Editing guides that show the numbers

These guides exist because our own editors needed them. When someone new joins a project, the fastest way to get consistent output is a page that states the exact margin, the exact export setting, the exact ratio, and the reason behind it. Publishing them costs us nothing and saves you a week of trial and error, whether you hire us or not.

Every guide is written to be usable mid-edit. Open it on a second monitor, apply the value, move on. There is no gated download, no email capture, and no thirty-second preamble about how video is important. If a guide cannot be acted on inside ten minutes it does not belong in this hub.

The technical set covers reframing sixteen by nine footage to nine by sixteen without decapitating your subject, safe zones per platform in pixel values, export settings by destination, file delivery and handoff structures that survive a client review cycle, and LUT and colour grading workflow for footage shot on mixed cameras.

The craft set covers hook structures that hold the first three seconds, B-roll selection that supports rather than decorates, caption styling and readability, subtitle accessibility, audio ducking that keeps dialogue intelligible under a music bed, music licensing without a takedown risk, thumbnail design, podcast clip selection, and how to read a retention curve so you know which edit decision caused the drop.

Start with the retention curve rather than the view count. A steep cliff in the first three seconds is a hook problem, and the fix lives in the hook structures guide. A gradual slide through the middle is a pacing and B-roll problem. A sharp drop at a specific timestamp usually points at one identifiable moment: a slow transition, a logo sting, a sentence that promised something the next sentence did not deliver.

If the curve is healthy but reach is low, the problem is more likely packaging or delivery than editing. Check the cover frame, the caption placement against the platform safe zone, the first line of on-screen text, and the loudness of the export. Those four items account for most of the reach gaps we diagnose in audits.

You do not need to hire an agency to benefit from a documented standard. Send your editor the export settings guide, the safe zones guide, and the caption styling guide, and ask them to confirm they are working to those values. Consistency across a channel is worth more than any individual clever edit, and consistency is a documentation problem before it is a talent problem.

If you want the standard applied for you at volume, that is the service. But the guides stay free and ungated either way, and we update them when a platform changes a spec rather than leaving stale numbers online.