Find stock b-roll

Sometimes the cut needs footage you didn't shoot — a city street, hands on a keyboard, a busy café. Eddie can search stock footage and import the clips you pick as b-roll for your project.

There are two supplies, and Eddie searches both at once:

• Free clips from Pexels — available to everyone, no setup, no credits.
• Premium clips from your own Shutterstock account — if you already pay for Shutterstock, connect your API key and Eddie searches your catalog too.

Ask for it in chat

There's no browsing UI — you ask Eddie, the same way you direct everything else:

• "Find stock b-roll for the main themes of this video."
• "We have no cutaways — search stock footage for the parts about remote work."
• "Find some stock clips of coffee shops for the intro."

Eddie reads your transcript, works out the visual themes, and searches for clips that fit — matching your project's orientation (landscape or portrait) and filtering out anything too short or low-resolution to cut with.

Pick what goes in

Eddie shows you the candidates — thumbnails, durations, and where each clip came from — and nothing is imported until you choose. Pick the ones you like and Eddie starts the import. If a theme turns up no good matches, Eddie says so rather than padding your project with unrelated filler.

What happens next

Chosen clips transfer and process in the background, which usually takes a few minutes. They then appear in your project as b-roll sources, ready to place like any other footage — "add b-roll wherever they mention the product" works exactly as it does with your own clips. See Add b-roll and overlays.

Connect your Shutterstock account

If you have a Shutterstock plan with video downloads, you can put its catalog behind the same search:

1. Open Integrations from the workspace menu.
2. Find the Shutterstock row and hit Connect.
3. Paste your Shutterstock API token and save.

From then on, Shutterstock results show up alongside the free ones. A few things worth knowing:

• Previews are watermarked. Shutterstock only hands out a watermarked preview until a clip is licensed, so that's what you're choosing from.
• Choosing one licenses it through your own subscription. Eddie licenses the clip at import time, which uses up one of your plan's downloads. Eddie will tell you before it does that.
• Eddie charges no credits for it — the cost is your Shutterstock download, not ours.
• The key is yours, not your workspace's. Because a licensed clip spends your plan, the key is stored per person: your teammates connect their own. It's encrypted, never shown back to you (you'll only ever see the last four characters), and you can disconnect it any time from the same row.
• If your Shutterstock account has no active plan that covers video, Eddie will say so and import nothing rather than fail halfway.

Good to know

• Pexels footage is free — search and import cost no credits, and the clips are free to use, including commercially. Eddie shows the creator credit for each one.
• Shutterstock costs no Eddie credits either — it spends a download from your own Shutterstock plan, under your own licence terms.
• You can import up to 5 clips at a time (across both supplies); ask again for more.
• You need edit access to the project to import.

Related: Add media to an existing project, How to prompt Eddie.