For CapCut / any editor
A manual recipe for any editor. 16 entries.
Editing & montage 6
Cold open, then hook: 8-10 s of best frames, hand-picked from a contact sheet
The opening that holds a viewer on real footage: 8-10 s of the strongest frames with no speech, then one line with a twist. What to look for on the sheet, and why the automatic pick is wrong.
The cutaway rule: what is said, same place and time, never over moving lips
Three constraints for every cutaway in a talking film, and the agent prompt that applies them to a transcript. Kills what viewers read as broken: a picture from elsewhere, a face out of sync.
Length follows the material: cut stammers and repeats, not thoughts
The decision rule for how long a film should be. A target length makes you stretch a thin day or chop a full one; the material decides, and the checklist says what may be removed.
Scenes, not best phrases: keep the lead-in, the talk and the reaction
Why a reel of good lines confuses everyone who was not there, and the checklist for keeping a scene whole: the lead-in, the talk, the reaction, with filler trimmed only at the ends.
Take something from every clip, and list the ones you cut with a reason
A rule for cutting someone else's footage, or your own from a year ago: each clip was filmed because it mattered, so each gets a chance, and the rejects get a written reason the person can argue with.
Voice as one continuous track, pictures on top, and the one-frame length check
The assembly rule for talking films: cut the audio from the same pieces as the picture, snapped to frames, then verify film length equals voice length. Drift over one frame is a bug, not a quirk.
Captions & text 3
Burned subtitles for 9:16: position, lines, characters, colour, as parameters
Settings for subtitles burned into vertical video for muted feeds: above the platform UI, two lines, about 32 characters each, white with a dark outline. Starting values, checked on a phone.
Accessible on-screen text: contrast, the bottom 20 percent, no flashing
A checklist for text that everyone can read, including people watching muted, on a small screen, in sunlight, or with photosensitivity. Eight checks, each with the parameter to test against.
Reading speed for on-screen text and speech: the parameters to check against
How long a text overlay must stay up and how many words a voice can carry per second, given as parameters you measure on yourself, with the formula and the two failure modes: unreadable, and slow.
B-roll 2
A mentioned object must be seen, ideally just before the line about it
The rule that turns 'X is mentioned, never shown' from a viewer complaint into a check you run on the transcript: every named thing gets a shot, placed just before or on the line.
Screen-recording b-roll for app demos: what to record, size, cursor
Rules for screen captures used as cutaways in a product video: real-looking data, output-size or 2x resolution, a slow cursor, one action per clip, and what makes a recording unusable.
Music & sound 4
Beat-sync cutting: cut on the beat, not on every beat
A rule and an agent prompt for cutting to music from a list of beat timestamps: cuts land on beats, phrases get room to breathe, and the best shot is held through the hook.
Live music in frame: one continuous audio span, picture cuts on top
When a band or a busker is in the shot, keep one unbroken stretch of that clip's audio under the whole scene and cut only the picture; cut the audio per shot and the beat restarts.
Score with a hole, not ducking, where something plays live
Cut the score to silence under live music, a laugh or a knock instead of ducking it; ducking is audible, a hole is not. The rule, the measured levels and the ffmpeg line.
Voice cleanup checklist: room tone, de-ess, noise gate, in that order
Six passes that turn a phone or lav recording into a usable voice track, each with the ffmpeg filter and a starting parameter to adjust by ear, in the order that keeps the gate off word endings.