A b-roll shot list is the filming decided before you pick up the phone

A b-roll shot list is a document with one job. It names every clip you need before you start filming, so the filming becomes execution instead of invention.

Without one the day goes the same way every time. You film the talking take, then stand in the room trying to remember what the script asked for. Every shot becomes a fresh decision, and fresh decisions are slow.

The expensive part is not the shot you forget. It is the second trip. A missing clip sends you back to the same room on another day, in different light and different clothes, and the two halves never quite cut together.

A list also tells you when to stop. Ten items means you film ten things and go home, rather than collecting forty seconds of everything and sorting it out later.

The generator above writes that list from the script you already have. Paste it, and every sentence comes back with one or two specific shots plus a checklist you can tick off while you film.

It is a keyword match, not a director, and it does not pretend otherwise. Each suggestion shows the word in your sentence that earned it, so a bad fit explains itself in one glance and you skip it.

Shot lists are made of nouns. Read your script back and mark every concrete thing you name out loud: the keys, the invoice, the wrench, the plate, the calendar, the box.

Abstract nouns do not qualify. Trust, quality and value have no shape, so there is nothing to point a lens at. What can be filmed is the moment that produced them.

Verbs are the second source. If a line says you tighten it, pour it, measure it or hand it over, the shot is that action, filmed close and finished inside one movement.

Sentences with neither stay on your face, and that is not a failure. A talking take carrying itself for eight seconds is a video, not a hole in one.

The tool does this pass mechanically. It matches whole words in each sentence against a hand-written library, so a line about a mortgage pulls the key turning in the front door, and a line about a deadline pulls the second hand on a wall clock.

When nothing in the library matches, it says so rather than inventing something. The fallback is the honest one: film yourself doing what the line describes, one step closer than your talking shot.

Every shot in the library passes one test before it goes in. One person, one phone, somewhere they already are, today.

That rules out drones, second operators, rented locations and anything that needs a permit. Those shots are not bad. They are just not going to happen this week, and a list you cannot execute alone is a list that never gets filmed.

Framing does most of the work a budget is supposed to do. Get closer. A macro of the pen hitting the paper reads as deliberate. The same desk from across the room reads as nothing.

Hold each clip for about ten seconds and make one slow movement, or none at all. The edit only uses a second or two from the middle, and ten seconds gives it somewhere to choose from.

Film vertical. The output is a 9:16 MP4, and cropping a horizontal clip into that frame throws away most of what you shot.

Here is the honest trade-off. A clip you film yourself is shakier and less pretty than stock, every time. It is also unmistakably yours, and that is the one thing stock can never be.

Fewer than most people film. B-roll is seasoning, and a video buried under it stops being a person talking to you.

Work backwards from the runtime. At a typical on-camera pace of 130 words a minute, a 60-second script is about 130 words, which is roughly ten spoken sentences. That 130 is an assumption, and everything below scales with it.

Cutroom lays b-roll over at most 45 percent of a video at normal pace. A clip that sits on screen much past three seconds starts to feel like the video changed subject, so 27 seconds of coverage works out at about nine placements.

Nine placements is not nine shots. Two or three of them repeat, which means six or seven unique clips carry a full minute of video comfortably.

Six or seven clips is one filming session of roughly ten minutes. Skipping the list is what turns those ten minutes into an afternoon and then a second afternoon.

The checklist view above collapses the repeats for you and counts how many lines each shot covers, so you film each thing once and know which ones are earning their place.

The list above is the hand-made version of the job. You read the script, you match the shots, you go out and film them yourself.

Cutroom's paid editor runs that matching pass on the transcript of the take you actually recorded, word by word, and lands licensed clips over exactly the phrases worth covering. Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those words. Swap any clip you do not like. Delete a line you do not want and the cut rebuilds around it.

The trade-off is worth saying plainly. A stock library cannot film your shopfront, your keys or your own hands at work. Anything that is specifically yours still comes off a list like the one above, and the clips you shoot live in your workspace library for the next video too.

One spoken take of up to three minutes goes in, and a finished 9:16 MP4 comes out. That is the whole product: no timeline, no layers, and the only thing you point at is a word.

A batch is 100 credits and the export adds 20 credits per output minute, so a finished 30-second video comes to about 110 credits.

Three finished videos are free inside your first seven days, no card, on the 600 credits granted at signup, and they export with a Cutroom mark across the middle. Lite is $19.99 a month for 1,250 credits, about 11 of those finished 30-second videos, nothing on the picture at all, and cancelling is one click.