The Stock Footage Issue

If you've never looked at the price of stock footage before, you would be surprised by the varying prices and quality out there. Recently I was asked to do a corporate video that would feature some shots from news broadcasters mixed in with some transportation shots and archived shots. Here's what I found.
1. News footage is extremely expensive. A colleague told me that CTV is the least expensive. When I checked on-line I found that it costs a minimum of 100 dollars an hour in search fees and a minimum of 200 dollars an hour in transfer fees. For Educational non-broadcast (Internet-purposed) videos the footage is cheapest at 10 dollars a second with a 20 second minimum. It's 15 dollars a second for Educational broadcast TV. Home video is actually higher at 20 dollars a second. Corporate one-country fees are 25 dollars a second. Just for fun, I'll add in the cost for commercial promo spots. Viewed world-wide, the cost is 100 dollars a second. Here's the CTV rate card and again, I've been told this is the cheapest place to go for footage.

2. Although rights run out on older archived footage entering the public domain, it can be difficult to get a hold of the footage. You can go-online at the Internet Archive to find footage that has entered the public domain and can be used for free but it's difficult to search through their database for archived footage. I would suggest monitoring Miro for works that are constantly entering the public domain. As for obtaining archived footage for a fee I found a great shot of a Ford T model car at Getty Images for 700 dollars for use by corporate videos. Clearly, I will have to do more research in this area.

3. Royalty free footage comes in all kinds of qualities and prices. For the most part, you get what you pay for. Revostock has great SD footage for around 20 dollars and HD for 30 dollars. Corbis Motion has high quality shots that can get pricey. I found an F-16 fighter jet for 349 dollars. Productiontrax has some shots in the 10 dollar range (they also have audio tracks). Pond5 has over 325 000 shots starting at 5 dollars a shot and also carries sound effects and music tracks starting at 2 dollars. A Luna Blue has HD shots that start at 40 dollars and SD NTSC shots at 30. Artbeats has beautiful nature scenes and time lapses. The company charges a 30 dollar service fee on every order. My favourite site for anyone getting started in collecting royalty free shots is Footage Firm. They don't have a huge variety and seem to specialize in computer generated backgrounds but they often have free footage on their site. You can also get bulk shots on DVDs for reasonable prices. Another fairly reasonably priced site for footage is Apex Stock. Shutterstock does some interesting work with wide angle and fish eye lenses.
For even more links to stock footage suppliers, a fantastic site with lots of links is Stock Footage Online.