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

The muted color palette is matched by lackluster performances from the cast, the exposition relies on what feels like stock footage, and the copious amounts of VFX manage to make the project feel dated and entirely unbelievable. —Ct Jones, Rolling Stone, 14 Sep. 2024

For Blanchett, that G7 stock footage was as rib-tickling as most comedies out there. —Tatiana Siegel, Variety, 9 Sep. 2024

Documentary footage is classed as photographed in actual occurrence, but may also include animation, archive footage, stills, stock footage, stop-motion, re-enactment and/or other techniques. —Ellise Shafer, Variety, 2 Aug. 2024

The two men came to an agreement under which Moritz swapped stock footage for name rights to the 2001 film and its successors. —Richard Natale, Variety, 12 May 2024

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

Word History

First Known Use

1931, in the meaning defined above