I’ve always been a fan of old movies and commercials. Such as all the movies used on MST3K, or the footage in Queen’s “Under Pressure” video. When I would see other media producers putting this old media into their movies I wondered two things. Where do you get all this great old footage and is it free to edit and use in my own movies without copyright concerns? I’ll discuss both issues.

In the past, I have found services that warehouse old footage and will convert it to various media formats for you, but it would cost hundreds of dollars. But today we have an excellent source for public domain footage and it is free. It is the Internet Archive Movie Archive. It hosts over 100,000 moving images online, from old commercials, and short films, to feature length movies. One of my favorite collection is from the A/V Geeks by Skip Elsheimer. And did you know “Night of the Living Dead” is public domain, it didn’t include a copyright and after a few years it became PD.

As far as rights to use this material, it says in a side bar. “This collection is free and open for everyone to use. Our goal in digitizing these movies and putting them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films. By providing near-unrestricted access to these films, we hope to encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before.” I would still check to make sure it says Public Domain in the Creative Common license field.

Once you find something interesting you can preview it in MP4 format and then download it if you like. I suggest downloading this stuff at the highest quality you can choose, usually mpeg2. It will be large depending on the length, but it will look and sound the best. Most editing software will not allow you to directly use mpeg2 footage so you will have to convert it. I have used QuickTime before with mixed results, but a great utility for Mac OSX is Visual Hub. It is only $24, and is a great solution for all your conversion needs, from ipod, psp, DV, DVD, or to Final Cut. Just drag and drop the mpeg2 footage into the window and choose the output format. In my case that would be a DV stream and I also check the box for prepare for Final Cut. A few minutes later its ready to go. Have fun.

Video Converters for Windows

http://www.madzsoftware.com/universal_video_converter.htm