What is B-roll? Meaning, examples and free sources

Someone watches your video and says "add some B-roll." But what is it, and where does it go?

B-roll is footage that plays over or between your main shot while your voice keeps going. You talking to the camera is the A-roll. The clip that cuts in while you talk is B-roll. This page has six kinds you can make without a crew, a 60-second script with every B-roll moment marked and three free stock libraries with licenses checked. The editing steps are in how to add B-roll to a talking-head video.

B-roll means supporting footage, and the name comes from 16mm film

B-roll is supplemental footage cut into or laid over the main shot. Merriam-Webster defines it as "recorded video of subjects or locations used to provide supplementary material for a film or television show." In practice it's any picture that isn't your main take: a close-up, a screen, a photo, a stock clip.

The name is literal. Editors cutting 16mm film hid their splices by building two rolls. The odd-numbered shots went on the A-roll and the even-numbered shots on the B-roll, with black leader filling each gap. The print was then exposed to both rolls in turn.

Video editors kept the letters in the 1980s. The A deck played the main tape. The B deck ran the supporting footage, usually with no sound, while the sound came from the A deck.

That last detail is still the best working definition. B-roll is the picture that changes while the sound stays with you. Your voice carries the video. The B-roll gives the eyes something new to look at.

A-roll vs B-roll: in a talking-head video, the A-roll is you

A-roll is the footage that carries the story, and B-roll supports it. In a film, the A-roll is the scene with the dialogue. In your video, it's you, talking to the lens. Almost everything else is B-roll.

Two edge cases trip people up. A second camera angle of you talking doesn't count as B-roll. It's still you saying the words, so treat it as A-roll from another side.

A montage is different again: a run of short shots edited together to condense space, time and information. You can build one from B-roll. But a montage carries the video on its own for a stretch, while B-roll sits under a voice that keeps talking.

Six kinds of B-roll you can get without a film crew

Film-school lists of B-roll start with establishing shots and aerial footage. That's no help if your work happens on video calls. Here is what a coach, consultant or founder can actually get, cheapest first.

Notice where stock sits. A clip of your real screen or your real notebook shows you do this work. A stock clip only illustrates it, and a viewer can tell the difference in a second.

Two more tools do B-roll's job without being footage. A text card puts a number, a list or a quote on screen. A punch-in zooms in on you for one line. Neither is B-roll in the film-school sense, but in a talking-head video they solve the same problem, and they're often the better pick. How to add B-roll to a talking-head video walks through footage, cards and punch-ins step by step.

Where B-roll goes in a talking-head video, and where it doesn't

B-roll goes where your words point at something the viewer can't see. Three moments earn it.

1. You name a thing. You say "the email," "my calendar" or "this slide." Show it for a few seconds, on the word.
2. You list steps. A card or a close-up per step helps the viewer keep count while you talk.
3. You cut. Record in sections and every join is a jump cut. Hiding a deleted moment is one of the most common uses of a cutaway, so lay a clip over the join.

Keep it off two places: the first few seconds and the ask. The hook is where a stranger decides whether you're worth hearing, and they decide by looking at you. The ask is a request from one person to another. Cover either with a stock clip and you've taken the person out of it.

Here's the view I'd push hardest. Most coaches need less B-roll than they're told. Fast-cut advice suits channels where the viewer came for pace. Your viewer came to judge whether you can help them. As I say in my video on showing your face, "Your authentic self and having a system around getting your authentic self in front of people, in front of your target audience, is going to become more important now than it ever has been before." B-roll supports that. It shouldn't replace it. About a quarter of the screen time is plenty.

The same goes for cinematic B-roll, the slow-motion, shallow-focus shots that make a brand film look expensive. They take hours to plan and film, and time is what makes people stop posting. "And so you quit because it's like, well, content's just never going to work for me. And the problem is you quit because of that time," I say a few minutes later in that video. A screen recording you can make in a minute beats a gimbal shot you'll never film twice.

