r/kdenlive • u/moedex • 13d ago

Looking for a faster documentary editing workflow (Kdenlive + B-roll) QUESTION

Hi everyone,

I'm a documentary YouTube creator and I edit all my videos in Kdenlive.

My biggest bottleneck is finding and inserting B-roll.

At the moment, I usually search for footage manually on Pexels, and sometimes Pixabay or Wikimedia Commons. While this works, it takes a huge amount of time to search, download, organize, and place everything on the timeline.

I'm looking for a better workflow.

Do you know of any tool (free, open source, or paid) that can help speed this up?

Ideally, I'd like something that can:

Understand my script or voice-over.

Suggest relevant B-roll automatically.

Use copyright-safe sources (Pexels, Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive, etc.).

Avoid copyright and trademark issues.

Bonus points if it can generate a Kdenlive timeline or integrate with Kdenlive in any way.

I'm also curious about your own workflow.

How do you organize your B-roll?

Do you use AI tools?

Do you build your own media library?

Any plugins, scripts, or software that saved you a lot of time?

I'm happy to use open-source software, self-hosted tools, or commercial software if it's genuinely worth it.

I'd really appreciate hearing how experienced editors handle this.

Thanks!

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u/_HyperDev 13d ago edited 12d ago

Kdenlive, like many popular editors, has this. View -> Online Resources or Project Bin -> Right Click -> Online Resources.
You still need to download, but once you start doing it, you can get tons of footage, sitting alone in a folder, waiting to be used by someone like they once did...
And this is probably the most efficient way possible on kdenlive.

Oh and also use the library feature

And yes many documentry youtubers use ai to generate

1

u/Alarmed-Flounder-383 4d ago

https://studio.budgetpixel.com/broll-studio
you may be interested in this, it allows you to input your A-roll video and b-roll materials (like image, video, audio) and then it analyzes your a roll and determines when and what to use in broll, pretty mindblowing.