Glossary · video-editing
What is B-roll?
B-roll is the supporting footage cut over your main shot — hands working, the shop front, a close-up of the product, someone walking through a door. The main talking shot is the A-roll; b-roll covers it. It does three jobs at once: it shows rather than tells, it hides edits so cuts feel smooth instead of jumpy, and it gives the viewer something new to look at every few seconds, which is the actual mechanism behind holding attention. Ten minutes grabbing extra shots at the end of a shoot usually saves an hour in the edit.
What does B-roll mean for a business in Pakistan?
Shoot b-roll at the end of every visit while you are already standing there, because going back to a Rawalpindi market shop for one missing shot costs half a day. Twenty short clips is plenty: the signboard, the counter, hands making or fixing the thing, a customer's point of view, the street outside. Filming during daylight also sidesteps the flicker that tube lights cause in the evening.
A worked example
A 90-second Reel for a Blue Area coffee shop uses 14 b-roll clips of three to six seconds each, laid over a 70-second voiceover. The whole set was filmed in 11 minutes once the interview finished. Without them the edit would be one static shot running 90 seconds, which almost nobody watches to the end.
Terms that go with this one
These come up in the same conversations and are worth reading together.
- Jump cutjump cutA jump cut removes a chunk of time from the middle of a continuous shot, so the speaker appears to jump slightly between frames. In classical film…
- J-cutJ-cutA J-cut is an edit where the audio of the next shot starts before its picture does — you hear the new scene while still looking at the old one. It is…
- StoryboardstoryboardA storyboard is a shot-by-shot plan made before filming: what is in each frame, from what angle, how long it runs, and what is said over it. It does…
- Colour gradingcolour grading / gradingColour grading is adjusting the colour and brightness of footage after shooting, both to fix problems and to set a consistent look. It has two…
- Frame rateframe rate / fpsFrame rate is how many still images make up each second of video, written as fps. Twenty-four gives the slightly soft, filmic motion of cinema; 25…
B-roll — quick answers
What does B-roll mean?
B-roll is the supporting footage cut over your main shot — hands working, the shop front, a close-up of the product, someone walking through a door. The main talking shot is the A-roll; b-roll covers it.
B-roll ko Urdu mein kya kehte hain?
بی رول — though in practice almost everyone in Pakistan says "b-roll". Shoot b-roll at the end of every visit while you are already standing there, because going back to a Rawalpindi market shop for one missing shot costs half a day.
Why does B-roll matter for a business in Pakistan?
Shoot b-roll at the end of every visit while you are already standing there, because going back to a Rawalpindi market shop for one missing shot costs half a day. Twenty short clips is plenty: the signboard, the counter, hands making or fixing the thing, a customer's point of view, the street outside. Filming during daylight also sidesteps the flicker that tube lights cause in the evening.
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