Finding the moments is the slow part, so CreateSocial takes the first pass. Click the Visuals button in the editor and we suggest on-screen visuals built from what you actually said, each tied to the exact words it belongs with. That includes the cards and punch-in zooms from the section above, and stock clips for B-roll moments come pre-picked. Swap any clip you don't like before you add.

A 60-second script with every B-roll moment marked

Here's a full script for a hypothetical business coach: a Reel or TikTok about the email to send after a sales call. It runs 141 words, about a minute at the 150 words a minute budget in how to write a video script. You'd record it in five sections, then mark the B-roll on the transcript afterward.

VIDEO: The email I send after every sales call
FOR: Reel or TikTok, 9:16, about 60 seconds

SECTION 1
[0:00] You had a great sales call.
They said they'd think about it.
Then nothing.
Here's the email I send the next morning.
Three lines. Copy it.

SECTION 2
[0:11] Subject line: their problem,
in five words or less.
  >> B-ROLL 1 (0:12 to 0:15)
     Screen recording: typing
     "The hiring backlog" into a new email
Line one: what they told you was hurting,
in their words.
Not your framework. The phrase they used.
  >> B-ROLL 2 (0:19 to 0:22)
     Phone close-up: your hand underlining
     a phrase in your call notes
Something like: you said the hiring
backlog is eating your Fridays.

SECTION 3
[0:27] Line two: the one thing you'd fix first.
Just one, so they can picture week one.
I'd start by taking interviews
off your calendar.
  >> B-ROLL 3 (0:34 to 0:37)
     Screen recording: interview blocks
     deleted from a calendar. Runs across
     the cut into section 4.

SECTION 4
[0:36] Line three: a question they can
answer in one word.
"Want to start on the 15th?"
That's the whole email.
  >> CARD (0:42 to 0:46)
     1. Their words
     2. First fix
     3. One-word question
Leave the PDF out, and never write
"just checking in."

SECTION 5
[0:48] A short email is easy to answer.
  >> B-ROLL 4 (0:49 to 0:52)
     Stock: a phone lighting up on a desk
Send it before lunch the day after the call.
Save this for your next sales call.

Add it up and B-roll covers 12 of the 60 seconds, 16 with the card. The first 12 seconds and the last 8 are all face. Three of the five moments come from the coach's own screen and notes, which no stock library has.

Only B-roll 2 needs planning, because someone has to film it. Put shots like that on a short list on the day you plan your scripts. Film the list after your last take, and leave the rest of the B-roll for the edit. That's the point of keeping recording day apart from thinking day: every decision is made before the camera goes on. "You don't go and edit that piece of content and post it right then. You just go on to the next idea, and you record that," as I put it in the same video.

This is how the recording runs in CreateSocial. The script sits on a teleprompter near your camera, and each section has one-tap retakes. You cut the stumbles by deleting words from the transcript, before you mark a single B-roll moment. If the camera itself is the hard part, how to look natural on camera fixes more than B-roll ever will.

Where to get B-roll for free, and what each license lets you do

Your own phone and screen are the safest source, because the footage is yours. For stock, these three libraries offer free clips with no credit required. They differ in the fine print, and the fine print is where a business video gets caught.

Checked against each library's own license page on November 9, 2026. Licenses change, so open the page again before you build a campaign around a clip.

Two rules cover most of the risk. A clip you didn't make is licensed, not owned, so never present a stranger in it as your client. And saving a clip from someone else's YouTube or TikTok doesn't give you the right to use it, however you found it.

You don't have to leave the editor to find stock, either. CreateSocial's editor has free stock video search built in, and your own phone clips and screen recordings sit next to it in My assets, ready to drag onto the timeline.

Six B-roll mistakes that make a talking-head video worse

The literal match. You say "growth" and a seedling sprouts. You say "teamwork" and strangers high-five over a laptop. Viewers have seen these clips in a thousand ads and read them as filler. If there's no real thing to show, use a card or stay on your face.

A clip you have no license for. A download from someone's YouTube channel. A Mixkit Restricted clip in a business video. A watermarked Coverr preview with the watermark cropped out. Each one can get your video taken down after you've built a post around it.

