French video editing
edited by people who can actually hear the mistakes

These are not interchangeable, and the difference shows up in exactly the places short-form lives: vocabulary, idiom and on-screen text. A Quebec audience reads Metropolitan slang as foreign; a Paris audience reads Quebec vocabulary as regional. Neither is wrong, but picking the wrong one costs you the trust you were trying to build with the localisation in the first place.

We decide this at brief stage and record it in the project spec, because it changes caption copy, hook wording and sometimes the whole script. If you sell into both markets meaningfully, the correct answer is usually two caption tracks on the same visual edit rather than one compromise version that reads slightly off to everybody.

Practical rule of thumb: if your audience is majority France, Belgium or Switzerland, go fr-FR. If Quebec is more than about a third of your market, produce a separate fr-CA caption pass. Canadian federal and Quebec provincial audiences in particular expect fr-CA, and Quebec's language legislation makes French-first presentation a commercial norm rather than a nicety.

French text runs roughly 15-20% longer than the same meaning in English. Drop a French translation into a caption template built for English and you get either three-line captions that swallow the frame or mid-word breaks that read as sloppy. We widen the caption safe zone and reduce the words-per-card count rather than shrinking the font, because small captions lose the muted viewers you were captioning for.

Accented characters are the second failure point. A lot of auto-caption pipelines strip or mis-render é, è, ê, ç and œ, and the result reads to a native speaker roughly the way missing apostrophes read in English. Every French caption we deliver goes through a native-speaker proof specifically checking accents, liaison spelling and proper nouns before it is burned in.

Line breaking matters more in French too. French clauses are longer and more subordinate-heavy, so breaking a caption at the wrong point splits a clause and forces the viewer to re-read. We break on grammatical boundaries and keep articles with their nouns, which sounds pedantic until you watch the retention graph on a badly broken caption.

Localisation takes your finished English video and produces a French version: French captions, French on-screen text, French thumbnail copy, and a recut where the timing no longer fits. It is the cheaper path and the right one when the content is demonstrative — product walkthroughs, tutorials, process videos, anything where the visual carries the meaning and the language is supporting.

Native editing starts from French raw footage or a French script and builds the edit around French delivery. It costs more and it is the right choice for anything persuasion-led: founder content, personal brand, sales-driven talking head, testimonials. Persuasion does not survive translation, because the hook that works in French is rarely the literal translation of the hook that worked in English.

Most clients end up running both: native French editing for the top-of-funnel persuasion content that has to feel local, and localisation for the library of explainers and product content where a good caption pass is genuinely enough. We will tell you which bucket a given asset belongs in rather than upselling every video into native production.

The single highest-leverage part of a French edit is the first two seconds, and it is the part machine translation destroys most reliably. English hooks lean on compression and punchy noun stacks; French leans on the verb and tolerates a slightly longer setup. A literal translation of a tight English hook usually lands as either abrupt or oddly formal.

We rewrite hooks in French from the underlying claim rather than from the English wording. The claim stays identical — the framing, rhythm and word order are rebuilt. In practice that means writing three or four French hook variants per asset and picking on rhythm read aloud, not on how close it is to the English.

Register is the other trap. French has a real tu/vous distinction with commercial consequences: tutoiement reads as modern and direct to a younger consumer audience and as presumptuous to a corporate or professional-services audience. We set the register per brand at brief stage and hold it consistently across every asset, because switching between them mid-library reads as careless.

Raw footage or your existing English masters, a note on which French market matters most, your preferred register (tu or vous), and any glossary of brand terms, product names and phrases that must not be translated. That glossary is the highest-value thing you can send us — mistranslated product names are the most common complaint we inherit from previous vendors.

If you have any existing French content, send it even if you dislike it. Knowing what did not work, and specifically why your audience said it did not work, saves a full production cycle of guessing. If you have French-speaking staff who can sanity-check, we will build them into the approval flow rather than around it.