B-roll
A transcript-only cut silently drops every clip without words. Don't.
Spot it
- A clip with 0 words is B-roll.
- A clip whose "words" are song lyrics or another language (radio, a café) is B-roll too: check what the transcript says before treating it as speech.
- All clips recorded in sequence → keep the recorded order; B-roll sits where it was shot.
Watch it (the step people skip)
Pulling 5 frames per clip led to bad cuts. Look at 2 frames per second (a contact sheet, 8 per row, small) for every B-roll clip, and read what the creator says right before and after it. Questions:
- What is the action? Where does it start and resolve?
- Is there a natural transition? Example from a real edit: the camera goes into a backpack (frames go black) in one clip, and the next clip starts black and comes out of the bag onto an airport table. Cutting black-to-black makes a free, perfect transition; cutting by fixed length destroyed it.
- Which part is steady and well framed? Which part is out of focus or the operator fumbling?
- Is it vertical (phone held upright)? It will crop to the middle in a horizontal/4:3 frame: flag it.
Cut it
- Segment by time:
{"clip": "…", "broll": true, "in": s, "out": s, "why": "…"}. - Length follows the action: a quick cutaway 2–4 s, a transition sequence 6–8 s, an outro over a drive 10–15 s. A soft-focus shot gets the shortest slot.
- 100% framing, colour the timeline pieces green so A/B roll read at a glance.
- Natural sound stays on the voice track, but: a B-roll clip that is silent gets normalized up by +30 dB (pure hiss) → set it back to 0 dB; a clip with a radio/music in it fights the music bed → lower it 8 dB or so.
- The music rises on B-roll (see
music-and-sound).
Report
Each B-roll: timeline time, what it shows, why that range, anything flagged (vertical, soft focus).