What Is B-Roll? A Guide for Video Editors

B-roll is the supplemental footage, cutaways, scenery, hands, the product, the location, that you lay over your main footage to hide edits and show what the speaker is talking about. The main footage is the A-roll; B-roll is everything you cut away to.

Here is the test of good B-roll: the viewer never thinks about it. They are listening to a founder describe their workshop, the picture shows the workshop, and they never notice that you trimmed forty seconds of rambling out of the audio underneath. That invisibility is the whole job.

A-roll vs. B-roll

• A-roll is your primary footage. In most interview and talking-head work it is the person speaking, the spine of the piece, the thing that carries the words.
• B-roll is the supporting layer: the cutaways, the establishing shots, the close-ups of hands or objects, the location, the process. It usually rides without its own sync sound so the A-roll audio keeps running underneath.

Where the term comes from

It is a genuine piece of film-history plumbing. In the 16mm era, visible splices were a problem, you could see the join. Editors solved it by conforming negative across two rolls in a checkerboard: odd shots on the A-roll, even shots on the B-roll, with black leader filling the gaps, so the two could be printed in a way that hid the splices, as the history of the term records. When linear video editing took over in the 1980s, the suites had alphabetically labeled tape decks, the A deck for the main action and the B deck for the supplementary material, and the name stuck. We still say B-roll long after the second physical roll disappeared.

Why B-roll matters

Two jobs, both essential.

It hides your cuts. Every time you tighten an interview, remove filler, drop a tangent, reorder soundbites, you create a jump cut where the speaker visibly snaps position. B-roll laid over that moment makes the cut vanish. This is the most common fix in the editor's kit and the reason documentary editors are forever asking for more coverage.

It shows, instead of just tells. A line about a busy kitchen is fine. A line about a busy kitchen over a shot of the busy kitchen is better. B-roll turns abstract words into concrete images, and concrete images hold attention. News and documentary crews have shot it this way for decades, capturing supporting footage after the interview specifically to illustrate what the subject said.

The kinds of B-roll

• Establishing shots that set a location or context.
• Cutaways, the detail shots, a hand on a keyboard, a face reacting, a tool in use.
• Insert shots, a close-up of the specific thing being discussed.
• Process footage, the work actually happening.
• Stock footage, when you cannot shoot what you need.

How to plan B-roll from your edit, not before it

The biggest B-roll mistake is shooting a pile of generic footage and hoping some of it fits. The fix is to flip the order: lock the words first, then you know exactly what pictures you need.

1. Lock your selects and story. Decide which lines make the cut and in what order. Until you know what is being said, you cannot know what to show.
2. Mark every cut point that needs covering. These are your jump cuts. Some need B-roll; clean cuts on natural pauses may not.
3. List the B-roll each line wants. A line about the product gets the product. A line about the team gets the team. Now your shot list writes itself.
4. Place it over the cuts in your editor. Cover the joins, illustrate the key beats, and leave the speaker on screen where their face is the point.

A worked example

You are cutting a three-minute customer testimonial. In the paper-edit stage you keep eleven lines and drop the rest. You mark six cut points that land mid-sentence, those need cover, and three that fall on breaths, those are fine clean. Your B-roll list is now six specific shots: the customer using the product, a close-up of the result, their storefront, two process shots, and one reaction. You shoot exactly those, not a hard drive of "maybe useful" clips. The edit comes together in an afternoon because every shot has a home before you import it.

Common mistakes

• Generic B-roll. Slow-motion coffee pours and stock cityscapes that have nothing to do with the words. It covers a cut but tells the viewer nothing, and it reads as filler.
• Covering the wrong moment. Burying the speaker's most emotional line under a cutaway. Sometimes the face is the shot. Walter Murch put emotion at the top of his hierarchy of what a cut should protect for a reason, do not cover the moment that carries it.
• Too much. If the speaker is barely ever on screen, the piece feels like a slideshow with narration. B-roll supports the A-roll; it does not replace it.
• Shooting before you know the story. Gathering footage with no edit in mind wastes shoot time and leaves gaps exactly where you needed cover.

The honest tradeoff

Good B-roll costs time and storage, both at the shoot and in the edit. The temptation is to grab everything; the discipline is to grab what the cut needs. Plan-first B-roll means a shorter shoot, a smaller card to back up, and an edit where every clip earns its place. Plan-less B-roll means a bloated shoot and an afternoon scrubbing clips that do not fit.

Where it fits a transcript-first workflow

B-roll is a finishing layer, you add it in your NLE. But you decide what you need much earlier, on the transcript. In ScriptCut you select the lines, drop the filler, and arrange the story before you touch your editor. Word-level timecodes mean every kept line is a precise cut, so you can see exactly where the jump cuts will land and build your B-roll shot list straight off the plan. Then you export a ready-to-cut timeline to DaVinci Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut, or Avid and lay the cutaways over the joins you already mapped. For the planning stage, see the paper edit; for using B-roll to cover joins, see jump cuts and cutting a documentary interview.

The takeaway

B-roll is the layer that makes interview editing look produced: it hides your cuts and shows what people are talking about. The editors who use it well do not shoot more, they shoot smarter, because they know the story before they know the shot list. Lock the words, list the pictures, cover the joins.

Sources

• B-roll, Wikipedia
• What Is B-Roll, StudioBinder
• Walter Murch, In the Blink of an Eye