Should you ask a creator for the raw footage?

You sell a resistance band — the flat kind you anchor on a door and pull. You've chosen the creator, the brief is written, and the offer is still open; the video goes up on their account in three weeks. Your plan has a second line in it: two placements in your own ad account over the summer, built by the agency that buys your media. This morning somebody there asked you to get the raw footage as well.

When should you ask for the raw footage?

Two conditions, and both have to be yes.

Somebody on your side could cut it. Raw footage is what the camera records on the day, before any of it is cut — the takes. If no one on your team would cut it and no agency builds your placements, the file has nowhere to land.

One of your plan's reuses needs material that is not in the posted video at all. Not a different version of that video, but something the camera caught and the edit left out. If every line in the plan can be made from the video you're already getting, nothing in the plan will open the file.

The first one you can answer from who works on your side. The second needs a read of the plan, because the plan says where each line runs and not what form it needs there.

For the band: your agency handles the placements, so the first condition is a yes. The second is the one you have to go and check.

What arrives if you ask for it?

One competitor's creator training walks through an edit, and plays the file through before any of it: "before doing any real edits, I'm going to play this sample video all the way through just so you can see what the raw footage looks like from start to finish". The file runs "roughly two minutes, 45 seconds", and the lesson says why — the creator is "going through the raw motions of setting up the product for showcase", "doing a tasting example", "repeating certain lines". The lesson's summary of it: "This is what a very standard raw piece of footage will look like." That's one file in one course, filmed for one product, so it measures nothing beyond what that file looked like before anybody cut it.

The rest of that lesson is the edit. The silences come out in two passes, the words on the screen get generated and broken up, and more passes follow before the lesson calls the job done — and when it does, it sums the whole job up as "that's really all the editing required in a standard UGC video." Another competitor's guide, drawing a line between creators and influencers, writes that same move from file to finished video as a job: "Turning raw footage into finished clips usually means trimming, adding captions, and resizing it in a video editor before posting."

This page follows our caption guide, which puts the boundary at the frame: "By caption we mean the text posted alongside the video, not the words burned onto the screen during it." Anything inside that frame, this page calls the words on the screen.

For the band: the file the agency is picturing is the whole of that day — the anchor going onto the door, the first set, the band back in its sleeve, and whatever happens between them. The thirty seconds that goes up is what the creator makes out of it. The takes are not a second ad.

Who on your side has to open the file?

Whoever would cut it — an editor on your team, or the agency that builds your placements. The competitor that drew the line between creators and influencers also has a guide to running creator content as paid media, and it has one line about the raw footage in its briefing list: "Keep the raw footage clean so your creative team has flexibility in post." That is a shooting instruction, and the same bullet opens with "Vertical format, clean audio, minimal branding." The reason it gives sits with a team you may or may not have.

The same guide's next line asks for something else out of the same shoot: "Brief creators to produce 2–3 hooks for the same core video. This gives media buyers assets to test without additional briefing cycles." That is something the creator produces at the shoot, and that guide puts it in the brief. It is a different line from the camera files — the raw footage itself. It changes what gets filmed, and what it hands the media buyers is a set of hooks to try. The extra hooks are that guide's recommendation to brands, not something we have measured. If what your side wants is more hooks to test rather than material to cut, the ask that serves it is that one.

For the band: the agency cutting your placements is the team doing that work, so the file has somewhere to land.

Which of your plan's lines needs a different form?

The second condition comes out of a document you already have. Our guide to usage rights reads a plan twice, and the second read is the one you need here. The first read asks where the video goes, and the second asks what form it takes there. That guide says of the ad line in its own worked example that "the ad version probably isn't the posted video". Do that read before you decide about the takes.

Three forms a line can need, and only one of them reaches the raw footage.

• A shorter cut of the posted video. The posted video is the input.
• The video without the words on the screen. If the posted video has words on the screen, they went on during an edit — that is where the lesson's example got its own. A version of it without them is a different ask from the raw footage.
• Something the posted video doesn't contain. A shot that got cut, the anchor from the angle you didn't get, the moment before the first pull.

