If you search for editing practice footage, you'll find two very different things with the same label: traditional stock footage clips and narrative film editing dailies.
Traditional stock footage clips are beautiful, single shots — a drone pass over a coastline, a barista pouring latte art — that are not part of a story. Film dailies are everything a film crew shot on a production to make a scripted scene in one day. That's why they are called dailies. Dailies include every take, every camera angle, flubbed line, and insert shot that was recorded by the crew.
Each type of footage has a very different use. Traditional stock footage is supposed to be inserted into a film you plan on broadcasting. For example, you download a wide shot of a city to use as an establishing shot within your film. The reason to buy film dailies is to practice film editing. If you want to learn film editing, you need to download dailies.
Below is a list of places to download free editing footage. Full disclosure before we start: I run EditStock, which appears on this list — but so do free alternatives and competitors, because the honest answer is that you should probably use several of these throughout your editing career.
1. Pexels and Pixabay (free traditional stock clips)
The giants of free stock video. These companies have enormous libraries, generous licenses, gorgeous 4K. What they're good for: use in advertisement, building montages, finding music and sound effects. What they can't teach you: scene editing. There are no actor performances to choose between and no story to serve — every clip is already someone's finished product. Use them for technical reps, not storytelling reps.
2. Cinestudy (free narrative project)
Born from a PBS series, Cinestudy offers free interactive projects — real scripted scenes with multiple angles and takes you can download and cut, with tutorials attached. It's a genuine act of generosity for the editing community and one of the few free sources of true narrative coverage. Selection is limited and production style varies, but for zero dollars, it's a real place to learn scene editing.
3. Film Editing Pro's free footage pack (free, email signup)
A couple of hours of professionally shot interview and b-roll material in serious formats — BRAW, ProRes, even RED media — in exchange for your email address. Strongest for movie trailer practice and for learning proxy workflows. It's a lead magnet for their courses, but it's a legitimately good one. Their courses are great.
4. ActionVFX practice footage (free, VFX-focused)
Production-quality plates designed for compositing and VFX training. If your interests lean toward After Effects, Nuke, or Fusion — tracking, keying, set extensions — this is purpose-built for you. It's not for narrative cutting, and it isn't trying to be.
5. Camera manufacturer sample footage (free, format practice)
RED, ARRI, and Blackmagic all publish camera-original sample files — R3D, ARRIRAW, BRAW. Downloading these is the cheapest possible way to practice professional color and media workflows: debayering, working in log, building proxies, ACES pipelines. One or two clips each, so this is workflow homework rather than storytelling practice, but assistant editor jobs are won on exactly these skills.
6. ACE Editing Experience raw footage packs (paid for schools)
The American Cinema Editors guild has created a truly one of a kind experience for editors by gaining access to dailies from Netflix shows including: The Queen's Gambit, The Old Guard, Somebody Feed Phil, What If, and A Series of Unfortunate Events. The drawback is that the dailies are not free. They must be purchased by a school. If you are a student of a film school, you should direct them to these projects because they are great.
7. EditStock (free projects and paid film dailies)
This is us — here's what we built and why. EditStock provides the complete, un-edited dailies from real short films — festival entries, professional casts and crews — with every take, every angle, and the script or interview transcripts. You make the same decisions the film's editor faced, and the result is reel-worthy because the footage is great quality. We have some free editing practice projects which are scene excerpts. The Films Under $50 collection covers beginners on a budget, and we have premium film projects that played at prestigious film festivals.
Which should you choose?
Honestly: you need both. Use Pixabay for projects you're editing on the side. Cut a free Cinestudy scene or an EditStock project to find out whether narrative editing is your thing. Then, when you're ready to build a reel, invest in footage which makes that reel shine. The skill that gets editors hired isn't downloading the pretties shots. It's choosing between very similar takes.
