Review: Action Essentials 2

Affordable action stock footage that will blow you away

Released in early 2009, Action Essentials 2 replaced the earlier Action Essentials stock footage product, and has been a huge success for Video Copilot. Good stock footage is an important tool for the motion graphics and visual effects artist, and I’ve certainly found myself reaching for the DVDs to source elements for a variety of projects. 

Action Essentials 2 is hard to fault, there simply isn’t anything else like it on the market. Consisting of over 500 action stock footage clips in 20 categories from Atmospheres to Water, Action Essentials 2 has something for all motionographers and visual effects artists.

Shipping as a 2 DVD 720P version and 4 DVD 2K version, all clips are pre-keyed and ready to drop into your projects. I’ve found the 720p version ($99.95) to be sufficient for most projects but if you’re working in HD it’s a plus to have a 2K version ($249.95).

Included on disk 1 are 4 full-length video tutorials, with an introductory walkthrough, building collapse, street bomb and muzzle flash examples, plus a bonus Sound FX starter pack.

Action Essentials 2 is popular amongst our design team at Foxtel. Once or twice a day you’ll hear someone call out “who’s got the Action Essentials 2 disks?”. I’ve included elements of fire, sparks, smoke and explosions from Action Essentials 2 in my last 3 projects.

A minor gotcha is that the video thumbnails are only included on disk 1 so if you have inserted disk 2 and want to browse the thumbnails, you need to reinsert Disk 1. Of course you could copy the thumbnails to your hard drive but I prefer not too.

This is a large library and finding what you need takes time. The video thumbnails help but it would be handy if some kind of browser such as Digital Juices’s Juicer was included. A workaround is to use Adobe Bridge, which is demonstrated in the introductory tutorial.

It would have been great if the collection included some slo-mo versions, particularly of fire, smoke an water, which would make these elements even more useful for motion graphics. It is possible to time warp using After Effects for example, but nothing beats the look of footage shot at high frame rates.

Positives: Affordable, high resolution, large variety of elements, pre-keyed clips.

Negatives: No slow motion versions, difficult to browse without Adobe Bridge or similar browser.

Summary: Action Essentials 2 raises the bar high for affordable, HD resolution stock footage. It really is a no-brainer to have at least the 720p version in your motion graphic and vfx toolkit. Buy it!

Addendum: Andrew Kramer of Video Copilot has informed me that many of the clips were shot at 50 and 60 frames per second, with some shot at 120 frames per second. The down-side is there is no indication as to which clips were shot at the higher frame rate.