“Because the material was shot for BBC programs, it doesn’t have the staged look of stock footage,” says Michael Albright, about the video clips available from the BBC Motion Gallery. “And a lot of the subject matter is unique to the BBC — it’s stuff you would never go out and commission for stock.”
With the exception of select blue-chip programs like “Monty Python,” which have their own licensing arrangements, material from virtually all BBC programs is available through BBC Motion Gallery. The shows are deconstructed into segments and posted as clips or sequences. The site also offers the entire archive of CBS News — all together, more than a million hours of content. Users can even get footage that never aired. “We’ve got fantastic outtakes that give users a lot of options in the edit bay,” says Albright.
Creative people are always in search of new perspectives. So it’s an advantage that the library is little known, particularly outside the U.K. “Most of this footage has rarely been seen in the North American market, so it’s fresh content for our users,” says Albright. “They suddenly have a resource that contains 70 years of material. It’s like hitting the mother lode.”
“QuickTime 7 and the new H.264 standard make all the difference. Our users will get almost full-screen previews — we believe they’re the biggest in the industry — and really fast downloads.”
Advanced Searchability
Just as valuable as this gold mine of content are the electronic shovels and picks the BBC provides to help customers easily scoop out their prized nuggets. “What we’ve done is develop a site that’s centered on the way our customers work, so it’s easy to put your hands on the exact images you want,” says Albright.
Michael Albright reviews a shot during a commercial shoot for Paramount Television.
To do that, the BBC is tightly integrating its Motion Gallery footage with Mac OS X Tiger. QuickTime 7 previews will contain a rich body of metadata searchable via Tiger’s new Spotlight feature, making the search for material intuitive and fast. Once users find what they need, the deep metadata in each clip helps them build out their stories. “In addition to some of the world’s greatest cinematographers, we have a staff of research scientists and naturalists whose job is to label and classify the footage they shoot,” says Albright. “So each clip has all that data, too.”
Albright is thrilled about the new features in Tiger. “No platform is better-suited to our users,” he says. “We’re developing one project that will let them search our entire online library in an instant, and another that will automatically notify them as new footage comes in. We’re even building our own widget to speed and simplify their search for the right shot.” At first, the new widget will let users search BBC footage without opening a browser or navigating. Later, it will likely include local searching via Spotlight and built-in e-commerce, so users won’t need browsers to buy non-broadcast clip licenses.
The Digital Workflow
The developers of BBC Motion Gallery thought hard about how customers would want to use the clips they purchase. “In addition to delivering remarkable previews that are easy to search, we wanted to make certain that our footage would fully integrate with their digital pre-production workflow,” says Albright.
Customers can browse for clips by subject or get BBC researchers to help them find the image they want. Once they locate the right footage, they have several options. “They can download a free, watermarked low-res QuickTime clip, which they can easily roll into their Final Cut Pro editing system and use as part of a video storyboard for preliminary treatments,” Albright explains.
Or, for more polished presentations, users can pay a $100 fee to download a higher-resolution, watermark-free QuickTime clip. They can examine it frame-by-frame to make sure it’s what they want, import it into their rough edit using Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro or Motion, and experiment with color correction, composites or other sophisticated effects before incorporating their prototype into final comps for client approval.
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