How do video content creation goals impact which concepts people prioritize for generating B-roll imagery?

B-roll is vital when producing high-quality videos, but finding the right images can be difficult and time-consuming. Moreover, what B-roll is most effective can depend on a video content creator’s intent—is the goal to entertain, to inform, or something else? While new text-to-image generation models provide promising avenues for streamlining B-roll production, it remains unclear how these tools can provide support for content creators with different goals. To close this gap, we aimed to understand how video content creator’s goals guide which visual concepts they prioritize for B-roll generation. Here we introduce a benchmark containing judgments from > 800 people as to which terms in 12 video transcripts should be assigned highest priority for B-roll imagery accompaniment. We verified that participants reliably prioritized different visual concepts depending on whether their goal was help produce informative or entertaining videos. We next explored how well several algorithms, including heuristic approaches and large language models (LLMs), could predict systematic patterns in human judgments. We found that none of these methods fully captured human judgments in either goal condition, with state-of-the-art LLMs (i.e., GPT-4) even underperforming a baseline that sampled only nouns or nouns and adjectives. Overall, our work identifies opportunities to develop improved algorithms to support video production workflows.