Welcome to The Angry Editor. 

For years I’ve teased the idea of The Angry Editor as a regular column here on The Editblog as a way to complain, gripe, nitpick, bellyache as well as air grievances out loud and in public when 280 characters on Twitter doesn’t work. 

I think I need to start a recurring column called “The Angry Editor.” Seems I’m making a lot of notes and observations these days that would fall nicely under that heading. pic.twitter.com/EApwJayV5b

— Scott Simmons (@editblog) January 17, 2018

Today’s topic:

The massive time suck when it comes to searching stock sites for a good graphics template.

When editors are talking shop, we often talk about how much of a time suck it is to search for good stock music. The stock music sites are plentiful, with some good music in them and a few of them even have some really good search tools. But it can still be a black and dark abyss. As you audition tracks, find a few good ones to narrow down to what you want to use.

But I’ll add a new time suck that is even worse than looking for good music. It’s scouring the stock sites for a good graphics template. That template might be as simple as a single line lower third all the way up to a multi-second opening title package. It’s a pretty amazing time we live in, (especially for those like myself who aren’t overly talented in motion graphic design) that there are template sites and stock sites that let us pay a reasonable rate for graphics tailored to our specific editing platform of choice. But as many of these sites have been around for years, and new content streams in on a regular basis, it’s getting to where many of them are a mess.

I know what you’re saying, “Hey angry editor, be less of a dumb editor and use some of the filtering options. That’ll help you narrow your selection down.” And that’s true. By choosing a few filters, I did get it down to just over 3,000.

The problem now is that so many of the options that are returned have multiple graphics within a single returned result. So if even half of these 3000 returned results have 9 different lower third options within the single result, I’m back to my 16,000 number. And I guess a “TITLES PACK” might have what I’m looking for because technically a lower third is a title but the preview thumbnail is so bad I won’t know that until I click into that “Corporate Titles Pack.”

But wouldn’t this be a great place for AI to help solve this voluminous and monotonous search nightmare?

It just so happens Envato Elements has an “AI Labs” tab with an AI search! That should make it much quicker to find a simple two-line lower third that has an elegant animation on and off the screen.

Let’s go!

Nice job Envato AI labs.

Perhaps I’ll have better luck with Motion Array.

Well that’s a whole lot of results also returned. I actually expect a lot of results with such a simple term as “lower thirds,” as there’s a whole lot that can encompass. Let’s get a bit more specific because I know exactly what I want, a simple two-line lower third that has an elegant animation on and off the screen.

I think you get the idea here.

Honestly, this grievance is less about the number of search results returned when looking for video templates and more that these websites have pretty bad granular search and filtering options. While there are plenty of search filters, it still seems difficult to narrow down findings. I know they are trying, they just need to be better.

In the meantime, perhaps we’re just resolved to a world of having to spend hours upon hours searching and digging.

Now don’t get me started on the quality of a lot of what these stock sites are selling these days, or the instructions on how to use some of this stuff.

If you have a stock template site that you just love, or want to defend Envato or Motion Array (I’m picking on them because those are ones I’ve used extensively) then please let us know in the comments below.

I asked around on social media how others might feel about this topic.

You never know the quality of the template you are going to get from the thumbnail, how adaptable it’ll be to your needs. Often templates are not built with the end user in mind.

— Brian Levin (@brianlevin83) December 18, 2024

Yup absolutely. I almost wonder if it’s a marketing thing. You look for something, get a ton of results and think “oh there’s heaps of stuff here!”

I mean it’s fine, I found some good stuff, but it seemed harder than maybe it needed to be.

— Dylan Reeve (@dylanreeve.com) December 18, 2024 at 1:50 PM

It can be a time sink but I’ve realized that you’ll probably only find that magic item once a year. The rest of the time I search for elements within templates to build my ideal look. I end up using 2-4 bits to frankenstein a result.

— EternalAfrican (@Donut_Tai) December 18, 2024

Music search has always been a horrible time suck. Clients never appreciate it. It’s always wonderful when I have someone else who will do it for me.

— Robb, with 2 b’s (@nledit.bsky.social) December 18, 2024 at 1:58 PM

I hate trying to find templates for anything. You don’t know the quality of it until you download it and it seems like they don’t always have all of the media to recreate the demo, so it takes forever to figure out how to configure it. So in many ways it’s worse than searching…

— Mike Nease (@nease) December 18, 2024

Yeah it’s pretty bad. I’d like AI to be able to help with searching through the different sites that offer these templates.

— Robbie Patton (@FilmPatton) December 18, 2024

Trying to find templates even with AI search integrated into some sites can be the worse. And unless you have an intermediate to somewhat advance understanding of app the template is made for, it isn’t always user friendly

— Kes Akalaonu (@NLE_Ninja) December 19, 2024

Also add stock music/SFX to this too. I can spend countless days between VFX elements, MX, and SFX. Even when I build my own libraries I get bored of it or need something different. Then back to the endless cycle of going through many different sites with differing quality.

— Corey Frost (@coreysfrost) December 19, 2024

On that subject – why do stock footage companies never have any mechanism to re-conform the watermarked preview clip with the paid-for full quality version (like actual matching timecode or something)!?

— dickij10.bsky.social (@dickij10.bsky.social) December 18, 2024 at 2:09 PM

It might be worthwhile to build a good relationship with a Motion Designer. The need is often somewhat repetitive (titles, l3rds) and shouldn’t incur a massive cost. It used to be my job, and I still make all the graphics I need. I was always happy to do quick gigs while working on longer projects.

— Jukka Tallinen (@jukkatallinen.com) December 19, 2024 at 3:09 AM

Stock sites were in an arms race with each other to accumulate templates. Quantity beat quality in internal metrics (number must go up!). Now they all have the same cesspools of crap to sift through. So the pendulum swings back to bespoke

— Nic Dean (@_nicdean) December 20, 2024