I am currently involved in another series of weekly videos that I write, direct, act in, and produce for our church. This is the 3rd series I have done (only 3 videos in this series) and is by far the hardest since I am doing a lot of chromakey work in it (think evil and good conscience on the shoulders). I finished the 2nd video at 5:00 am on Saturday...well...technically I guess that would be Sunday, but I started working on it at 3:00 pm on Saturday so it felt...oh, you know what I mean.
Now to the subject. I wanted it to open showing a freeway with a lot of traffic. I was just going to go shoot on the overpass of I-5 one day, but totally forgot about it. No problem I thought, there has to be a small 10 second video like that on the Internet. Well, no such luck. However, there were plenty of videos that I could by, something known as stock video footage. Well, I do all of this as a ministry and I don't charge the church for any out of pocket expenses (tapes, DVD's, lighting, fabrics, software, etc...) but the price of short clips of stock video is outrageous. I saw small videos going upwards of $500. This is just for small 30 second clips. The cheapest I found was $19.95. Still, $20 for a small video? I wonder how much money these people actually make? If it's a lot, maybe I'm in the wrong business :-) Here are some examples at how ridiculous these things are:
1) Seen in a close-up, a female hand grasps a computer mouse resting on a gray surface. The pointer finger of the hand double-clicks the left button, pauses, and then clicks it a third time. Runs for 5:18. Price: $149 .
2) A plate of sushi fills the screen. You see a man use a pair of chopsticks and grap a piece. The clip runs for 5 seconds and the price to have it shipped on a CD is $149 (for 5 seconds of video). But wait! You can download it and only pay $99! Can you say “bargain”!
3) An 11 second clip of someone filming the St. Louis Arch for $9.95. Ok, I know what you're thinking. However, that's for the medium resolution version. The high resolution version is $19.95. Ok, still not so bad (meaning it won't bankrupt you). It gets better. The clip is on the site whose site title, domain name, and main graphic proclaim “Free Stock Footage!”.