The five-step workflow, and why German subtitles break on umlauts, compound words and product names.
Editing for review
That is the particularity of work delivered on this market.
Your edit will be reviewed by somebody who did not shoot it, often in a table of timestamped comments.
Three choices making that review easier.
Leave half a second of breathing between sentences: it gives a hook for commenting.
Avoid cuts every eight frames: they make it impossible to point at a precise moment.
And keep a version with no burnt-in text, alongside the final version, because correcting one word must not require a full new render.
What is settled on the shoot, not in the edit
Four things, and they save hours.
The sound: a three-euro clip-on microphone beats any filter applied afterwards.
The exposure: a dark image lifted in the edit becomes noisy, and network compression amplifies that noise.
The vertical framing, decided at the take, with air at the top and bottom.
And two seconds of silence before and after each sentence, giving material for clean cuts.
The settings that really count
Five, and they are enough.
Record and export at the same frame rate, with no intermediate conversion.
Export at 1080 by 1920, vertical, with no black bars.
Keep the sound at an even level rather than loud: the platform normalises, and clipped sound cannot be recovered.
Place the text outside the areas taken by the interface, at the top and bottom.
And do not burn in your logo: this is not your video, it is the brand's.
Naming and delivery
That is the part giving an impression of professionalism, and it takes two minutes.
A readable file name: brand, product, format, version, date. No accents, no spaces, no special characters, because an exotic name breaks some management tools.
Three files delivered together: the edited version, the version without text, and the rushes if the contract provides for them.
A download link valid for at least thirty days, not a platform expiring after seven.
And one line of message saying what has been delivered, with no personal comment on the result.
What can be done on a phone without loss
| Task | Doable on mobile | What stays difficult |
|---|---|---|
| Cutting and assembling | Yes | Nothing |
| Subtitling | Yes, automatically | Proper nouns |
| Colour correction | Partly | Fine grading |
| Exporting several formats | Yes | Batch naming |
What is settled before editing
Exporting at full quality, one project per order, and clear naming from the start. Finding a file three weeks later costs more than the edit itself.
What is checked before sending
The readability of subtitles on a small screen, the absence of the editing app's logo, and the file weight against what the brand can receive.
What not to add
Four things, in order of frequency.
Trending music, whose rights almost never cover commercial use or a brand account. This point is checked with a lawyer before delivery.
Animated transitions, which date the video within three months.
Automatic zoom effects applied to the whole track.
And subtitles generated without proofreading: speech recognition systematically fails on product names, brands and compound words, and an error in a product name is the one flaw a client is certain to notice.
One last time marker: a clean edit for a thirty-second video takes between thirty and sixty minutes, proofreading included. If you spend three hours on it, the problem is almost always in the shoot, not in the app.