Strangers who seem to vouch for you. A smiling stock "client" shaking hands next to your offer implies a client who doesn't exist. The same free clip can turn up in anyone's ad next week. Use stock for things and places, and let your real work stand in for people.

A real client's name on screen. Screen recordings leak. An inbox, a calendar or a shared document will show names you never meant to publish. Record from a dummy account or blur the names, and ask before you show anything from a client's work.

The wrong shape. A horizontal stock clip dropped into a vertical video either shrinks to a strip or crops out the subject. Look for vertical clips, or pick one where the action sits in the middle of the frame.

Stock sound under your voice. Ambient noise from a stock clip fights your words and makes the whole video feel cheap. In CreateSocial, stock B-roll clips are added muted by default, so their audio doesn't compete with your voice. For the rest of the edit, how to edit talking-head videos faster covers the order to work in.

How CreateSocial adds the B-roll and runs the rest of your content week

CreateSocial helps coaches, consultants and founders build a personal brand that brings in clients, speaking gigs and customers, without content taking over the week. It learns what you know, then runs the whole content week with you: ideas, scripts, written posts, recording, editing, thumbnails and scheduling. B-roll is one step near the end. Here is the week around it.

• You know what you'll say before B-roll comes up. Add your website, past videos and client stories to your knowledge base, and CreateSocial turns them into 80 personalized ideas a month with hooks, talking points or full scripts. Trending Now adds what your niche is talking about every Monday. "Ask me first" asks you questions before it writes, so the script carries your real story.
• You record in sections, off a teleprompter. It sits near your camera and scrolls by hand or at a speed you set. Each answer is its own section with one-tap retakes, at your desk or in the iPhone app. Dual mode frames 16:9 and 9:16 in a single take.
• The edit is mostly deleting words. Delete them from the transcript and they're cut from the video. Remove Silences takes out the pauses in one click, eye contact correction keeps your gaze on the viewer, and subtitles go on in 11 styles.
• The B-roll gets suggested for you. Visuals puts forward cards, punch-in zooms and stock clips tied to the exact words you said, with the clips already picked. Search free stock video for anything else, or add your own phone clips and screen recordings from My assets.
• One video becomes a week of posts. The same recording turns into LinkedIn posts, X threads, blog posts, emails and LinkedIn carousels with PDF and PNG export. On a recorded webinar or talk, Find Clips suggests the moments that stand alone, and YouTube thumbnails come from your video and photos of you.
• It all goes out from one calendar. Schedule to TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and X with a caption written for each platform, and we post it for you once your accounts are connected.

Also in the one plan: written posts with no video at all, competitor tracking that brings in new posts from profiles you follow, screen recording with your camera as a bubble, reaction videos in Layout or Stitch mode, green screen and virtual backgrounds with or without a real green screen (here's how to use a green screen at home), platform safe-zone guides for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, and an Analytics page with followers, views, likes, comments and shares for your connected TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.

You also get a direct line to the person who built it. I'm Ben Moore, and I built CreateSocial on my own, bootstrapped, here in Cincinnati, Ohio, so you talk to me directly. Feature requests come to me, and a lot of what customers ask for gets built. Before CreateSocial, my agency generated millions of followers and millions of dollars in revenue for its clients, and I've generated hundreds of millions of views.

It's $129 a month, or $99 a month billed annually, with no add-ons and no per-feature charges. Start your free trial and add B-roll to your next video today. Want a content plan built around your offer first? Book a free strategy call with me.

Mark the B-roll on your next video this week

1. Record your next video plain, start to finish, in sections. No B-roll thinking yet.
2. Read the transcript and underline every thing you name, every list and every join between sections.
3. Cross out anything in the first few seconds and in the ask. Those stay on your face.
4. For each underline, try the cheapest source first: your screen, then your phone, then a card, then stock.
5. Keep each clip to a few seconds, then play the whole video back once.

Then post it. When you sit down to place the clips, how to add B-roll to a talking-head video takes you through the edit step by step. A free CreateSocial trial puts the teleprompter, the transcript editor, Visuals and free stock video search in one place.