Best Storyblocks Production Workflow for B-Roll

So these days, almost every video on this channel is about AI, whether the tools, the strategies, the new platforms, and launches. But the core methodology that I try to impart on these videos is that AI is incredible to use on some things and definitely shouldn't be used on some other things. And one of those areas is sound effects, music, and the B-roll that you as a creator, a business owner, may need to use when creating content for whatever it is that you do. There is such a surplus of content available out there that's made by human professionals that's guaranteed to be quality. And so you don't need or want to risk currently AI making slight errors across that domain of content. And so today I want to break down a full step-by-step production workflow to incorporate human-made B-roll sound effects and music into your videos. That's going to be the video. Let's go. So this video is sponsored by Storyblocks. They've sponsored a lot of these videos because they're actually really useful. They're one of the top platforms out there for exactly what we're looking at. And this is actually how we do it for this YouTube channel. And the whole point of Storyblocks is that they're 100% human-made stock media library. So millions of assets all generated or created, I shouldn't use the word generated, by humans. And then everything is pre-licensed with one whitelisting feature for YouTube and social media use. That's part of it. The other part or the workflow element I want to break down is how to make all of those resources accessible inside of your editing platforms, which is a really critical part of this. So we're going to jump into my computer. I'll show you what I mean there. And now if you make videos currently or you've been meaning to start, you can support the channel and learn better from this video by pulling up Storyblocks and following along with me while I go through the workflow. Again, you'll support the channel and you'll get 15% off. If you do want to upgrade off of any annual plan, that's the link in the description or just storyblocks.com to check it out and follow along. And now let's get into my computer. So to kick us off, this is what Storyblocks looks like. And I have a sample Premiere Pro project set up as well. Now we're going to start by just how you would start if you were editing a video, whereas the components that you're most likely most often going to use will be B-roll from Storyblocks. There's two general ways we can search. Number one, we can just straight search for keywords in the titles of the description, or we can go to the AI search. Personally, I prefer this. It is going to capture those edge case descriptions that are not going to be directly caught by just the keywords in the title or whatnot. So we'll get into sound and motion graphics in a second, but let's just say we're searching for something on an AI mode, like a person working late with a laptop in a city. Let's let this run. And what I want to emphasize is this is an unlimited subscription. There is no kind of pay per clip. So if I was actually in Premiere looking through the library and wanting to find a clip like this, I'm going to go pull 5, 10, 15, pull them onto my timeline, see what works in the project, and then pick my favorite. So here we have all of those, and this really keeps going on. So let's go ahead and download one. We'll go Forte 5 megabytes. Not a fan of this one. Let's download this as well. This one, number four, and number five. Now I'm taking all of these. I'm going to drag them into the timeline. And so all of these, once I've listed my channel, which we'll look at also in a minute, I can use, I can just play around, see what fits in the project that I'm looking at and go from there. Now we are going to look at in a second, an even cleaner, quicker way of incorporating that search into your workflow. But for now, that's just what that kind of base search and clip volume and experimentation looks like. I'm going to organize these into a little montage. So let's go something like this. We have one clip that's longer, then we'll have these even shorter, and then we'll end with a long one. And I'll add a little zoom in effect right here. So we have something that looks like this. Now that's our B-roll, let's say, for our hypothetical video project. Next up is going to be sound. So for that, we can see video, right, as well as motion backgrounds. In this tab, templates is motion graphics, and then we're going to jump into audio. Let's click explore, and then we can choose between music or sound effects, or if we use AI, just describe what we're looking for. So let's say I want a whoosh. Here are four and a half thousand whooshes. That's a few too many. Let's give a few a listen. We can go for this one, the deep sound effect. We're going to pull this into our timeline. Let's apply it right here. Move this forward, and right about there. Let's add a little width effect as well, and then we want some backing music for that. And one more time, this is going to be all included in the subscription, so we can use as many variations here as we want just to play around. And now let's look for a pop sound effect. We'll see what shows up. We have 557, and now we're back in Premiere. We're going to apply. Now we're back in Premiere, I'm going to apply these little pops just to our transitions here. Go ahead and apply. Then let's just level out this audio. Okay, and