- If you're wondering what B-roll is,
then this video is gonna explain everything that you need
to know and I've got three tips on how you can shoot
better B-roll for your videos.
(upbeat music)
So I've been getting this question over and over,
and that is what is B-roll?
And so I wanted to put together a video that talks
all about B-roll, just the basic idea of what B-roll is,
and at the end of this video,
I'm gonna give you three tips on how you can do
some really awesome B-roll for your videos.
Guys, if you're new here to this channel,
my name is Jeven Dovey.
I do filmmaking tutorials, camera reviews, YouTube training,
and I just like going on adventures,
so make sure you hit that subscribe button
if you like this video and you wanna see
more content like this.
So to explain B-roll, I'm just gonna break it down
very simply at first.
And I just finished shooting a conferences
down in San Diego, it was a fitness conference,
and my production company was in charge
of basically covering the event.
It's a great way to explain what B-roll is versus A-roll.
So at this converence, I was shooting a mix of interviews
and then footage of the actual conference.
And the difference between the two
is that A roll is the main subject and the main story.
On the other hand, B-roll is all the footage
that basically stitches everything together.
It's the glue that holds the entire project together,
so B-roll is that extra footage.
It's the footage that gives you a look more
into what's going on around the specific subject.
So to make this very simple, when I was at this conference
shooting the event, the A-roll was the interviews.
So that was going to each booth and talking
with the different people at each of the booths,
and that is A-roll, that is the main things
that we needed to capture was these interviews.
Now the B-roll is all the footage that I captured
of the booth without the interview.
So to really break it down,
A-roll is your most important footage,
it would be your interview or your storyline,
your talking bits, and then your B-roll is the sexy footage,
the slow-mo, the different shots
that really show what's going on.
And so when you're working on a project,
say you're working on a YouTube video on a vlog,
your A-roll is gonna be this, it's gonna be those moments
when you're talking to the camera,
or if you're out vlogging, walking around,
it's when you're talking to camera,
and basically moving the story forward.
Your B-roll is all the extra footage.
So if you're in a specific location,
and you're getting wide shots of the city,
or you're getting a drone shot or a slow-mo shot
of the food, whatever it is that you're doing,
that is all the B-roll.
So you need both, you need A-roll, you need B-roll,
but your A-roll is your main story bits,
and the B-roll is actually a lot of fun to shoot
because once you start diving in
to different creative ways to shoot B-roll,
you can also tell your story using B-roll.
However, it's more in a visual sense rather than your A-roll
which a lot of times is the talking head bits.
Now I'm sure some of you are wondering well what about
those videos where you don't have any talking,
you don't have any interviews or anything like that.
So if you see a sexy cinematic video here on YouTube,
a lot of times that's all B-roll footage
with some music and effects to really tell the story.
So you don't always have to A-roll,
and you also don't always have to have B-roll.
It's just different ways to talk about the different styles
of footage that you need to capture for a project.
So if I was talking to you about shooting
this video right now, I would say I need to shoot the A-roll
which is me talking to camera, this,
and then I need to shoot the B-roll which is all
the samples of B-roll along with some shots
of the gimbal that I use to capture all of my B-roll.
Right now, I'm using the Zhiyun Crane 3 Lab,
that is the gimbal that I'm using to get
this sexy cinematic smooth footage.
And so right now, as you can see,
I'm showing you B-roll of this gimbal, that is B-roll.
Now if you cut back to me, we're back to the A-roll.
So B-roll is that added footage that enhances the story
or enhances whatever that you're doing
so that your viewer becomes more engaged
with the content that you're creating,
and it's also the footage that just shows more
of what's going on.
Okay so I hope that was a clear enough distinction
of what A-roll versus B-roll is,
and if there's anything that you're still not understanding
about what B-roll is versus A-roll,
please go down in the comments and leave me a question.
At the beginning of this video, I said I have three tips
on how to get better B-roll.
So my first tip is to make it smooth,
and I mentioned a gimbal.
