Footage, licences and credits.
Licensed sources only.
Footage scenes show a real clip or photo. The AI never invents a file or a link: it writes what the scene should show (a search query), and the Footage step finds a licensed file for it.
01Where clips come from
| Source | What is used | Key |
|---|---|---|
| Pexels | Stock video and photos under the Pexels licence | Pexels API key |
| Pixabay | Stock video and photos under the Pixabay Content License | Pixabay API key |
| Wikimedia Commons | Only files whose licence is public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA. Non-commercial (NC) and no-derivatives (ND) files are never used | none (Settings, Channels and publishing, "Wikimedia Commons footage") |
| The workspace's uploads | Photos and MP4 clips people upload themselves | none |
Nothing is ever downloaded from YouTube or from other creators' videos.
From Wikimedia Commons the studio downloads 1920-pixel copies of photos and 1080p versions of videos, not the originals, and identifies itself with your public URL as Wikimedia asks. If Wikimedia still asks it to slow down, it waits briefly or stops searching there for the time Wikimedia names, and says so on the Footage step.
For each footage scene the studio searches the sources, ranks the results against the scene's query, downloads the best match from the provider's own servers only (a fixed list of hosts, with size limits and a file-type check), scales and trims it with ffmpeg (a photo taken upright is shown whole over a blurred copy of itself in a wide frame, never cut through the middle), and stores it in the workspace's library with its title, author, page, licence and the attribution text. People can see the candidates and swap any clip on the Footage step. A scene that gets no clip renders with its own text over the style pack's background.
02Credits in the description
The Package step writes a footage credits block into the YouTube description: for every file the title, the author, the licence and the link to the file's page, grouped by licence. YouTube descriptions are limited to 5,000 bytes (an accented letter takes two); when an episode uses many files, the credits that do not fit are shown separately on the Package step to paste into the pinned comment. Credits that the licence requires (CC BY, CC BY-SA) are kept in the description first.
03Your responsibility
The studio filters by licence and writes the credits, but it cannot give legal advice and it cannot see everything about a file: people in a photo, trademarks, or a wrong licence set by the uploader on Wikimedia Commons. Check anything important before publishing, especially for monetised channels.
- Pexels and Pixabay licences allow commercial use without attribution, with limits (for example on showing identifiable people in a bad light, or selling unaltered copies). Read their current terms.
- CC BY requires the credit. CC BY-SA also asks that adaptations of the file itself be shared under the same licence. If you are unsure what that means for your videos, turn Wikimedia Commons off or pick other clips.
- Public domain and CC0 need no credit; the studio credits them anyway.
04Music
Music comes from the console's Music library: tracks you upload. Upload only music you hold the rights to use on YouTube. Each track has a mood. An episode plays a library track whose mood matches the channel's music mood (or the style pack's), unless someone picks a track in the scene editor; with no matching track it renders without music and says so.