Best Stock Footage Platform for Creators | Storyblocks Walkthrough

So this kind of AI stock footage that you see a lot looks great in a still frame, but then if it starts to move then some things look a little off. You're talking reflections that don't track or just motion that definitely isn't hyper-realistic. And for all of us who are terminally online, which is everyone these days, you're gonna clock pretty much immediately in a lot of the cases where AI is used for stock footage. And that impacts watch time and engagement and how well you do as a creator. And so this video is about the fix for that, what professional creators are doing instead, and then how to plug a real stock workflow into your editing workflow so you create the best videos possible. That's going to be the video. Let's go. So before we jump onto my computer, there are generally four problems that we're trying to solve here. Number one is motion because diffusion models generally still struggle with continuous motion. It depends on the realism and the case, but a lot of the time, again, if you have close-up complicated motion, it's just not going to look perfect. And if it's off a little bit, then you hit that kind of, you know, uncanny valley phase. Number two is consistency. We cover a lot of the tools that have made a ton of progress on this, but depending on the type of shot, they're not always going to be perfect. Number three, and this is a big one across the board regardless of quality, is licensing where there's still a lot of ambiguity about how you can use this, whether you have the rights to and how that impacts monetization on your videos. And the number four, again, there is arguably just this general, it looks like AI where you can clock it nowadays. Will that change at some point? Maybe. But that still is a very real thing in a lot of B-roll stock footage and video generation today. Now, this video is sponsored by Storyblock, and that's the solution that we're going to explore in the video. Now, Storyblocks is a human-made stock media library built for creators. You get your footage, your sound effects, motion templates and images. That's all in one place with about 7 million assets. That is all 100% human-made. There's no AI footage in the catalog. And then critically, they have really nice workflows that sync into Premiere Pro, which we're going to look at. So we're going to jump into my computer to look into how exactly you can source and then integrate that footage into your processes. Now, if you want to follow along and learn how to do this while you're watching the video for the next 5 or 10 minutes, you can just head to this link on the screen or in the description. You do help to support the channel if you want to go on a paid plan. Otherwise, you can just learn, follow along while we look at Storyblocks. And that in mind, let's get into demo number one. So this right here is the Storyblocks platform. Now, I want to start off with the core workflow before we get into the fancy and the fun features, and that is finding and using stock footage for your videos. There's a really cool AI feature that we'll get to for now. Let's just give it a base prompt. So let's say you want footage of a city skyline at night for your B-roll of the city that you have a narration segment for. Let's go ahead and give it that prompt. So here we can see all the pieces of footage. There are dozens on this page, and there are 60 plus pages, right? There are thousands of search results here. Every single one of them is completely human shot. There's no AI involved. Now, you can filter by the type of media. So if you want something like a template, especially. And then also what's useful is the resolution. So if you want 4K, you can filter for only 4K shots and then also the frame rate and duration. Let's go sub 27 seconds, and then maybe we can filter by commercial use as well. So now this is city skyline at light, 30 frames per second, 4K resolution, sub 30 seconds and commercial rights allowed. And we still have, I don't know how many hundreds of results here. Now, again, you can start to see some of those AI features that we'll get to in a second. I'm going to hold off on that. Let's just go ahead and download this. We'll do that in 4K. And then here I have a Premiere Pro timeline open, and I just dropped that clip. Let's go to a 4K, and we can see this kind of background-esque shot right here. Now we're going to get into the workflow you can use just for Premiere in a second. First, I want to jump back here, and we can switch into conversational editing. So let's just say I have a video where I'm describing personal finance topics, and I want backgrounds for some of my voiceovers. You can go as specific as you want here. Let's just give it this, and we'll see what results are. And so this is an AI tool to help you just talk to the AI and get whatever kind of stock footage you want. So it's pulling all those up, and it's searching through the 7 million assets on the platform. And here we can see all of the results. And that covers the stock footage side of it. If we jump back to the homepage here, you can see audio, images, motion backgrounds, etc. are available. I think video templates is also a fun one. For example, if I search tech under video templates, and these are all things you can drop into After Effects. So this is a full suite of assets for video creation, production, etc. Although I would say the stock footage is the strong end of the platform. And speaking of that end-to-end production process, sound is a very important part of that. So I want to jump into the audio component. But first, again, just to reiterate, I think it's important that all of this is human shot. And in the world of AI, I think there's a very good argument to be made that that still matters. That in mind, let's jump into Explore Audio. So they have a large music and sound effects library that is built into the platform and exclusive to it. So it's royalty-free. It's pre-licensed for any kind