I'm doing a new short and I need to buy some 9/11/01 stock footage. I've looked but I haven't found any video of the actual event. Just aftermath stuff. There are a lot of videos of the event, but I don't know where to buy the rights to them at. I'm most likely not going to take it to a festival or anything, just doing it for practice. If nothing else works out, I may just use videos off YouTube or Google Video to do the scene.

You can get such footage from most any television news organization (i.e. abcnewssource and so on). The bottom line is, with any stock footage, how much are you willing to pay for it?

Check this out: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6932.htm

http://imagesource.cnn.com

Look under clip reels

Thanks for the replies. I hope to spend about $100 or less. I'll try to make the scene as short as possible. Just to let you know the setup, I will be shooting a news-room type area with the footage playing back on a 51" TV that will be to the right of the anchor. This footage may be played back on a TV that the character is watching, or we will just use the footage itself.

Your not going to find any decent length footage for $100 from a news source.
CNN for example charges something like $500/minute. It's very expensive.
Your best bet might be a local TV station, anything national will cost you.

I do not need a minute of footage. I have several shots that could be just a few seconds. Another option could be to buy 720p stock footage of New York today and then buy a stock photo from the same angle of the twin towers. I could then put them together and add smoke effects to the tower. This would cost about $35 for 720p and $55 for 1080i. I'm shooting in SD with an 2 XL2's for the movie, so 720p should work out great. Since I plan to do this movie just for experience, as well as preparation for my bigger movie next year, I may just use unauthorized footage and make it so I can go in and change it if I decide to change my mind. I think that I will probably end up shooting the TV as a green screen and then putting in the video in post. This would allow me to change the footage depending on which decision I make.

Another thing I just thought of is that I will probably increase the depth of field both in camera and in post on the inserted video. Having it slightly out of focus will draw more attention to the anchor, and will allow for me to use lower quality footage that I could make in post.

Here you go. They claim to have more than 500 hours of 9.11 footage.

www.cameraplanet.com