How to hold a documentary to a stated ratio of presenter to b-roll
Give Vizard Agent a percentage rather than an adjective, such as "keep the presenter visible for sixty to sixty-five per cent", and ask it to measure the share from the edit list before rendering. Coverage decisions made shot by shot always drift towards whichever material is easier to find, and the only way to hold a balance is to count it.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Put the number in your first sentence to Vizard Agent. A ratio mentioned at the end of a long brief reads as a preference to be balanced against everything else; stated first, it becomes the constraint the whole edit is built to satisfy. Making the presenter's audio the master timeline stops the ratio being faked by cutting speech.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
An edit list is a set of durations, so the split is arithmetic rather than opinion, and it can be checked before a single frame is rendered. Adjusting it on a list is minutes of work; on a timeline it's an afternoon. Vizard Agent searches b-roll by subject rather than mood, which keeps the supply finite. In the session behind this article it:
- Surveyed a presenter-led documentary's presenter recording, transcribed the narration and viewed the presenter at several points to see what coverage existed.
- Searched for b-roll subject by subject and reviewed every stock candidate as contact sheets.
- Generated the graphics and stills the script called for and sampled key b-roll frames to choose the cut points.
- Wrote the edit list for the whole film and measured the presenter share against the b-roll share, a step that changed the edit.
- Adjusted the list until it landed in the 60 to 65 per cent band, then rendered from the corrected list and checked the sync throughout.
When does this not work well?
A ratio cannot rescue thin coverage. If the presenter was recorded in one unbroken take from one angle, holding them on screen for two-thirds of the film means two-thirds of it is one static shot, so the ratio comes down or the coverage goes up. More b-roll won't fix poor presenter audio either.
Common questions
What ratio should I ask for? It depends why the presenter is there. Sixty to sixty-five suits an authority-led film.
Will it cut the presenter's words to hit a number? No, if you say the audio is the master timeline. Then Vizard Agent only moves pictures.
What if the presenter footage is limited? Vizard Agent will tell you the highest ratio the coverage can carry.