of commercial or YouTube work. And then here's what makes this whole process super easy. Again, all of these sounds are exclusive. And the way you set that up is let's click on our account here. I'll go to My Account. Then I'm going to scroll down. I'll click Edit YouTube Channels under My YouTube Channels. And then I can just paste, for example, the channel ID for my Cliffs channel. So it's that easy. I just click Save Changes here. And now I'm jumping back into audio and then also into the whole video catalog. Just for any asset on the platform, we are completely whitelisted to use those assets. There will be no copyright strikes. You're just good to go. Under Music, let's click Explore Audio Library. We can see all kinds of music here. And that does include songs with lyrics, like let's give this. We can see all these songs. There's a ton of stuff here. And this does, or at least it can if you want, include songs with vocals, like let's give this a listen. And then if we go to sound effects here as well, let's search something like a UI click. We can hear these different sounds. So again, exclusive to the platform. And that is exactly how you whitelist your channel. Now I want to jump back into some of the fun stuff there. And that is going to be your templates. I briefly touched on this prior, but basically those are all the motion graphics, the animations, the text, the slides, etc. that go into the behind the scenes of videos. If we jump into Premiere Pro, we can see things like this. We have a lens, zoom effects, typography, titles. You guys, if you make video, you know exactly what that process is like. And these are drag and drop into your workflows. And that brings us to this, which is the embedded Storyblocks plugin inside of Adobe Creative Cloud. So if we click download now and then open desktop app and then install. So we can jump into the Adobe Creative Cloud app here. We can go to Storyblock plugin and then install that. Let's close out of Premiere. Now we'll install. It was installed. That took about 20 seconds. And then now we can go under window extensions, press on Storyblocks and that'll open up this panel inside of Premiere. Let's click log in to sync the accounts. Now we're good to go. And so this is the entire asset library of Storyblocks inside of or directly embedded in Premiere. That includes the video as well as all the templates, audio, images, etc. So let's jump into templates and then let's go for this lower third. Let's install that and click confirm. Now we can head to the graphic templates tab and search modern fast lower. Now we can see all of the lower thirds right here. Now I've dragged one of those onto the timeline. Let's click change settings. And then here we can go ahead and see that template, which we can go ahead to properties to edit. Let's say hey guys. And we can let that play to see the final result. So it's that easy to use templates. You just install the plugin and then you can go ahead and just drag and drop whether it's templates, whether it's your stock footage from the plugin straight into your timeline view. They did a survey on this apparently. And about 85% of people who start using this workflow end up producing more content. And on average, you save about three hours a week. That's good to know. And it definitely is a workflow that helps me save time. And that in mind, I want to jump back into the web platform and talk through some of those other very fun AI tools. So these are things that support you and your ability to use this human made footage. Let's jump into AI tools. Click on AI toolkit. And we can see a few different tools. Number one is voiceovers generated by 11 labs. If you don't know them, it's the preeminent voice AI company in the world. I'm actually curious what their valuation is. Let's see. It's 11 billion. Then they have an AI video editing tool that helps you with things like lighting and coloring. That's my favorite one. Personally, I hate color grading for any weather photos or videos just across the board. So I love having AI to do that for me. We're not going to do a deep dive into those workflows in this video. If you do want to see a deep dive into using AI to do your color grading, to do voiceovers directly in Premiere, let me know and we can make that happen. And these serve to accelerate your production of your human made footage and audio. And that overall is the Storybox platform. So here's my genuine take on Storybox, I think, before we close out. It is really strong on any kind of video where you need cutaways, B-roll, graphics, ambient music, transitions, SFX, or clean kind of title. So they have a deep library. The licensing is clean. That's all a great setup for people who make content, right? Or YouTube videos, for example. Plugin is also useful. Channel whitelist is something every tool like that needs to have. Now where that's going to fall short is if you have a hyper-specific video about subjects that are niche or that are super technical or complex, or something like a custom product, right? That stuff's just not going to be available. That is where you need to go and do the work yourself to custom make or generate those, whether with AI tools or manually. And then where Storybox, I think, is ideal is for that other kind of 80% of use cases where the connective tissue is going to be what's on their platform and then what's easy to integrate into your overall workflow and also license. So there you go. That's the video. If you want to try it out for yourself and support the channel while you do so, you can go to this link on the screen or in the description. You also get a limited time discount if you do click through that link in the description. And so you get that whole workflow that drops right into Premiere. All the footage shot by real people and no copyright takedowns. Again, that's the link in the description. That in mind, I hope you learned something from the video, and I appreciate you being here, and I will see you in the next one. Cheers.