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.

Before anything goes out, check six things in order: captions sit inside the platform safe zone on a real phone rather than in the editor, the cover frame reads clearly at thumbnail size, the first three seconds make sense with the sound off, integrated loudness is near minus fourteen LUFS with true peak under minus one dBTP, the export matches the destination spec, and the on-screen text has no typos in the first frame where they are most visible.

That list catches the overwhelming majority of avoidable reach problems we find in audits. It is deliberately short, because a checklist nobody runs is worth nothing, and the six items above are the ones where a small error costs disproportionate distribution.

Consistency compounds in a way individual clever edits do not. A viewer who recognises your caption treatment, your colour, your pacing and your sign-off in the first half second is a viewer who has already decided to keep watching. That recognition is built by writing the standard down — font, weight, caption position, colour values, cut density, intro and outro rules — and applying it identically across every deliverable.

Use the guides here as the starting values, then lock in your own variations in a one-page format spec. Whoever edits your video next, in-house or agency, should be able to match your channel from that page alone without a call. If they cannot, the spec is not finished.