so we've done our b-roll pass and our sound pass. We can give this little mini demo. Not that there's really any story arc, but we'll give it a watch. So that's the function of how you use the platform, but what's the best way to actually incorporate that function into your material editing workflow? Well, for that, let's make this screen a little smaller, and the magic is going to be under window and extensions. And there's a Storyblocks Premiere extension. If we press on this, you can see that Storyblocks is directly embedded into Premiere. So we'll go ahead, we'll sync these two accounts. You can see it auto-syncs there, and then now our entire library is searchable within Premiere itself. So that same process that we just went through to do the b-roll and the audio pass, we can now do directly within the Premiere platform you prefer to edit on timeline. So we can search by video, or we can go through all the other modalities of the platform. For example, let's say I don't like that pop, and I want something more like a metallic whoosh reverb. For that, I just go ahead and download. I click confirm, and then you can see it's directly dropped into the timeline. And this is a window, right, or a panel, and I can, for example, drop that next to my effects controls. So I can easily, whenever I want b-roll, just have the panel search, get it into my project folder, and then just drag it on to the timeline. So that is the easiest workflow to pull all the kind of b-roll, sound effects, music you want into your workflow under that unlimited license for flexibility. And speaking of, let's jump back into the Storybox platform. If we go to my account, we can scroll to my YouTube channels, and you can see here, this is where you whitelist your entire channel. Once you do this, you won't get any copyright claims. And so you can see that right here, you avoid any issues with claims once you go into my account, and then you effectively license the entire library to your channel by adding the channel ID here. So to recap that whole workflow, you start here, you whitelist your channel, you download the extension, and then you're free to search through the audio, the library, the sound effects, the templates within your timeline. And what I recommend doing, depends on you, so let's use an editor, is just pull three, five, ten into your timeline, see what works, and then choose your favorite. Now again, what's important there is that everything you download, you want to be pre-licensed for commercial use and whitelisted, so you don't get copyrighted when you post it on social media platforms, or you get the content taken down. So what you want to do for Storybox is go to that whitelisting page, enter your channel URL, and then your videos are protected, you'll never get any kind of copyright claims because of using that content. And trust me, it absolutely sucks to release a video, there's some like five second music clip in there that you forgot to get a license for, and all the revenue from the video just evaporates. Not fun, so definitely do that, that's whether you're using Storybox or any other platform out there that allows it. Now let's jump back into my computer, I want to show you the AI tools they have on the platform pretty quickly, and that'll be the last core workflow feature I want to show you here. But this is an AI channel, and it wouldn't be right to skip the final set of features I want to touch on here under AI tools. We have conversational search, we know that already, but let's click on the AI toolkit. The first is a video editor, what that helps you do is edit the existing b-roll. You can see that right here, it's basically applying filters, changing the color, or moving around objects within that scene. You can also generate video, I wouldn't recommend this tool for that as much as many of the others we look at on the platform. I would say video editor is much more useful and fits kind of cleaner into the workflow. Voiceover is also a very nice feature, let's click try that out quickly. This is what that looks like, let's say I want to say, hey we're reviewing Storyblocks, we can choose our voice. Let's go Mr. Cole, I'll click generate, accept, and then we can listen to that narration. Hey, we're reviewing Storyblocks. The recommendation I always have for any kind of narration is slow it down a little bit if you can, and we can see all the different voices right here. Now the other tools are on the left in this same portal, so we have that video generator and image generator as well. And there you go, that as a whole is what I wanted to get across. So overall, if you make a lot of videos, this is something you should use. If you make videos super irregularly, or you don't care about the revenue from them, then you can use no one's going to sue you. But if you make lots of videos, period, whether you're a creator, a business owner, etc, then that's who I think this workflow is best for. And so there you go, that's it. All pre-licensed, tons of assets to look at, and the whole Premiere workflow that we looked at. Now again, if you think this is useful for you, and I hope it is after watching this, then you can support the channel and save yourself 15% on an annual plan by going to this link or the link in the description. If you also comment story blocks, then we'll respond to that comment with the link. Not a mind, I appreciate y'all being here. Hope you found this one useful, and I'll see you in the next one.