BRoll is our new Premiere Pro plugin, and it does the thing every editor has quietly wanted an assistant for: it watches the footage you shot, learns what is in it, and places b-roll on your timeline for you, matched to what your speaker is actually saying. Not stock downloads. Your clips, from your bins, cut into your sequence as real, editable, video-only clips.
Everything about it lives on the BRoll product page, and it installs through Filmit Studio, our free desktop app, with a 7-day trial. Here is what it actually does, feature by feature, tested on a real documentary project.
What does BRoll actually do?
The workflow is three moves, and the plugin does the heavy lifting in each one:
Analyze your bins
Point BRoll at your footage. Shot detection splits every clip into its real shots, and a vision model looks at each one, locally on your machine, so BRoll knows what is on the shelf. It analyzes once and remembers forever.
Transcribe your sequence
One click runs local Whisper transcription on your timeline, so BRoll knows what is being said and exactly when. That transcript is what your footage gets matched against, sentence by sentence or word by word.
Add B-roll
Pick your settings, hit Add B-Roll, and it places shots across the sequence on the track you chose. Every placement lands as a normal, trimmable Premiere clip, and one undo removes the entire run.
What happens to your project panel?
This might be the sleeper feature. As BRoll analyzes, it renames your clips descriptively right in the bin: "A045_Bottle Production Line Moving," "Lab Scientists Working Research," "Bird on a Windowsill." Your original camera names are respected and stay in the clip name, so A-cam and B-cam ordering survives. Every clip also gets tags (close up, wide shot, industrial, interior), and your whole library becomes searchable by what is actually in it.
Type "wide shot" and every wide shot from the project comes back as a thumbnail grid. Type "woman" and there she is, working the bottling line. Click a result to load it, use Find in Bin to jump to it in the project panel, or star shots as favorites and pull up your favorites list when you are assembling by hand. You can also run Organize on clips without placing anything, if a logged, searchable library is all you want.
How does phrase match work?
Phrase match is the documentary mode. BRoll reads the transcript of your sequence and matches shots to the words being said: your speaker mentions whiskey, and the whiskey shot lands on that sentence. You control the pass with a few settings that map to how editors actually think:
What if there is no dialog? Music mode
Music mode skips the transcript entirely and cuts your footage to the music. BRoll maps your song locally, the beats, the energy, the sections, then lays b-roll gapless for the length of the track, with pacing that tightens as the energy rises. Film-type presets cover weddings, real estate, sports, travel, and more, and an optional shot-order chronology follows the real day using your camera timestamps. Event recap from a DJ set, cut to the drop, without touching a blade.
Do you need an API key?
No, and this is a deliberate design decision. Placement needs one AI pass, and the free route is built in: Export for Claude or ChatGPT copies a complete, ready-to-paste prompt built from your transcript and your analyzed library. Paste it into a free Claude or ChatGPT account, paste the JSON reply back via Import, and BRoll places everything. No key, no setup, no cost.
If you would rather have one-click placement, add your own OpenAI or Anthropic API key, synced from Filmit Studio, billed by the provider at cost. There is no credit system and no markup, because credit systems are how tools quietly charge several times over for someone else's API.
Either way, the heavy work never leaves your machine: clip analysis, Whisper transcription, search, and beat mapping all run locally, and your video and audio never upload. Only tiny keyframe thumbnails are sent if you enable cloud naming, never media files. Anamorphic footage is handled at its true aspect, no stretched frames.
What does a real project look like?
The demo above is a nine-minute documentary about a whiskey distillery, shot on a RED Raptor and Komodo with anamorphic glass. The b-roll bin held 134 raw 8K clips. The rough assembly came out of RoughCut, our AI assembly tool; BRoll then analyzed the full batch locally in about 35 minutes, renamed and tagged everything, and placed a heavy documentary pass against the transcript on an empty V3. The honest workflow: start the run, get coffee, come back, then spend your time in the review panel, jumping to each placement, rerolling any shot for the next best pick, or swapping it by hand.
How do you get BRoll?
BRoll runs in Premiere Pro today, with a DaVinci Resolve version planned. Head to the BRoll page, install Filmit Studio (free), start the 7-day trial, and BRoll appears in your applications list inside Premiere alongside the rest of the suite. Run it on a real project, in real quantity, and tell us what it gets wrong on Discord; that feedback is what the next version gets built from.
