What is b-roll?
B-roll is the supporting footage cut in around the main shot: hands at work, a wide view of the room, the sign over the door, the machine running, the street outside. HindLight Media shoots it on location in Rome and across northwest Georgia.
What b-roll actually is
The main footage, meaning the interview or the person speaking to camera, is A-roll. B-roll is everything layered over and between it to show what the speaker is describing, hide the joins where their answers were trimmed, and keep the picture moving while the audio carries the story.
It is usually shot without usable dialogue, often after the interview has wrapped. It is not filler, even though careless b-roll ends up looking exactly like filler.
A HindLight brand film. Watch it with the A-roll and b-roll test below in mind.
A-roll and b-roll: the actual difference
A-roll is the footage that carries the spine of the piece. Someone is talking, and what they say is the reason the video exists. Take the picture away and the audio still makes sense on its own. B-roll is the opposite: strip the audio and you have a nice image of a hand turning a wrench, and nothing else.
That is the practical test. If the shot is load-bearing for the argument, it is A-roll. If it exists to illustrate, establish, cover, or breathe, it is b-roll.
The term A-roll has faded from everyday use; people now say the interview and the b-roll instead. Under the b-roll umbrella sit establishing shots, insert shots, pickup shots, effects shots and stock footage.
One more thing. B-roll does not mean second-rate. The B refers to which reel the footage lived on, not to how good it is.
Why it is called b-roll
The name is a leftover from 16mm film. A splice in 35mm film is hidden by the width of the frame. On 16mm it is not, and every join showed up on screen as a visible flaw.
The fix was to build two rolls instead of one. Odd-numbered shots went on the A-roll and even-numbered shots on the B-roll, with opaque black leader filling the alternating gaps in a checkerboard pattern. The print stock was exposed twice, once to each roll, and the splices landed in the black leader, invisible.
News crews carried the habit forward. Into the mid-1970s they shot both rolls on 16mm and played them through a telecine built around two film projectors, sound from the A-roll, silent images intercut from the B.
Then videotape arrived, edit suites labeled their decks by letter, and the names got reused: the A deck held the main material, the B deck held the cutaways. The workflow died decades ago. The vocabulary did not.
What b-roll is actually for
It hides edits. Nobody says anything in one clean take, so an interview answer gets stitched together from pieces, and every join is a jump cut. Lay a shot over the top and the join disappears. Editors call it covering, and a lot of b-roll is shot for no other reason.
It shows instead of tells. Somebody says the shop has been in the family since the sixties. Cut to the framed photograph on the wall and the claim lands in a way the sentence alone never would.
It compresses time. Three shots of a process take a viewer from start to finish in eight seconds without anyone narrating the middle.
It establishes place. A wide exterior at the top of a scene tells the audience where they are before the first word is spoken.
And it gives the eye something to do. A talking head running past forty seconds unbroken feels longer than it is.
How much b-roll a project needs
There is no single defined ratio of A-roll to b-roll, and any fixed percentage you read is a guess dressed up as a rule.
On the capture side there is a real convention: editors work to roughly a three to one rule, about three usable seconds of b-roll for every second of finished cut it has to cover. In practice, shoot around three times more than you plan to use. That sounds wasteful until the only shot covering a critical sentence turns out to have a focus hunt in the middle of it.
Documentary, travel and montage pieces lean heavily on b-roll because atmosphere is doing the storytelling. A product demo or a legal explainer leans the other way; the viewer needs the speaker face on screen to trust what is being said.
Running short is the normal failure, and it is a shooting problem, not an editing one. Nobody ever finished an edit wishing for less coverage.
How b-roll gets shot
Hold every shot longer than you think you need. Ten to fifteen seconds is the floor for a normally paced video. Roll before the action starts, keep rolling after it ends, and let people and hands enter and leave the frame. Those margins give the editor room to trim.
Cover every subject wide, medium and tight. A sequence needs at least one establishing shot, a few mediums and plenty of close-ups.
Photojournalists teach a five-shot version: hands, face, wide, over the shoulder, then one creative angle, shot low or high. It is a checklist, not a rule, and it works almost anywhere.
Think in sequences rather than pretty pictures. A chain of shots showing a process move forward, each one a link, cuts together on its own. A folder of gorgeous unrelated clips does not.
Keep the look consistent. Mixed color grades, mismatched aspect ratios and clips of wildly different quality read as amateur work, however good each shot is.
Record ambient sound anyway. B-roll is traditionally presented silent, and footage deliberately shot without audio is still marked MOS, but a low bed of natural sound under a cut adds more realism than people expect.
Where b-roll goes wrong
Clips cut short
The biggest sin in b-roll shooting is not holding a shot long enough. A clip lasting a couple of seconds is not a shot.
One angle, repeated
If every clip is a medium shot from eye level, there is no sequence to build and cuts between them read as mistakes.
Decoration with no motivation
Every shot should enhance what is being said at that moment. If the b-roll reads as filler, the viewer notices, and it distracts from the message.
Too much of it
Cover an entire interview and the audience never sees the person they are supposed to trust. Faces do work that objects cannot.
Stock that does not belong
Library footage is legitimate b-roll, but a glossy generic clip dropped into a video shot on a real street in a real town stands out immediately. Mix stock carefully or not at all.
A closing note
HindLight Media is a video and multimedia production company in Rome, Georgia, and shooting b-roll that cuts together is a big part of the job, on event and sports coverage as much as on a brand film. You can see how it reads in finished videos in the work. If you have a project in mind, call or text 706.506.5349.
B-roll questions
What is the difference between b-roll and a-roll?
A-roll is the primary footage carrying the content, normally someone speaking on camera, and it stands up as audio on its own. B-roll is the supporting footage cut in around it: establishing shots, hands working, details, cutaways. The quick test is whether removing the audio leaves anything meaningful. If it does, that is A-roll. If it leaves a nice picture and nothing else, that is b-roll.
Why is it called b-roll?
It comes from 16mm film editing. Splices were visible on 16mm because the frame was too narrow to hide them, so editors built two rolls, odd shots on the A-roll and even shots on the B-roll, with opaque black leader filling the gaps on each in a checkerboard pattern. The print stock was exposed to both rolls in turn and the splices vanished into the leader. Videotape edit suites later reused the letters for their A and B decks, and the name stuck long after the equipment disappeared.
How long should a b-roll clip be?
Shoot each one for at least ten to fifteen seconds for a normally paced video, and longer for slow-paced work. Roll before the action starts and keep rolling after it ends so the editor has room to trim. Cutting a shot short is the most common way perfectly good b-roll turns out to be unusable.
Does b-roll need sound?
It does not, and traditionally it is presented silent, which is why footage recorded deliberately without audio is still labeled MOS. The dialogue almost always comes from the A-roll underneath. That said, capturing natural ambient sound costs nothing and a low bed of it under a cut makes the sequence feel considerably more real.
Is b-roll the same thing as a cutaway?
Not quite. A cutaway is one kind of b-roll, specifically a shot that cuts away from the main action to something related, often used to bridge an edit. B-roll is the broader category and also covers establishing shots, insert shots, pickup shots, effects shots and stock footage.
Can you use stock footage as b-roll?
Yes, and it is standard practice for anything impractical to film yourself, such as aerials, archival material or locations you cannot get to. Watch the match. Stock clips carry their own look, grade and frame rate, and a polished library shot dropped into footage from a real location can read as obviously borrowed.
Have a project that needs b-roll?
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