Aerial b-roll
Also known as: drone b-roll, aerial cutaways
Drone shots that exist to support a sequence rather than to be its subject: the landscape, the approach, the place between the action.
Updated
What it means
Aerial b-roll is the supporting half of drone footage. Where a tracking shot follows the rider, b-roll shows the mountain, the coastline, the empty line before anybody rode it.
Its job in a cut is to let a viewer breathe. A sequence of impacts with nothing between them is exhausting, and a wide landscape shot restores context the way B-roll does anywhere else.
It is also the most reliable material a drone produces, because it needs no tracking, no subject and no timing. The shot works whether or not anybody turned up.
How it works in practice
Shooting it deliberately rather than hoping for leftovers is what makes it useful. Five minutes of slow landscape moves at the start of a session covers the entire editing need.
Slow and simple beats complex. A steady rise or a gentle push is cuttable at any length, where an elaborate move only works if the whole thing is used and is therefore useless to Smart trimming.
Capturing the place without anybody in it also solves the opening problem, since a Establishing shot is exactly what a highlight needs before the first action beat.
What to watch out for
Too much of it flattens a sequence. Landscape after landscape reads as a tourism video, and the action it was meant to support stops registering as special.
Shots with no movement at all are also hard to use, because a completely static aerial looks like a photograph and sits oddly between moving clips. A very slow drift is enough to fix that.
It also competes for flight time with the shots that actually need the drone, so a battery spent on scenery is one not available for Active track when the rider is ready.
How RawClip handles it
Wide aerial shots are recognised as supporting material rather than action and used between the stronger moments, which is what gives a highlight somewhere to settle. A session with none of it produces a noticeably more relentless cut, because every shot in the sequence is then competing to be the most dramatic one.