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MillimeterGet It Now: Stock Footage on the Internet
Jan 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Audrey Doyle
Research is traditionally the most time-consuming stage of the stock-footage purchasing process. When demo reels arrive from stock companies, you laboriously search through each one for the clip you need. If you find the clip, you often wait a few days for it to arrive via express mail before you can use it in your storyboard or comp. If you don't find the clip you need, or if the one you ordered isn't adequate, you start the research process again. Sometimes, more than a week can pass before you have a high-resolution version of your coveted clip in hand.
The Internet has presented an alternative to this tedious, inefficient, and time-consuming process. An increasing number of stock-footage Web sites provide visitors access to a large portion of vendors' libraries. On many of these sites, you can enter keywords or specify parameters, and, within minutes, search engines will offer a selection of still images taken from clips that match your criteria. At some sites, you can view QuickTime movies of demo reels and download samples to use in rough cuts before making your purchase. A few vendors offer the capability to download directly from their Web sites clips that are suitable for corporate presentations and online applications. The Internet is helping to make the task of researching and purchasing footage an easy, efficient, and expeditious process.
That's good news not only for users but also for independent cinematographers and stock-footage vendors, says John Tariot, a former broadcast TV producer, director, and editor now with Footage.net. The Hanover, New Hampshire-based company builds and hosts Web sites for leading stock-footage providers. "Obviously, the biggest benefit to producers and directors is that these Web sites provide a quick way to glean the information about a stock company's product line," Tariot says.
Independent cinematographers with their own Web sites can also benefit, he says, because the Internet places them on equal footing with vendors of large libraries. "When you search online for, say, 'surfing,' you'll get the top five names of footage providers that you'd get no matter what you're looking for," Tariot explains. "But you'll also get the nuggets, the special collections of unique imagery that you don't see in magazine ads and at trade shows. Researchers are always looking for the rare, unique, and never-before-seen. The Internet makes small cinematographers much more accessible."
According to Tariot, stock footage is a $200 million-per-year business that is expected to reach $1 billion by 2010, and the Internet is playing a major role in that growth. "Providing the ability to search, license, and purchase stock footage online will mean major new forms of revenue for footage vendors," he states. "It won't double a company's bottom line right out of the gate, but over the next few years, it will become an increasingly important part of every stock-footage company's business."
Words and Pictures According to owner Scott Dittrich, Malibu-based Action Sports/Scott Dittrich Films receives requests over the Internet for footage on a daily basis. However, he adds, the company uses its 21/2-year-old Web site mainly as a method of communication. "Say someone's looking for football footage. They search our site based on keywords to see if we have that footage. When they see that football is one of the categories we specialize in, they call us and give us more information as to what they're looking for," Dittrich explains. "Then we e-mail them a QuickTime clip so that they can see the footage in action, or we'll make up a tape and send it to them. They select off that tape, and we get a master-quality version out to them."
Dittrich prefers textual descriptions rather than images and clips because he feels current technology for viewing video on the Internet does not do his footage justice. "Even if people could view the clips on our site, we feel they'd still want to see a D1 tape before they approve anything."
Historic Films of East Hampton, New York, offers one of the most comprehensive text-based, online research tools at its four-year-old site. A search by keyword or collection generates short descriptions of applicable clips from thousands of hours of vintage and musical performance footage. After finding something that they like, users can order a screening cassette. Although he calls it a "bare-bones site," president Joe Lauro adds that it's nevertheless responsible for about 15 percent of the company's revenues.
Historic Films will also test the potential of moving pictures later this year by making several thousand hours' worth of footage viewable as QuickTime clips. "I'm not convinced that having thumbnail representations of our footage on the site will help users. I think people can find what they're looking for based on textual descriptions just as easily as they can based on images and clips," Lauro states. "But I'm interested in any means of getting product out to people who will use it."
