Short-form video glossary

The tall frame shape used by TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts: 9 units wide for every 16 tall, usually exported at 1080 × 1920 pixels. A normal widescreen recording is 16:9, so turning it into 9:16 means cropping or reframing. Aspect ratio calculator

Working out who is talking at each moment, from the audio and the faces in the frame, so a vertical crop can follow that person. It's what lets a two-person podcast recorded in one wide shot become a clip that cuts to whoever is speaking. Clips from podcasts

The ratio of a video's width to its height. 16:9 is widescreen, 1:1 is square, 4:5 is a tall feed post and 9:16 is full-screen vertical. Each platform accepts a range; uploading the wrong one leads to black bars, cropping or the video being treated as a different format. Vertical video sizes and safe zones

A subtitle format with full styling: fonts, colors, outlines, exact positions and effects. Video editors and players can read it, but most social platforms won't accept it as an upload, so it's mainly used to burn styled captions in.

Automatically moving the crop window through a video so the subject stays in frame when you change its shape, for example from 16:9 to 9:16. Good reframing follows the active speaker and moves smoothly instead of jumping with every small movement. Work out a crop by hand

Translating a video's speech into another language and replacing the audio with a synthetic voice, sometimes one modeled on the original speaker. YouTube and Meta both offer forms of it on their own platforms.

Supporting footage cut over the main shot of someone talking: a product, a screen, a place being described. In clips it hides cuts and gives the viewer something new to look at.

Placing a wide video in the middle of a vertical frame and filling the space above and below with a blurred, enlarged copy of the same video. Useful for slides, screen recordings and wide shots where cropping would cut out what matters.

Captions drawn into the video picture itself, so they always show and look the same everywhere. Most short-form clips use them because they survive cross-posting and can be styled. The trade-off: viewers can't turn them off or switch language. How to add captions to videos

How captions look and move: font, size, color, outline, position, how many words show at once and whether the current word is highlighted. Short-form styles often show one to three words at a time, large and centered. Try caption styles

A short, self-contained section cut from a longer video, made to make sense to someone who hasn't seen the rest. A good clip has its own hook at the start and a payoff at the end. How to make podcast clips

Captions delivered as a separate text track that viewers can turn on or off, usually uploaded as an SRT or VTT file. Strictly, closed captions also describe sounds and identify speakers for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, while subtitles only transcribe or translate speech. SRT and VTT converter

Switching between languages within a conversation or a single sentence, like Spanish and English (Spanglish) or Hindi and English (Hinglish). Speech recognition built for one language often garbles it, so captions need a model that handles both. Captions in 50 languages

YouTube's system that matches uploads against copyrighted audio and video submitted by rights holders. A match can block a video, monetize it for the rights holder or track it. YouTube blocks Shorts over one minute that have an active Content ID claim. YouTube Shorts rules

The still frame or image that represents a video in feeds, profiles and search. On Instagram, a Reel's 9:16 cover is cropped to the middle on the profile grid, so text near the top or bottom can be cut off. Cover safe-area checker

Publishing the same clip to several platforms, such as TikTok, Reels, Shorts and LinkedIn. Each platform has its own length limits, text limits and interface overlays, so the caption text, hashtags and safe zones often need adjusting. Platform specs

YouTube's name for a view where someone clicked to watch or kept watching past the first few seconds. Since August 2026 YouTube counts a regular view from the first frame and reports engaged views separately. YouTube Shorts statistics

Sounds and words that carry no meaning in speech, like "um", "uh" and a reflexive "like" or "you know". Cutting the ones that interrupt a sentence tightens a clip; cutting every one can make speech sound unnatural.

The first line or image of a clip, made to make the viewer want to keep watching. It usually raises a question, makes a claim or starts a story that the rest of the clip pays off. Short-form video hooks

A cut between two moments of the same shot, so the subject seems to jump slightly. In talking-head clips, jump cuts remove pauses and mistakes; a punch-in (a slight zoom) on alternate cuts makes them less jarring.

Showing a wide video inside a taller frame with plain bars above and below. It keeps the whole picture but leaves much of a phone screen empty, which is why most vertical clips crop or use blur fill instead.

The part of a clip that delivers what the hook promised: the answer, the punchline, the result. A clip that ends before its payoff feels cut short; one that runs long after it loses viewers.

How fast captions ask the viewer to read, usually measured in characters per second. Netflix's English guide allows up to 20 for adult content and 17 for children's. Captions that change faster than that are hard to follow on a phone. Check caption reading speed

Short vertical videos on Instagram and Facebook. Instagram lets you record and edit reels up to 20 minutes long, but recommends reels over 3 minutes less to new audiences. On Facebook, almost every video is now treated as a reel. Clips for Instagram Reels

A link from a YouTube Short to a longer video on the same channel, shown on the Short. Shorts made with YouTube's own remix tools link to the source automatically; for others you can choose the related video in YouTube Studio. Turn YouTube videos into Shorts

Turning one piece of content into others: a podcast episode into clips, quotes, a newsletter and a blog post, for example. For video, it usually means cutting a long recording into short clips for each platform.

How much of a video people watch, shown in platform analytics as a curve over time. A steep drop in the first seconds usually means the hook didn't land; a drop in the middle points to a slow section to cut.

The area of a vertical video that the app's own interface doesn't cover. Usernames, captions, buttons and progress bars sit on top of the video, mostly at the bottom and right, so faces and on-screen text belong inside the safe zone. Safe zones by platform

YouTube's vertical short-form format. A square or vertical video up to 3 minutes long counts as a Short; wider videos are treated as regular long-form uploads. Clips for YouTube Shorts

Cutting or shortening pauses in speech. Tightening long pauses rather than deleting every gap keeps the speaker's rhythm, and a very short audio crossfade at each cut avoids clicks.

Labeling a transcript by who said each part (Speaker 1, Speaker 2). It makes long multi-person recordings easier to scan and lets captions or layouts change with the speaker.

Software that turns spoken audio into text, with timings for each word. It's the first step of almost every captioning and clipping workflow, and the accuracy of everything after it depends on it, especially names and jargon.

A vertical layout that stacks two shots, usually two speakers, one above the other. It suits back-and-forth conversations where cutting between faces would be too frequent; for one speaker, a single full-height crop reads better. Clips from interviews

The most widely supported subtitle file format: numbered captions, each with a start and end time (with a comma before the milliseconds) and the text. YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and most video editors accept it. Convert SRT and VTT

Exporting an edit as a project file (such as XML for Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve, or FCPXML for Final Cut Pro) instead of a finished video, so an editor can open the cuts and keep refining them with the original footage.

Editing video by editing its transcript: deleting a sentence in the text deletes it from the video. It's much faster than scrubbing a timeline for long talking-head recordings.

A way of billing for video tools by the total length of the videos you upload, counted once, rather than by credits, clips or exports. On Reeltopus, clips, exports and re-runs inside your hours don't cost extra. What an hour of video costs on each tool

The W3C's subtitle format for web video, read by HTML5 players. It looks like SRT but starts with a WEBVTT header, uses a period before the milliseconds, and supports positioning and basic styling. Convert SRT to VTT

Timestamps for every word rather than every caption line, which lets captions highlight or pop each word as it's spoken. It needs speech-to-text that returns accurate per-word timings.