Professional video production services are expensive. That’s a fact that many forget because of many factors. There are people to pay, return debt of equipment and time on project (not just shooting, but planning and editing too) is valuable. I won’t go into the details how production value is estimated because every single project is valued differently. If every project would be the same, you could save on costs. But that’s impossible in most cases.
And because every production projects are different, there could be place to use stock video footage to lower the costs. If you need 15 shoots to make a commercial, why wouldn’t you save money buying 5 shots from stock agencies if something similar was already produced. If a specific 5-second shot at video production would cost you $2000, and you can find a very similar on video stock database for $200, wouldn’t that save a lot of money? We do understand that many video parts must include specific items and locations, but I can almost bet that even in Coca Cola commercials they could put in a stock video footage. Main actors and their bottles with coke would still be present as main video production value. Of course video productions will find many reasons why they should shoot all the footage, it’s their income that’s at risk.
That doesn’t really answer our question. There are ways of making projects completely out of stock video footage and still include your own product placement and message. Through texts, audio or special effects. And this is where you could hire only post-production company and make your own projects from much more cheaper stock footage. Instead of paying, for example, $40.000, you invest only about $15.000. Where the main cost would be post-production services putting clips together and adding all visual and audio effects.
Stock video footage production is not as cheap as you think. There are video productions that put a lot of investment making variety of footage and being able to sell same shots for dozens of times pays their debts. Even individuals have their investment in making stock footage, but if they are careful and creative, their debts are much lower. Having some luck, some contributors might have very nice profit from stock video industry.
