What is B-Roll?

So what exactly is B-roll? Well, B-roll is anything that is not your A-roll. And in this case, A-roll is me standing here and speaking to the camera. I’ll be providing information and sometimes the camera will be on me as I speak. But sometimes you wanna show an example of what you’re talking about. Say, perhaps I’m talking about a website. I could use B-roll and throw it up and now you can see an example. You can see the images, look at the assets, that sort of thing. Or sometimes I might wanna cut away to something like images or a video that is something about the event that I was at. These are good times to use B-roll and they are topical to what I’m talking about, but you always wanna make sure that it does make sense with the topic of your video. You don’t just wanna cut away to something random, like some idiot running around the office in a T-Rex outfit. It just doesn’t really make sense unless your video is about idiots in T-Rex outfits and then that’s the perfect time to use that sort of B-roll. However, B-roll isn’t just for showing examples. It also serves a function within your video. You see, sometimes when you’re filming, you don’t get everything quite right on the first try. It might take several takes to get information, but you might like the beginning of one video and the end of another video. So you can use B-roll to cover up the edit. And that way, when you cut back to me, this might be a completely different take than the one you were just listening to and you’d never know it. But if you have any more questions about B-roll or when it’s useful for your videos, you can reach out to us at video@ciesc.org.