org that offer thousands of free video clips of varying lengths covering a wide range of subjects. A lot of this is material produced by the government, so it’s not copyrighted. Finally, a definite method of obtaining non-copyrighted footage is to record your own. If you already have a suitable video camera and can easily stage the desired scenes, this is a cheap way of getting the needed footage.

Making the Changes
With the starter video loaded in the computer, it’s time to do the creative part of the operation. Depending on how creative you want to get, there are programs that can handle either editing or perform complex special effects or both. For heavy-duty jobs, Adobe Creative Suite is the most popular and powerful one around. Currently, Adobe offers this package online for a monthly fee instead of outright purchase of the package that can run into thousands of dollars. Adobe Premiere Pro is used for editing video, but it’s designed for big-screen movies with resolutions of over 10,000 by 8,000 pixels. Complimenting this tool is Adobe After Effects. This software allow special effects to be applied to video footage. It also lets you add a large number of other images and video to the base video through layered compositing. Motion for Mac and the freeware version of Blackmagic Fusion provide more modest compositing capabilities. Software like Explaindio and Videomakerfx are designed mainly to create product promotion and educational videos. They provide limited compositing that’s restricted to included animations and special effects.

The Finished Product
Once you’ve created your vision, one way to make it available to others for further use is in the form of a royalty free video loops. Examples of popular uses of loops include animated GIFs people use as their avatars on web pages and other sites, repetitive backgrounds like orbiting planets in an educational video, and rhythmic scenes used in music videos. While the earlier-mentioned software usually provides a means to generate a loop, a huge array of programs that focus on this particular task are available online. Many are free for the taking. Normally, the final video clip is in the MP4 format. This format maintains a sharp picture after compression, and it covers a wide range of image sizes. It’s also gaining in popularity over the rival FLV format used by Youtube and Hulu along with web browsers.