How to edit clips for TikTok, Reels and Shorts

1. Cut the moment out first

Find the moment and trim it before you upload. Any trimmer does this; the one in your phone's gallery is enough. Leave about a second of room at each end. The pause cutter removes dead air later, but nothing brings back a word that was trimmed off.

Our suggestion: start the clip on the first words of the line that makes the moment, not on the lead-up to it. If the line needs context, give it in the title (step 6) and keep the clip short. A clip can be up to 3 minutes on the free plan and up to 15 minutes on the paid one.

2. Make it vertical

Streams, podcasts and interviews are almost always filmed wide, and TikTok, Reels and Shorts are tall: 9:16, exported at 1080 by 1920. When you upload a video that is wider than it is tall, the resize switch appears and is already on. It offers two ways to fit.

• Blurred sides keeps the whole picture, at full width, and fills the space above and below it with a soft copy of the same picture. Use it for gameplay with a HUD, a screen recording, or two people in one shot.
• Centre crop fills the tall frame with the middle of the picture and loses the left and right. Use it when the person or the action sits in the middle.

The crop takes the middle of the frame and does not follow a face, so a speaker sitting to one side will be cut off. A split layout, with the facecam on top and the gameplay below, is not built. More on the choice in how to make a horizontal video vertical and on the resize tool.

3. Tighten it

Switch on the pause cutter and pick a pace. Natural cuts pauses longer than 0.6 seconds, Fast those longer than 0.4, and Extra fast those longer than 0.25. For two people talking, start with Natural: the short gaps between speakers are part of the rhythm. For one person, Fast usually holds up.

Cutting pauses removes silence wherever it is, so it also shortens a quiet reaction or the beat before a punchline. Watch the free preview. If the moment needs the pause, turn the cutter off for that clip. The filler-word switch takes out um, uh and erm in the same pass.

4. Caption it

Captions let the clip work with the sound off, and they hold the eye on a shot that barely moves. Turn on captions: each word appears as it is said, in one of ten styles. For a clip where the words are the point, a bold style with two or three words at a time reads best; the caption style guide goes through all ten.

• Check names and game terms. They are what a transcript gets wrong most. Tap the word in the transcript and type the right one; its timing stays.
• Mind the position. Captions can sit at the top, in the middle or at the bottom. With blurred sides, the middle puts them over the picture; top or bottom puts them on the blurred part and leaves the picture clear.
• Expect more mistakes over loud sound. Music or game audio under the voice makes mishearing more likely, so read the transcript once before you export.

5. Fix the sound

One switch for audio turns steady background noise down and sets the loudness to −14 LUFS, so the clip is not quieter than the one before it in the feed. It cannot take out music or a second person talking over the first.

6. Title the first seconds

A clip starts in the middle of something, so tell the viewer what they are looking at. The hook title sits over the first 2.5 seconds and takes up to 60 characters. Say what happens or why it matters, in plain words, and let the clip deliver it. The hook guide has patterns that also work for clips.

Preview, then export

Every change can be watched in a free preview before it costs an export. The export is 1080p and carries no watermark on any plan. The free plan gives you 3 exports a month, videos up to 3 minutes, 1080p, no watermark.

If you clip for a campaign

Campaigns that pay for clips have their own rules, for example on length, tags, disclosure and watermarks. Read them before you export; Anteras does not check a clip against them.

What this does not do

• Find the best moments in a long video.
• Trim a clip out of a longer upload.
• Download a video from a YouTube or Twitch link. You upload a file.
• Put a facecam and gameplay in a split layout.
• Export many clips in one go.

Those jobs belong to Clip mode, which is planned and not built. That page says what it would do and takes sign-ups for the waiting list.