Use case
5 Reasons Creators Let Cutroom Find And Place Their B-Roll
You upload one talking video. The clips get found for you, and each one lands on the words that need it.
- clip sites you have to open
- 0
- the longest take it accepts
- 3 min
- free edits before you decide anything
- 3 in 7 days
B-roll is the part everybody puts off
You film yourself talking. It's fine. Then you watch it back and it's a face for ninety seconds, so you go looking for something to cut away to.
That is two jobs, and both are slow. Finding clips that fit what you said, and then getting each one to sit on the right moment without knocking everything else out of place.
Cutroom does both from your transcript. Here are the five reasons people use it.
- If you have no footage: Cutroom searches for you, and you never open a clip site
- If you already have footage: it uses yours, on the words you actually said
What happens after you upload
Two of these five steps are the ones you were doing by hand. Neither of them is yours any more.
Upload one take
3 min ceiling, enforced
It writes down what you said
Word-level timing
It searches on the phrase
Millions of free clips
Each clip lands on its words
Not on a timer
Export
1080 by 1920, captions burned in
You never go looking for clips
This is the part that eats the afternoon: opening a clip site, typing a word, scrolling past four hundred results that nearly fit. Cutroom reads your transcript and does the searching itself, across millions of free clips.
You don't type a search. You don't pick from a grid. Cutroom takes the phrase you actually said and goes and finds something that matches it.
The clips come from Pexels and Pixabay. Millions of them, free to use, and included. Searching doesn't cost anything extra: it happens inside the same batch that transcribes your video and builds the cut.
The sentence does the searching
You said the words. That is the whole search query.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Every clip lands on the words that need it
Most tools drop b-roll in on a timer, one clip every six or eight seconds, whether it fits the sentence or not. That is why the result so often feels random. Cutroom puts each shot on the words it belongs to, and nowhere else.
You say "our warehouse in New York" and a warehouse shot covers those five words. Not the sentence before it. Not the one after.
You can see it while it happens: your words on the left, the shot highlighted exactly where it sits. Nothing is hidden in a timeline, because there is no timeline.
Five words, one shot, landing exactly there
It starts when you start saying them and ends when you stop.
It can use your own footage instead
Stock works, but everyone is using the same clips, and a warehouse that isn't yours doesn't make your video feel like yours. Upload your own once and Cutroom will reach for those first.
Upload your videos and photos once. Cutroom goes through them and writes down what it sees: man, beard, grey t-shirt, bedroom, warm lighting, lamp.
After that it just uses them. Say "back in my workshop" and you get your workshop. The free library is still there for everything you haven't filmed.
Stock, or yours
A stock search gives you somebody else's warehouse. Your library gives you yours, tagged the day you uploaded it.
Don't like where a shot sits? Move it onto other words
This is the bit that usually means opening a real editor. Not here: you drag the shot onto a different phrase and it goes there, starts there and ends there. Nothing else in the edit moves.
Swap a clip for a different one. Take a shot out. Move it two sentences later. Fix a word the transcript got wrong.
You are never dragging a block along a timeline and hoping the rest still lines up. There is nothing to line up, you are pointing at words.
Change the one thing that bothers you
Everything you already fixed stays fixed.
The b-roll isn't the only thing it does
You came for b-roll, but a video with clips cut in and nothing else is still half finished. The captions and the cuts come with it, in the same pass, without you setting anything up. Music is one tap away when you want it.
Captions in six styles, burned into the video, following your voice word for word. Transitions between shots: a whip pan, a punch-in, a glitch, a light sweep.
Music is one tap away, and it starts off so you hear your own voice first. The ums come out, the long silences get shorter, and nothing is ever cut halfway through a word.
You didn't set any of that up.
Karaoke, one of the six caption packs
A marker box on the word you are saying, burned into the picture, following your voice word for word.
What it doesn't do
Your video has to be under three minutes. It comes back as a vertical 1080p video: one size, no 4K, and there is no more expensive plan to click through to. If you need a landscape edit or a twenty-minute video, this is not the tool and we would rather you found that out here.
The free tier is three edits inside your first seven days, and what it exports carries our mark across the middle. Lite at $19.99 a month takes the mark off. Nothing else about the free tier is cut down: the same editor, the same b-roll library, the same length. Avatars and generated music open on Basic at $39.99 a month, the drawing tool and product shots on Premium at $79.99.
Questions people ask
- If I make an ad, can I actually download it, or is there a paywall at the end?
- You download it. On the free tier our own mark sits across the middle of the picture, and that is the only difference: same editor, same length, same export. On Basic and Premium nothing is stamped on it at all. Exporting costs credits, and the price sits on the Export button before you press it, so nothing about the bill turns up at the end. There is no card at the front door, and you get seven days to walk through it: the free tier is three finished videos, with 600 credits, which covers those three edits and re-exporting them after you change a caption.
- Will it work with my kind of video?
- Cutroom takes one upright video of a person talking, up to three minutes, with sound on it. You get back one upright video at 1080 by 1920. Landscape footage is refused at upload, before a single credit is charged. A wide take inside an upright frame is a strip between black bars, and we would rather stop you than sell you that. A video with no sound is refused for the same reason. There is no widescreen export and no 4K; a 4K upload comes back at 1080p, the same as everyone else's. If you shoot horizontal, or your videos run twenty minutes, this is not your tool yet, and we would rather you knew that here than after paying.
- How many videos do I actually get for this?
- Two charges make an ad, and you see both before you spend them. Cutting one upload is 100 credits: writing out what you said, the edit itself, and the b-roll search. Exporting is 20 credits for every finished minute, charged for the length you actually export, so a thirty-second ad is 10. That makes a thirty-second ad 110 credits from upload to finished file. Basic gives 2,500 credits a month, which is about twenty finished ads. Everything between those two charges is free: editing, previewing, undoing, searching for clips, uploading your own footage, changing your mind. Exporting the same cut again unchanged is free too. Credits you do not use stay in the account. Before any of that, the free tier gives you three edits, ever, with our mark across the middle.
- If something breaks, do I get a real person or a chatbot?
- A person. There is no support bot, and nothing in the product answers you automatically. Support is a live chat inside the app: if somebody is at the desk your reply lands while you are still sitting there, and if nobody is, it comes back by email and stays in the same thread so it cannot get lost. You can also just reply to any email we send.
- If I want out, can I do it myself, and does the charging actually stop?
- Yourself, without emailing or calling anyone. In Settings, then Billing, you press Cancel subscription, a screen tells you exactly what that does, and you finish in Stripe's own billing portal, so the cancellation sits on the biller's books rather than on our word. Your plan then runs to the end of the period you already paid for and stops. Nothing is charged after that. There is no fee and we do not ask why.
- If it turns out not to be what I thought, do I get my money back?
- Your first charge: yes, in full, if you tell us within seven days that you did not mean to be billed. No argument. Later charges: we refund unused subscription time when something went wrong on our side, and we say so plainly when we think it did not. Credits already spent on finished videos are not refundable. That video was made and the machines were paid at the moment it ran. There is one case where we say no, and it is written on the refunds page rather than discovered by you. And if an export fails on our side, you do not need to ask at all: the credits come back on their own.
Upload something you already filmed and watch where the b-roll lands. Three finished videos free in your first seven days, no card. They carry a Cutroom mark; Lite at $19.99 a month removes it.