Digital Juice Libraries: VideoTraxx and Editor's Toolkit 1 and 2 offer high quality and flexibility.

Stock film and video footage provides access to resources that often are rare, unique, and difficult to produce internally, but finding them can be a source of frustration. Searching for the necessary footage can be time-consuming, requiring you to navigate through clip after clip of footage as well as pricing and licensing agreements until you find the content you require, at the quality you need, and at a price that fits your budget. All the time spent on researching can have a negative impact on a studio's bottom line. If only every studio could have its own comprehensive, high-quality, indexed, royalty-free stock library on site. Helping to make that dream a reality, Digital Juice produces high-quality, royalty-free libraries of film and video clips, overlays, lower thirds, motion design elements, and more.

As I was producing a training video on diamonds, the client asked for clips of flowing lava during a segment on the creation of diamonds and methods of discovery. Those I could find were either of very poor quality or beyond the client's budget. But then the Digital Juice libraries arrived.

Each of the libraries includes a copy of Juicer 2, Digital Juice's content management software. Installation was a breeze. When it was finished, I inserted the first DVD of each library, which contains the indexes, and clicked Install Catalog. I was presented with the option of installing still or movie thumbnail previews for each catalog. For the VideoTraxx library, the still preview required approximately 200MB, whereas the movie preview option requires nearly 2GB.

The Juicer has a clean, intuitive interface with four floating windows--Product Browser, Keyword List, Preview, and Batch--which you can arrange at will. In the Product Browser, you can select a catalog and volume to browse or enter a search query. Alternatively, by selecting a catalog and keyword in the Keyword List window, it automatically is entered into the Product Browser's search field. Once you've found what you're looking for, highlight it in the Product Browser, and it will appear in the larger Preview Window, where you can zoom in or out and, if you installed movie previews, play them. After identifying a file for use, you can either drag it to the Batch window or click Add to Batch. Here, you prepare files for output, setting the length, upper or lower field first, resolution, opacity, and more. When you're ...