# Guides: free stock video, licences and editing

> Short, answer-first guides for video makers and AI assistants: whether a clip may go into a commercial video, how to credit it, what NASA, public-domain and Creative Commons footage allow, editorial versus commercial use, and how to turn a shot list into a b-roll sequence.

## Licensing

- [Free stock footage for commercial use: what the licences mean](https://video.shep.bot/guides/free-stock-footage-commercial-use.md): Free footage is safe for a commercial video when its licence allows commercial use and nothing in the frame needs a release.
- [How to credit CC BY video in your own videos](https://video.shep.bot/guides/credit-cc-by-video.md): Name the clip, its author, where it came from and its licence with a link, and say that you edited it, for example: “Ocean waves 04” by Jane Doe (Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:…), CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), trimmed and graded.
- [NASA footage: what you can and can't do with it](https://video.shep.bot/guides/nasa-footage-rules.md): You can use most NASA footage in your videos, including commercial ones, without asking: NASA media is generally not copyrighted in the US.
- [Editorial vs commercial: model releases and logos in stock footage](https://video.shep.bot/guides/editorial-vs-commercial-footage.md): A licence covers the copyright in a clip, not the people, brands or property in it.
- [Public-domain archive films (Prelinger) and how to use them](https://video.shep.bot/guides/prelinger-public-domain-films.md): The Internet Archive holds hundreds of thousands of films marked public domain or Creative Commons, including the Prelinger Archives: thousands of 20th-century industrial, educational and advertising films whose public-domain status is stated by the collection itself.

## Production

- [Vertical video for Reels, TikTok and Shorts: find and crop footage](https://video.shep.bot/guides/vertical-video-reels-tiktok-shorts.md): Search with the orientation set to vertical (or add 'vertical' or '9:16' to the query) to get clips that are already 9:16 and fill a phone screen without losing anything.
- [Build a b-roll sequence from a shot list (OTIO, ffmpeg, Remotion)](https://video.shep.bot/guides/b-roll-sequence-from-shot-list.md): Write one line per shot ("city skyline at night (4s)"), pick the frame (16:9, 9:16 or 1:1), the frame rate and the total length, and let the sequence builder pick one commercial-safe clip per shot with alternatives.
- [4K, 1080p, codecs and containers: picking the right stock video file](https://video.shep.bot/guides/video-resolution-codecs-containers.md): Download the smallest file that reaches your timeline's resolution: for a 1080p edit, a 1080p rendition, not the 4K master, unless you want room to crop, stabilise or reframe.

## AI agents

- [Using an AI agent to find and license stock footage](https://video.shep.bot/guides/ai-agent-find-and-license-footage.md): Add the MCP server https://video.shep.bot/mcp to your agent under the name 'video' (in Claude Code: claude mcp add --transport http video https://video.shep.bot/mcp).

Glossary of video and licence terms: https://video.shep.bot/glossary.md

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Source: https://video.shep.bot/guides