Organizing B-roll

Once you've built your primary narration track, you're going to want to add some B-roll. The term B-roll harkens back to the day when we actually used two separate decks to edit video, you had your A-roll deck and then a separate deck that would playback other footage, or the B-roll, and these would often get cut together. Now A-roll and B-roll is pretty straightforward, but you'll just hear the term used to describe footage that is added to a project that is descriptive in nature. For the case of this project, we have several folders of B-roll organized by topic, and what I need to do is get that footage organized and start to add it to my timeline.

As we alluded to before, watching this process is going to be a little bit boring. I'm going to show you how to organize a few clips and add those to the timeline and then I'll repeat the process, sort of like Julia Child off-camera. You're welcome at that point to pause this online training and go ahead and finish out the editing on your own, or you could jump forward in time and go on to the next step of refining clips, changing their speed, and starting to color correct. With that said, let's get our footage organized. I'm going to go ahead and use Mini Bridge and navigate to my folder. The first section I'm going to use is Urban shots, and let's just pull this up, so it's a little bit larger.

There we go! I've got my clips, I can clearly see them and this allows me to scroll on through and see all the shots that have been pulled for this particular section. Now you might be wondering, how do you know which shots to use? You've got two things: a script and your brain. You're just going to need to pick the ones that best tell the story. My job here today is to teach you how to edit with the mechanics. However the art of editing is all about making subjective choices. Feel free to choose different clips than I do. It is up to you to put the story together and you are free to use any of the shots I give you, or your own footage as you cut one of your projects together.

Now I could see my clips here, but I'm going to jump on over to big Bridge by clicking the Reveal In Bridge button, and that takes me over and gives me a little more control, including the ability to adjust the size of these thumbnails, and what I want to do here is just review the footage. I can quickly drag through to see my shots and get an idea of what I have. Let's go ahead and just read the script. This is your world; traffic, cell phones, steel structures, concrete roads, people on the go. Trees are the exception not the rule.

So I think I need to start off with a fairly busy shot and let's just start right here; we've got some traffic, and then it calls for some cell phones. I'm going to take this shot and go there. I like that cell phone shot better than my other one, but again, feel free to try different ones on your own. That's looks pretty good. Steel structures; well there is a building construction site. People on the go; I like this shot--little more active with multiple people. There we go. Trees are the exception not the rule; that seems pretty good and I'm just going to use these five shots to tell the opening story.

Now I've got those in the order I want, I've just dragged them from left to right. I can go ahead and Shift+Click to select multiple shots, and those are ready to be added to my timeline. If you choose, you can also take advantage of things like Batch Rename to give them more descriptive names, or individually click on a name to modify the file. Remember, any changes you're making in Bridge are actually destructive changes as they're modifying the original file on your hard drive.