What is B-roll?
B-roll is secondary footage cut in over your main recording — the hands typing, the product close-up, the street shot — while your primary audio keeps running underneath. It does two jobs: adds visual context, and covers cuts in the main take so removed takes and filler words disappear invisibly.
What actually counts as good B-roll?
The pattern behind all four: specificity. B-roll works when it could only belong to this video. Stock clips of smiling meetings work in the opposite direction — the viewer has seen the same shot elsewhere, and your video inherits that déjà vu.
- Your own product or screen, doing the thing the voiceover describes
- Hands, tools, environment — texture from the world you actually work in
- Archival: an old screenshot, a first version, a whiteboard photo
- A second angle of the same recording (a wide shot is B-roll for the tight shot)
Why is B-roll the editor's eraser?
Cut a stumble out of a single-camera take and the picture jumps — the classic jump cut. Cover the joint with two seconds of B-roll and the audio edit becomes invisible. This is why editors ask for cutaways before they ask for anything else: every cutaway is a place a mistake can vanish. When a whole recording gets reframed to vertical for clips, the same trick covers the 9:16 crop.
Read the transcript
What is B-roll? B-roll is secondary footage cut in over your main recording — the hands typing, the product close-up, the street shot — while your primary audio keeps running underneath. It does two jobs: adds visual context, and covers cuts in the main take so removed takes and filler words disappear invisibly.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the name B-roll come from?
Film editing: the A-roll carried the primary footage, the B-roll the duplicate used for dissolves and cutaways. The tape is gone; the name stayed.
How much B-roll does a talking-head video need?
Less than most tutorials claim. A cutaway every 15–30 seconds keeps a talking head alive; wall-to-wall B-roll reads as stock-footage soup. Cut to something real when it illustrates the sentence being said, and at edit joints you want to hide.
Does Never add B-roll automatically?
It plans B-roll where the transcript calls for it and pulls from your own uploaded footage first — your product, your screen, your space. Generic stock is a last resort, because it's the fastest way to look like every other AI edit.