Cutting Corners

We’ve got that B-Roll!

“b-roll” is the term used for the video that is brought in after-the-fact to supplement a news story or a commercial.

When I was in television news, it was considered almost sinful to rely too much on file video. We prided ourselves on writing to the video we had, and not pulling generic stuff from the archives.

It was a sign of laziness if one were to write the copy first, then hunt for specific video to make it fit. More often than not, you get a better story by writing to what you experienced and perceived than some generic and stale ideal.

I knew many in the business, though, who were masters at using stale stock video. Some kept their own libraries of traffic, weather, schools and “people walking around.”

The “B” in b-roll doesn’t stand for “bland,” but that’s not a bad guess. It had to do with the early film editing process, where there were two channels being mixed together live on the air. Typically, you’d have the reporter’s narration and the sound bites on the A-channel, and the cover video (with natural sound) on the B-channel.

Modern editing has rendered these notions moot, because non-linear video setups allow for multiple tracks, overdubs, and slowing of video in an instant. Need to trim a little bit of video? No problem. The fancy dissolves and wipes are a cinch, too. Now you don’t have to pay attention to an A-roll and a B-roll, because each little bit is a snippet in its own right, and is sequenced automatically by a processor.

TV’s Future is in the Past

Yet, even with the video innovation, there are two lessons:

1) Jargon never goes away. We will still have “B-Roll” long after the generation who actually edited on film. Ask anyone in a TV newsroom, and they can tell you what B-Roll is, even if they’ve never touched film or can’t explain the origin of the term.

2) B-Roll will never go away. The declining population in newsrooms isn’t going to magically rebound when the economy improves, meaning stations (that survive) will do so by doing more with less. Shooting fresh video can be costly, and if you make a practice of discouraging the travel and time required to acquire video you can shoehorn a little extra “product” out of the crews you have.

And that’s what it is, “product.”

Which makes this fake ad as raucously funny as it is sadly prophetic.

(hat tip to my friend John McQuiston for finding this clip.)