For New York-based Archive Films, the Web has served as both a marketing and customer-service tool. "Not only is the site attracting business from people who hadn't heard of us," says director of marketing Jim Wood, "we're also getting requests from people who want our footage delivered in QuickTime format so that they can use it on other Web sites. This represents a new type of user for us."
In November, Archive Films enhanced its 18-month-old, text-based site with 13 QuickTime demo reels. According to Wood, Archive now plans to add a visual component to the site's search function that will allow visitors to see images that correspond with their search results.
For Miami-based Sharpshooters, the Web is about getting the word out. "We knew we had to have a [Web] presence to be competitive," says director of footage Carol Higgins. "But we also think it's a great tool for people to get to know a little bit about us-more than they can get out of a magazine ad."
The new site offers four low-bandwidth samples and a one-minute demo reel. It does not yet include text-based research and preview clips, though such capabilities should be available later this year.
At this point, Sharpshooters is not planning to offer downloadable ready-to-use clips directly from the site. "Our customers still want to get their final product in high-quality tape format," says Higgins.
Downloading the Future? Whatever the potential of moving pictures on the Web or the pros and cons of online video, for some companies the downloadable future is here now-at least at low res.
One such company is Myrtle Creek, Oregon-based Artbeats, which offers a library of more than 1,000 royalty-free clips in several categories, including backgrounds, effects, nature, concepts, archival, and reference. The company launched its Web site when it formed four years ago. "The Internet plays a large role in our business," says president Phil Bates. "I'd say half of the people who place an order with us viewed our footage on the Internet."
At the Artbeats Web site, visitors can view short QuickTime movies of each clip or see each image at full screen. As of this writing, ordering can be done online or by phone, fax, or mail. Later this year, Bates says that the company will offer downloadable "broadcast-quality" clips at the site. "People have been asking for this for some time," he says. "But before we can offer it, we need to transfer our site to a location that can handle the required bandwidth."
Energy Film Library, Studio City, also plans to offer downloadable, ready-to-use clips at its site. The company, which provides footage on everything from cutting-edge lifestyles to time-lapse sequences, currently has tens of thousands of sample clips available online. Visitors search for a clip by keyword or clip ID number; specify the shot speed, format, and composition; and select either contemporary or archival and color or black-and-white. A proprietary search engine presents clips matching the criteria. After playing a QuickTime movie of the clips, users can order the ones that they want or add the clips to the Clip Bin. "A Clip Bin is a workgroup tool that lets you save a clip by project name and e-mail to your client a link to that clip," explains Michael Albright, vice president of sales and marketing. "The client can view the clip by clicking on that link and decide whether it satisfies his or her needs. If it does, you e-mail us to order the clip."
Although visitors can already download sample clips that are adequate for use in rough cuts, Energy doesn't plan to let users download and purchase ready-to-use clips directly from the site until later this year. "And when we do, these clips will be Web-quality initially," cautions Albright. "We don't think the Internet will be able to deliver final elements in higher quality quickly for some time."
The Image Bank, New York, is not offering downloadable clips until the bandwidth is there for D1 quality. In the meantime, the company's Web site contains more than 100,000 full-motion clips and about 80 demo reels. Users can search by keyword, subject, or clip ID number; view thumbnails and QuickTime movies of clips; and add clips they find interesting to a Clipboard. "The user e-mails the Clipboard to us, and we compile a viewing cassette for them," says Rick Wysocki, senior vice president/managing director of the Image Bank Film Division (and CEO of Archive Films and Archive Photos, an Image Bank holding).
New York-based Second Line Search owns the footage companies Action Sports Adventure, Hot Shots Cool Cuts, Film Bank, and Modern Video Library and has launched Web sites for all of them. According to Second Line Search principal Todd Pavlin, the most sophisticated by far is the Action Sports Adventure site, which has been online for nine months.
At ASA's site, visitors can search the company's entire footage database or 3,000 MPEG-1 video clips. Users can view just textual descriptions of the footage or descriptions and images. Clicking on an image opens a close-up version, and the play button activates the clip. The site's search engine is based on VideoQ, a searching technology developed by a research team at Columbia University's Center for New Media Technology. According to Pavlin, VideoQ expands the traditional search methods-keywords and subject navigation-with a novel search technique that enables users to search video based on visual features and spatio-temporal relationships. The Hot Shots site also uses the VideoQ technology.
