Playbooks / Plan and source B-roll, stock, AI shots, music and reference clips

Plan and source B-roll, stock, AI shots, music and reference clips

Plan and source B-roll, stock, AI shots, music and reference clips

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Plan cutaway placements against the transcript (change every 2 to 4 s in the hook), source footage self-shot first then stock APIs then AI hero shots, identify and license the music bed, download reference clips from any platform to ProRes with a sources log, and keep a personal indexed asset bank.

Kit

video-offline-tools

You need

AccountWhyFree or paidPlan
Pexels API (stock footage and photos)Free stock clips and photos for B-roll and blog images; self-shot footage first, then Pexels and Pixabay, then AI hero shots.FreeFree with attribution rules; 200 requests an hour.
Pixabay API (and Unsplash)Second stock source for the blog pipeline and B-roll search. Unsplash is used the same way when a key is present.FreeFree.
Epidemic SoundLicensed music beds and sound effects for every video; the b-roll skill searches and downloads through the API and MCP; each track ships with a LICENCE.md.PaidPersonal (about 10 USD/mo) covers one creator's own channels; Commercial (about 20 USD/mo and up) is required when the video is for a client. Licenses are per account: a client must hold their own.
yt-dlpDownloads YouTube, TikTok and Instagram video, auto-captions and comments for vaults, B-roll, MIDI extraction and quote verification.FreeFree.
ffmpeg + ffprobeEvery cut, mux, loudness pass, proxy, contact sheet and platform encode. The delivery encoder uses h264_videotoolbox on Apple Silicon.FreeFree (Homebrew build includes VideoToolbox).
Google AI Studio (Gemini API)Image generation (gemini-2.5-flash-image) for slides, blog images and placeholders; video analysis in the n8n research agent; the external second-eyes review of video rounds.Free tier availableFree tier works (rate limited, roughly 5 to 15 requests per minute). Add billing for volume image generation.

What you bring

  • Your raw footage, on folder paths that do not move
  • Your own Epidemic Sound login, and your licence records

The steps

  1. Classify the job and read the program, not the raw
  2. Plan concept animations first, then the cutaway table
  3. Source in order: yours, then stock, then AI
  4. Identify and license the music bed
  5. Download reference clips to ProRes with a sources log
  6. Sound pass after picture lock, then hand off

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