Demand for stock footage?

Hey everybody,

I was just curious what you all thought about the market for visual effects stock footage. I’m thinking about setting up a website were people can preview and buy really high quality stock footage. It’d be things like muzzle flashes, bullet impacts, water splashes, fire, smoke, explosions, and anything else you may find your self wanting to composite into some footage, but would be too much of a pain in the butt to film yourself. The footage itself would be good, high quality stuff. I’m thinking of getting a Scarlet for this, so the footage would be extremely high-quality, high resolution stuff.

Before I go to the trouble of setting all this up and spending a lot of money to do this… I’m just wondering what ya’ll’s opinions are on this… Do you think there’s much demand for this type of thing? Would YOU use it? I know I’d have fun with it, but it wouldn’t exactly be cheap to do, and it’d be nice to know I could count on at least breaking even.

Thanks everybody!

I’m no expert but this is my observation
There’s already huge demand for stock footage and there are tons of websites that sell it.
Some sites allow users to sell their stock footage libraries on their site.
http://videohive.net
https://www.videocopilot.net/products/action2/


http://www.artbeats.com/

As someone who selects stock footage for pieces in advertising, I never ever ever need “muzzle flashes, bullet impacts, water splashes, fire, smoke, explosions”. People and places are what sell. And with faces, you need legal releases.

You might want to become a contributor to one of the big sites, like gettyimages.com. Then at least your stuff will be searched for by people who actually buy footage. That is, if you are actually a videographer trying to sell your work. If you are just a web programmer, eh whats the point.

@Idh1109 Thanks, there were a few sites there I hadn’t seen yet.

@Atom I mean to say I would create visual effects stock footage. If you don’t work with a lot of effects, I can see why you would never have need for it.

I mean a website like this: http://www.detonationfilms.com/

That one’s been around for a while, and it hasn’t changed for many years… at least not that I’ve noticed. I’m not even sure if they’re still kicking around or not…

I would’t some slow-motion footage for analysis…hopefully the prices will be good enough for someone on a low budget like myself.

That’s part of the issue I take with some of the other stock footage sites. I’ve seen some really horrendous, unusable clips, and they want 39 bucks for them… yea no thanks.

I figure what I’d do is have it setup so you could choose from 2 or 3 different resolutions and price accordingly (though still really cheap).

EDIT: Wait… how slow? The Scarlet (camera I’m thinking of using for this) can do 120fps at 1K… not great resolution at THAT speed, but would look 5x slower than the 24fps that movies record at.