It has become easy to find stock videos that you can download for free and use in your project. But it isn’t as easy to find free and royalty-free stock videos in 4K or Ultra HD (UHD) resolution. Here are your best options so far.
Your first step is probably to check Pixels Video, Pixabay, or one of the other popular sites for copyright-free stock videos. But while those sites have some 4K and UHD videos, not all of them are available in these high resolutions. You can end up wasting a lot of time on these searches.
Instead, one of the sites listed below is guaranteed to get you 4K resolution stock videos to use for free.
Dareful (Web): Hand-picked 4K Videos
Dareful has a small collection of videos in 4K resolution, but it excels by doing what Unsplash did for photos. These are all hand-picked to ensure they are of good quality, so you won’t get bad footage here.
Right now, there are only 36 videos on the site, but they vary in their type. There are nature videos, drone shots, fireworks, bokeh lights, city footage, and so on. Click one, watch a preview, and if you like what you see, download it to your computer.
All of the videos featured on Dareful are under the Creative Commons 4.0 license, which means you can use and adapt them freely, but you will need to give credit where appropriate.
Mitch Martinez (Web): Director of Photography’s Free Videos
Sin City 2. The Hunger Games–Mockingjay. The Man In The High Castle. These are only some of the big movies and TV series that have used the free stock footage released by Mitch Martinez, a Director of Photography.
Over the years, Martinez has shot quite a lot of stock footage on professional RED cameras. He released that footage for anyone to download and use for free, which is how many of the aforementioned names used his videos.
Martinez’s videos are sorted into neat categories like animals, aerial shots, light, landscape, city, particles, water, timelapse, and so on. Click the category, find a video, and you can preview it on Vimeo. Then click the “Download the clip” button to save the full-resolution video on your hard drive. Easy peasy.
Iris 32 / Frederick Tschernutter (Web): Thousands of Free 4K Videos
Like Martinez, Frederick Tschernutter has been shooting the world around him with a RED One and a RED Epic for years. And like Martinez, he decided to give all that footage to the world to use for free with the aforementioned Creative Commons 4.0 license.
Downloading videos from his site, Iris 32, is a slightly tricky process. You need to first visit Tschernutter’s YouTube page to search or browse through his videos. But the YouTube videos aren’t high resolution. To get the 4K version, check the video’s description, where you will find the clip name or a link to the Iris 32 download page. Enter a validation code on Iris 32, accept the Creative Commons license, and save the video to disk.
There are thousands of videos, so use the search feature when you can. But you can also check out Tschernutter’s playlist of favorites to find the best-looking clips.
Harmonic’s Demo Footage (Web): 18 High Quality Videos
If you need a 4K video for a demonstration, Harmonic is where you should head first. The company specializes in streaming Ultra HD video with HDR, and they’ve made a few such clips available for anyone.
You’ll need to register to download these 18 clips, all of which are available in Apple’s ProRes and H.264 codecs. Most of the videos are shot at 60 frames per second. Be warned, these are really large video files, each of them over a gigabyte in size. So make sure you are on a stable and fast internet connection.
Needless to say, you don’t need to actually use Harmonic technology for any of these videos. That said, they do come with a Harmonic watermark in the bottom-right corner.
Free 4K Timelapse (Web): New York City’s Times Square in Timelapse
Max Lee took his trusty Canon 6D to New York City’s Times Square. He set it up and shot a lot of footage for a long time, and eventually turned it into a series of incredible timelapse videos. And you can download them for free.
The whole thing turned into a series of 19 timelapse videos. This is followed by one video in HDR, and a couple from the W Hotel. Lee has also uploaded the original RAW files in case you want to grab those instead of the edited videos.
Lee says his videos can be used to monetize other videos, or in commercial projects, but you will have to add an attribution link.
The One Other Stock Video Site You Should Check
With Pexels or Pixabay, you will have to search for “4K” and hope to get something that fits your needs. But there’s one other such stock video site you should check. Videezy, one of the best places to get media clips for presentations, has an entire dedicated 4K section. Check it out!
Read the full article: 5 Sites to Download Free and Royalty-Free 4K or Ultra HD Stock Videos
