A b-roll list you can use again
The reason your cuts jump is a missing second and a half of picture, free to film on the day.
You cut a sentence out of the middle of a paragraph and the video hiccups. Your head jumps. You try moving the cut a word earlier and it still looks wrong, because the problem was never where the cut sits. The problem is that there is nothing to put over it.
What is missing is short. Call it a second and a half, as a starting figure rather than a rule: enough picture from somewhere else to cover the join while your voice carries on underneath. And it was free to film, on the day, while the light was already up and the camera was already out.
What is b-roll actually for?
Covering the moment you removed something.
B-roll is the general name for any picture that is not your main shot. Most explanations of it talk about mood and texture, which is fair for films and beside the point for a teaching video. In a tutorial it does two jobs, and the first one is structural: it hides an edit. Your voice runs continuously, the picture goes elsewhere for a moment, and the cut underneath becomes invisible.
The second job is showing the thing you are talking about while you talk about it, which sounds obvious and is skipped constantly by people who describe an object at length while sitting next to it, on camera, holding it.
Why a downloaded shot list will not help you
Search for a b-roll shot list and you get shots for somebody else's video. Hands typing on a laptop. Coffee being poured. Somebody walking through a doorway looking purposeful.
None of those are wrong, and none of them are yours. The clips that actually cover your cuts are the small physical actions of your own trade, and no template contains tapping the tuning fork or wiping the blade before the next cut or turning the page back to check something. Those clips belong to one person, they take a minute each to film, and they cannot be bought.
So the useful thing is not a list. It is the twenty minutes that produces your list.
How do you build your own list?
Walk the room and watch your hands
Go into the place you work and do ten minutes of ordinary work, paying attention to nothing except what your hands are doing. You are looking for the actions you perform without deciding to: the reach, the wipe, the adjustment, the thing you always pick up first.
Those are the clips. They feel too small to be worth filming, which is precisely why nobody films them and why everybody's cuts jump.
Name them as actions, not objects
Write them down as verbs. Not the knife, but picking the knife up. Not the piano, but lifting the lid. An object sits there and gives you nothing to cut to. An action has a beginning and an end, and a beginning and an end are what a cut needs to hide behind.
Film each one longer than the gap
Ten seconds an action, as a starting point. It sounds absurd for a join lasting a second and a half, and it is the difference between a clip you can use and one you cannot. A clip that begins at the exact moment the hand enters the frame has nowhere for the cut to land. You want the movement already underway when the join arrives, and still going when it leaves.
What does a finished list look like?
In a kitchen
Wiping the board down. Salt going into a pan from a height. A drawer opening and a spoon coming out. The tap running over something. Oil hitting a hot pan and moving. Chopping, filmed from three heights, because one chop filmed three ways is three clips.
In a workshop
Not the finished piece, which everybody films and which covers nothing. Picking a tool up and setting it down. The back of a hand pushing dust off a surface. Sweeping shavings. A drawer of screws being opened. Clamps going on. Safety glasses coming off, which is the closest a workshop has to a full stop.
At a desk
A notebook being opened at a marked page. A pen being put down. A screen being turned to face somebody. Sleeves being pushed up. Two hands going flat on the table before an explanation, which is a gesture almost everybody makes and almost nobody has on file.
How often will you use these?
Constantly, which is the whole argument for spending the hour.
A cut is a cut whatever the video was about. Ten clips of your own hands doing ordinary things in your own workspace will cover joins across a year of uploads, in videos on subjects you have not thought of yet, because none of them depend on what you were saying. The only things that date them are the room changing and your clothes appearing in frame, and the second of those is an argument for filming most of them from the wrists down.
Where the hour actually goes
Film them at the end of a day you were already filming, when you would otherwise be packing up. That is not a scheduling preference, it is the part that makes them usable: the light is where it was, the camera is where it was, the room looks the way it looks in everything else you have made.
B-roll filmed six months later, in different light, with the shelf reorganised, does not cut into anything. It just gives you a second folder of clips that do not match the first one.
Keep reading
This is a service, and the method is written down.
Everything above came out of doing the work rather than writing about it. If you want the method instead of the story, it runs in order on one page.
Start with a free audit
Tell us where your content is now. We will come back with what we would change and what result to expect.
A person reads the channel and writes the audit by hand: a considered read typically takes three working days. That is the usual shape, not a promised turnaround. We use these details only to reply to you: no lists, no lurking.
What you will get
A fit snapshot: where your channel stands, and whether we are a match.
Two to three opportunities: specific, prioritised, yours to keep.
A recommended next step, even if that step is not us.
The audit is free and commits you to nothing: nobody follows up with a call you did not ask for.