How to Properly Utilize Online News Footage

Online news footage is a great way to dramatically improve the quality of your video. With online news footage, you gain instant attention, recognition, and a professional flair to just about any project. With all the newsworthy events going on each day, there is plenty of opportunity to add online news footage to your video—whether for a product promotional video, an instructional video, or simply a year-in-review company video.

Here are a few tips for the best use of online news footage:

Maximize on motion. The most attention-grabbing portion of a news clip is the portion with the most action. This is the kind of footage you want to include in your video. In other words, capture the action of the news (not the news anchor talking about the action). The more action your video contains, the more engaging it will be.

Sound is not as important as the visual. Keep in mind that some online news footage may come without sound. Often, news footage with sound creates a cluttered and confusing feel to the video. Unless you are showing a speech or something similar, provide your own sound, voiceover, or music.

Creatively use CGI. Online news footage is great for background imagery, but you can also add your own images, action, and text to the screen. Use computer-generated imagery, and add unique elements to the footage.

Create custom transitions. Another way to add ownership and uniqueness to the stock footage is to create transitions that provide your own signature to the video.

Cut, splice, move, and rearrange. Many online news footage clips are as long as thirty seconds. This length provides plenty of footage to move portions of the clip to different areas of your video. You can get more mileage out of a single episode of news footage by breaking it up with text, other scenes, or narrators.

Use labels. In order to keep your online news footage in line with the video you are creating, it is important to use onscreen text. For example, insert text that reads, “2010: Haiti Earthquake” to orient your viewers to the event that they are watching.

Shorter is better. The legendary “two-second rule” for showing stock clips is not a hard-and-fast rule, but it does suggest a good rule of thumb. Keep things moving.

There is plenty of online news footage available, and you won’t run out. Keep the scenes fresh, and rotate clips every few seconds…even if it’s not exactly two.