As we mentioned a couple of times earlier in this module, it’s not legal to snag things off the internet and add them into your videos without checking to see who owns the rights and whether there’s a cost attached. This goes for images, music, and even video. But, rest assured, there are good songs, video and editing tools you can use for free or cheap.

Music

• Melody Loops. Melody Loops is a low-cost source of royalty free music, and they have a huge database of music you can search by type or even “feeling.”  (Want happy music? Just search “happy”!) You can download samples of the music to test them under your video before you download the actual sound file, so you can make sure it works before you purchase.
• Incompetech. Incompetech is another royalty-free music site with lots of great tunes to choose from.  Again, there’s a minimal cost for the music. All the songs on the site are written by one person, and he likes to be credited on your work, but he’s talented and it’s worth it!

Video

• Internet Movie Archives. If you’re looking for old film, interesting film clips…well, there’s a world of good videos on this site. From old instructional videos to entire feature films, these are all public domain and can be downloaded.
• National Parks Multimedia. The National Parks have an archive of video footage from nearly all their parks that you can download.
• Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons offers all of its images, video and audio footage to use, but follow their reuse guidelines so you’re giving credit where credit is due and following the licensing rules for reuse of the content.
• Vimeo. You can search Vimeo for videos tagged “Creative Commons.”  There are hundreds of pages of video to choose from.

Editing Programs

There are many video editing programs on the market today. Adobe Premiere and its easier-to-use cousin, Adobe Premiere Elements, are always a good choice in editing programs, and they’re not terribly expensive. A serious editor might also check out Final Cut. If you’re looking for other alternatives, you can look at these:

• Lightworks. Lightworks is an excellent program, free to everyone even though it’s been used to edit feature films like The King’s Speech and Road to Perdition. They likely used the Pro license, which comes with a price tag, but the free version will allow you to do a lot of basic and even professional editing. In fact, it won an editing and technology Emmy Award in 2018.
• Shotcut. Shotcut is a free, open source video editor that works pretty well as far as basic editing goes. It may be challenging to learn up front, but there are many tutorials on YouTube. If you want to produce something that looks really good without buying an editing program, then it’s worth the effort of conquering the learning curve with this program.
• Rawshorts. Rawshorts is an animation program. If you have no drawing skills and you think that your message is best delivered in animated form, check out Rawshorts.

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