Gimbals are a great tool to make footage smooth,
and the one that I use, it's a Zhiyun Crane 3 Lab,
it can hold much bigger cameras, so this gimbal works great
in allowing me to get some awesome stable footage
that you wouldn't be able to get
just holding it in your hand.
Now I know a lot of you would say,
well there's cameras out there with stabilization, yes,
but a gimbals gives you those really cinematic motions,
and it gives you the ability
to kind of float through a scene.
So gimbals are a really cool tool
in getting awesome B-roll because it allows you
to get that really smooth cinematic footage.
Now my second tip is get shallow depth of field,
and what I mean by that is throw the background
out of focus.
So this all depeneds on the sensor size
and the lenses that you're using.
So if you're using a full frame camera, it's much easier
to throw your background out of focus.
With a micro 4/3, it's much harder to throw the background
out of focus, so you have to have a wider open aperture,
which means you have to have those lenses that go down
to 1.4 or a 1.2, .95, and that allows you to get
that shallow depth of field.
More often than not, prime lenses are gonna give you
the ability to throw that background out of focus
because there gonna have wider apertures.
So if this is something that you really want to do,
if you want to get shallow depth of field,
think about finding prime lenses for your camera,
and I suggest you go for the 35, 50, and the 85
for your prime lenses because that's a good set of primes
that gives you a range of focal lengths,
and you're gonna get that really shallow depth of field
when you shoot it wide open.
So smooth gimbal-like shots, shallow depth of field,
and my third tip is shoot in slow motion.
Things just look so much better when they're shot
in slow motion, and a lot of cameras nowadays allow you
to shoot up to 120 frames per second.
So if you want to get more cinematic looking footage,
put it on a gimbal and add some movement,
throw your background out of focus,
and then add some slow motion to it so you really get
that cinematic look to all the footage
that you're shooting.
These three things put together
is gonna give you really awesome B-roll,
and when you add that in with your A-roll,
whatever it is that you're shooting,
that's gonna give you those sequences
that become very cinematic and it gives you
a whole different element to your video
and just makes your production level look that much better.
Guys, if you wanna learn more about cinematic sequences,
I'll put a link down below in the description
to a video I did all about that.
It jumps off this video and gives you more insight
into creating these sequences
for whatever type of project that you're creating.
And guys, one last thing before you go is that B-roll
has more uses than just in your project.
So for me personally, I like to sell
all my B-roll as stock footage.
Stock footage is a great way to diversify your income
and bring another revenue stream into the content
that you're already producing.
So if you wanna become successful on YouTube,
one of the things I always say is you need
to diversify your income.
You can't just rely on ad revenue,
you can't just rely on affiliate money,
you kind of have to have your hands in muiltiple revenue
streams to be able to be successful on this platform.
So if you're gonna be shooting a lot of cinematic
sexy B-roll, then I highly suggest taking that B-roll
and selling it as stock footage.
The cool thing about stock footage is that it allows you
to basically upload your content onto different stock
footage platforms and from there, you can sell your shot
for 20, 30, 40, up to even 100 or a couple hundred dollars
if you're selling 4K clips.
And there's a lot of uses for B-roll,
and it's one of those things for my production company,
I go to stock footage agencies all the time
and buy B-roll shots because me personally,
can't be everywhere at once, and there's a lot of times
where I just need a couple shots for a video,
and I don't want to go out there and shoot it.
And so that's the really important part about stock footage
is that you're basically filling the needs
of all these people who are creating content
from all over the world.
So if you're gonna shoot awesome cinematic B-roll,
and you wanna make some extra money off of it,
then I highly suggest checking out stock footage,
and I'll put another video down below in the description
that talks about the basics of stock footage.
So I highly suggest that's another video to checkout
if that's something that you're interested in.
And guys, last but not least, if you wanna checkout more
about the Zhiyun, the Crane 3 gimbal,
it's the one I've been shooting with to get
all this awesome B-roll footage, then I'll put a link
down below in the description
to where you can check that out as well.
All right guys, if you're new here to this channel,
make sure you hit that subscribe button,
there's a lot of awesome filmmaking tutorials,
camera reviews, and I also do some adventures
around the world.
All right guys, that's it, I'll see ya on the next one.