stock footage

noun

: recorded video of a generic subject (such as a person, object, or location) that is kept for later use

That explosion … could have been created by treating stock footage of real bombs, but Cameron and Dixon felt audiences were too familiar with those images.

—Ron Magid

For this last location, Griffith spliced in pieces of stock footage of Niagara Falls. Although the actress in reality was nowhere near that or any other falls, the audience believed her to be because the editing bound the locations together.

—Frank E. Beaver

Examples of stock footage in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

At present, Sora’s abilities seem more conducive to creating stock footage rather than film footage, said Blake Ridder, a British director, writer and actor. —Angela Yang, NBC News, 23 Feb. 2024

The dramatic soundtrack halts, and Carter looks at some stock footage projected on the wall: a tank firing a shell, a kid playing with a toy soldier, and real-life soldiers. —Justin Fairweather, The New Yorker, 7 Feb. 2024

Anyhow, a TikTok sleuth in Canton found that several of those clips meant to scare and incite are actually heavily edited stock footage created in Europe. —cleveland, 14 Sep. 2023

To illustrate the allegations, the complaint also compares what an attorney for Siragusa say is stock footage of Taco Bell's food with decidedly slimmer examples of actual products the suit said was pulled from Reddit and user reviews. —Irina Ivanova, CBS News, 1 Aug. 2023

And while the demo currently relies on stock footage and photos, the company intends to eventually use generative AI to re-create events that have happened, but for which cameras were not present. —Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter, 26 July 2023

The video also included visuals of vandalism and riots that appear to take place during the 2020 racial injustice protests (but, as some on TikTok have pointed out, some clips are taken from stock footage or from protests in other countries). —Kelsie Gibson, Peoplemag, 25 July 2023

The music video goes further, though, mostly showing footage of demonstrators — some of it stock footage of Canadian protests — along with brief shots of violent crime. —Chris Willman, Variety, 22 July 2023

Some of the images come from Fox News’s coverage of Black Lives Matter protests, but some are stock footage, including of demonstrations from other countries. —Tori Otten, The New Republic, 21 July 2023

Word History

First Known Use

1931, in the meaning defined above