Photo stock sites like Adobe Stock and PIXTA are widely known, but plenty of people are unsure how to find video stock. Business uses video for product explainers on a site, ads and social posts, seminar clips, and staff training. Shooting every shot yourself for those is heavy work, and for a small cut, a city street or a running dog, stock footage cuts the time and effort.
This guide covers how to choose a stock footage site, then nine commercial-use sources, free and paid. Commercial use here was current as of mid-2023, so confirm the latest terms.
How to choose a stock footage site
Searching turns up many sites, so check a few points before you use one. First, commercial use. Images and video carry copyright, and using them without permission can be penalized, and the same holds for free assets, where terms vary by site on whether commercial use and credit apply. Commercial use means using an asset to gain your own profit, such as developing and selling a product, using it in a proposal deck, in a video or blog that earns ad revenue, or in a flyer or pamphlet, so read the terms before downloading.
Second, royalty license. "Royalty" appears in the terms alongside commercial use, and it is the fee paid to the rights holder to use the work. Rights-managed licenses, which need permission and a fee per use, were once common, but royalty-free, where one permission removes later fees, has grown. A rights-managed asset needs a step each time, so unless you are short on options, royalty-free buys you a clean, one-time use.
Third, pricing. Some footage is free, some paid, but even "free" can require attribution to the creator or the site's logo, so read the terms. Paid comes as a one-time buy per clip or a subscription, where the subscription is either a set number of clips per month or unlimited downloads for the term.
Fourth, the catalog and quality. A larger catalog makes the shot easier to find, but a high count can come with low quality or narrow uses, so check whether the footage you want is actually there. Free footage can run lower in resolution and image quality than paid, and quality varies within a site, so check a sample first. For resolution, full HD at 1920×1080 is the recommendation, since 4K at 3840×2160 may not display on a small screen and can load slowly, and full HD is the current standard. Image quality is the cleanness of the footage itself, and even 4K can look rough from an old camera or a wrong setting, common in free footage and amateur uploads. And weigh reliability: a site you have heard of, on a solid footing, since an overseas site can fold suddenly and leave you unable to view or re-download what you paid for.
Free sites
Pexels offers free photos too and is widely known. No sign-up is needed and every photo and video downloads free, uploaded by individuals, with no attribution required and commercial use allowed. The footage is beautiful, with landscapes and verticals, it supports Japanese for easy search, and it has its own search by color.
Mixkit is an Australian free site, not yet in Japanese, with little Japanese material beyond some landscapes, but strong on usable genres like lifestyle, food, and nature and on angles that are easy to edit. Commercial use is mostly allowed, but restricted-license clips are not, so translate and read the terms when using an English-language free site, especially for commercial use.
Pixabay, like Pexels, offers free photos too and is well known. No credit or permission is needed, which suits anyone after simple, stylish assets. The footage is public domain, with little Japanese scenery or people but around 30,000 high-quality clips across genres, plus free photos and illustrations.
A Japanese-made HD footage library run by a Japanese creator offers high-quality clips, with Japanese search and Japanese terms for peace of mind. It leans toward nature, which suits anyone after simple background footage.
Paid sites
Adobe Stock, run by Adobe, sells royalty-free photos, illustrations, and video, with around 20 million video assets, the trust of a major name, and high quality. It comes as a one-time buy or a subscription, with the subscription paying off for regular use.
Envato Elements holds over 55 million assets, video templates, stock footage, audio, photos, WordPress themes, and Adobe templates, with around 340,000 video clips. Unlike per-clip or per-month-limit sites, a monthly plan downloads anything on the site without limit.
Shutterstock pioneered the subscription stock model now standard in the industry. It began image-only and now offers high-quality video and BGM across a wide range, run from the US but easy to search in Japanese, a good fit for high-quality footage. It comes as a one-time buy or a subscription.
iStock, run by Getty Images, sees use by major companies. It spans a wide range with footage of Japanese people and an easy search, and offers a one-time buy, a monthly plan by download count, and credit packs. For video alone, one clip at 6,200 yen runs notably cheap against rivals.
PIXTA needs no introduction for designers in Japan. Known first for photos, it has offered video since 2010, with plenty of Japanese scenery and Japanese people. Beyond a one-time buy, its subscription plans cap downloads at 3 to 20 per month by plan.
Finding footage that fits your image
Even with these sites, finding footage that matches the picture in your head is hard. You may want "a zebra mother and foal on a grassland" and find no clip that lands it exactly. When that happens, think before you search about what footage actually suits the video's theme and story. Ask which parts can flex: does it have to be a grassland, does the zebra have to be a parent and child, would a lion do? Where a part can be swapped, change the idea flexibly and pick the footage that works.
