Picking the perfect stock footage is only the first step. If you want your footage to blend seamlessly into your video project you will need to do a few extra things. Here are seven tips for perfectly blending your stock footage into your video project.
1. Pick the Tone
Picking the right tone isn’t about simply matching the movements. It’s more about figuring out what story the stock footage is trying to tell. What feelings does your footage evoke? Not every piece of stock footage will work for your specific project.
2. Color Correct
Color correcting is the process of getting all of your video camera footage to their natural colors. Most stock footage is already color corrected, so before you begin to aesthetically blend your footage together, you will want to color correct your video footage. Sometimes you may want to color correct by hand, other times using automatic color correction tutorials will suffice. This tutorial from GranolaTech shows us how to color grade footage in the free software, DaVinci Resolve.
3. Color Match
After you color correct your video footage, it’s time to color match your stock footage. If you’re in a hurry, simply adjusting the levels and curves (as outlined in the tutorial below) might be enough.
However, if you want to make your footage look really convincing, you should use the RGB Monochrome technique. This process allows you to match two pieces of footage by color matching each individual channel at a time.
4. Match the Sharpness
Not all video clips are similar in sharpness. Generally speaking, stock footage will be sharper than footage captured inside your camera. So you will need to match the sharpness of your video by either softening the stock footage or sharpening your video camera footage. Most video editing applications have sharpness effects that can easily be dropped into your footage and adjusted to your liking.
5. Match the Grain
Grain is another really important thing to look for when trying to match your footage. While stock footage tends to be grain-free, most footage shot by everyday cameras will have grain. This is, of course, a problem if you’re trying to make your video footage look like it belongs to your stock footage. The best tool for matching grain on any platform is the Match Grain feature in After Effects. The tool allow users to match grain across two shots.
This great tutorial from TunnelvizionTV shows us how to use the Match Grain feature in After Effects along with some other really great compositing techniques.
6. Match the Saturation
Saturation is also another really important thing to consider when trying to blend two shots together. Saturation is essentially how vibrant certain colors are in your video. Depending on what footage you are working with, you might have to adjust the saturation of your scene.
7. Color Grade
Color grading is probably the most important thing you can do to integrate stock footage with video footage. Color grading, in contrast to color correcting, is the actual process of stylizing footage. When you stylize your footage, you will give both your stock and regular video footage color properties that can help them look even more similar.
Conclusion
As we said before, you can’t simply throw just any ol’ stock footage into your scene and expect it to blend well with the footage you captured. This is why it is extremely important to have a wide variety of options when searching for stock footage. Stock footage isn’t like music. Sometimes you need a very specific shot. With more than 3,000,000 HD clips, Shutterstock Footage is a great place to look.
Have any other tips for blending stock footage and video footage? Share in the comments below.