Anything built out of the video you're getting stops at the posted video. Only a line needing material that was never in it reaches the raw footage, and a line like that in your plan is your second condition met.

For the band: your two placements both run the posted video in full with your own end card on it. If the plan grows a fifteen-second slot in August, that comes out of the posted video too.

Does holding the raw footage let you cut it?

No. Our guide to usage rights settles it: "A cut-down version is still the creator's work, reshaped — so making one needs their agreement, the same way reusing the video does." A folder on your drive doesn't change that sentence. That guide to running creator content as paid media keeps the same question as a term to agree up front: it asks "Can you trim, add voiceover, overlay a discount code, cut a 6-second bumper?" and tells brands to "Define it clearly."

What permission you need, for how long and on which channels, is that usage rights guide's question; this page answers only which deliverables the shoot hands you.

So where does the line go, and when?

Two documents could carry this line, and one test is meant to sort them. Our guide to what belongs in a brief asks of a line, "does the line govern the video, or the deal?" Deal-side lines are the ones where "no draft can get it wrong", and for those it says "Settle it in the agreement before the shoot, and let the brief point at it in one line." That test doesn't sort this line. One of the questions in our guide to what to settle before the shoot sits the same way, and it's where the video gets posted.

That guide calls that one "the odd one out" and says of that test, "That test doesn't decide it, and it doesn't have to." What makes it different is in that guide's own words: "It isn't a permission you're buying for later — it's the shape of what you're buying". That is what this line settles too. That guide is separating a post from a file delivered in place of one; this line asks whether the camera files come along with the post. They share the timing too — the creator has to know what shape the job is before they film.

So this line lands in the same two places. The offer prices it, and the brief carries it as a fact. Of the posting answer that guide says "Write that part flat", and this line is written flat too — You're sending the raw footage along with the video.

For the band: if the read had turned something up, that line would go out with the offer and one line of the brief.

Our guide on asking what a creator films with settles its own booking decision with a single question, because "It takes a sentence, it has a yes or a no, and a no lets you resolve that shot before booking." What this page takes from it is the form of the question. When the read does turn something up, name the one thing it is, and the answer comes back yes or no before anybody films.

What if the video is already up?

Then you're not sending back a note. Our guide to what to ask for when a draft isn't right leaves the ad question out of the notes you send, for a reason that covers this one: "Either way it's settled in what you agreed with the creator, not in the draft. If the agreement covers the route you want, you don't need a revision. If it doesn't, no revision fixes that either." Our guide on posting a creator's video on your own account names what a shorter cut becomes when somebody wants it after the fact: "That's a second ask."

The camera files after the fact are the same kind of request, and you can go and make it. How it lands turns on what the creator still has and what they say to you, and neither of those is on your side of the table.

What changes if the answer is no?

Each document keeps the lines it already has. What you keep is the read you did on the plan: you know which lines run on the video you're getting, and whether any of them would have needed something else.

For the band: the answer was no. The offer prices a post, and the brief is the one you already wrote.

Frequently asked questions

The creator quoted a separate price for the raw footage. Is that a second negotiation?

It's a term of the one you're in. Our guide to what to settle before the shoot gives the reason to keep it there: "you want these terms priced against the campaign rather than against how much you like one file." Right now nobody has seen a file.

We only want a shorter cut of the posted video. Does that need the raw footage?

Not the raw footage — but which cut you mean changes what you're asking for. Our guide on posting a creator's video on your own account separates two cuts that look alike, and says both need the creator's agreement: "Both kinds of cut need that agreement; they aren't the same thing to ask for. A few seconds off the end to fit a slot is a trim. Cutting the opening because it only worked where the video was is a rewrite, and that's a bigger thing to hand somebody." Work out which one your slot needs before you ask.

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