Stills and clips are also available for download at the ASA site, although Pavlin says that broadcast and film users do not tend to take advantage of this capability because "it's not worth it time-wise."
As Internet Limitations Fade Although it's technically feasible to download high-quality footage from the Net, many vendors and users feel it's impractical at this point. "It's cumbersome. If you want to sit there for three hours to download three seconds of footage, you can probably get reasonable quality," says ASA's Pavlin.
"The lack of bandwidth is keeping us from letting clients do what they really want, which is download directly at high quality," agrees Wysocki. "With the Internet today, you can screen clips at the quality they exist in, but it takes you too long to download them at that quality. Some people are sending D1-quality material over fiber. But most people don't have access to a heavy-duty broadband connection, so for them, you're talking about essentially hours to download one clip."
This limitation may be temporary, though. Footage.net's Tariot says that reasonable estimates show bandwidth doubling every nine months. And according to a recent report by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc., more than one million North American subscribers already enjoy broadband access to the Internet, a number that is expected to reach almost 26 million subscribers by 2003. "We're not really worried that it's never going to happen. It's not a matter of if, but when," Tariot says.
Another factor to consider is that online searches are inherently limited because the Internet cannot duplicate a person's artistic sensibilities. "Footage isn't a commodity, like a book or toy," states Sharpshooters' Higgins. "People look at footage because they're trying to illustrate a concept, idea, or emotion. And many times the image that first comes into someone's head when they're writing a script isn't the only or best way to say what they want."
This is where footage agencies come into play. "We're experienced with helping people find the right image for their productions," Higgins continues. "We have an intimate knowledge of our product lines and can suggest several alternatives that can work just as well as the client's initial idea."
But just as the lack of bandwidth may be temporary, it appears as though search limitations may be temporary as well. According to Wysocki, the MIT Media Lab, for one, is working on search systems that are almost intuitive. "Say you're looking through a library for footage of lions. You can start picking your images, and the computer will infer that you're picking pictures of lions that look ferocious, so the search system will start spitting out pictures that were keyworded 'ferocious,'" he says. "So now, in addition to ferocious lions, the search engine starts suggesting footage of ferocious gorillas."
Such sophisticated systems would benefit not only footage researchers but also those who are logging the footage. "We have to log thousands of touchdown passes," says Second Line Search's Pavlin. "If a system could understand what a touchdown looks like, the next time we log a clip in which a player crosses the goal line, the system could automatically log that as a touchdown," he enthuses. According to Pavlin, Columbia University is currently working on such a technology.
As technology continues to improve, we may see more footage vendors selling online and more users taking delivery of their footage online. "The stock cinematography business is at a major crossroads. It's about to change dramatically," says Energy Film Library's Albright. "In a few years you'll see many more creative people using stock cinematography, just as they're using stock photography now."
"We believe this market is ready to explode, and the Internet is helping that happen," Albright concludes. "This is one way creative people can quickly give their clients exactly what they want. They can actually take control into their own hands and play God. And what could be more fun than that?"
ABC News VideoSource www.abcnewsvsource.com Action Sports Adventure www.actionsports.com Action Sports/Scott Dittrich Films www.sdfilms.com Archive Films www.archivefilms.com Artbeats www.artbeats.com CNN ImageSource www.cnnimagesource.com Energy Film Library www.energyfilm.com Film Bank www.filmbank.com Footage.net www.footage.net Historic Films Archive, LLC www.historicfilms.com Hot Shots Cool Cuts www.hotshotscoolcuts.com The Image Bank www.imagebank.com National Geographic Film Library www.natgeostock.com Second Line Search access via www.footage.net Sharpshooters www.sharpshooters.com WPA Film Library www,mpimedia.com
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