Use case
5 Reasons Creators Let Cutroom Edit Their Reels
You film the Reel. Cutroom does the part afterwards that eats your evening.
- what comes back, at 1080 by 1920
- 9:16
- the longest take you can upload
- 3 min
- roughly how long the edit takes
- 1 min
The filming takes ten minutes. The editing takes the evening.
You record yourself talking about something you know. That part is quick and you are good at it. Then you sit down to cut it, find something to show while you talk, line up the captions, and an hour is gone.
That is the part Cutroom does. You upload the take and a minute later there is a finished Reel: b-roll on the words that need it, captions timed to your voice, the ums taken out.
Here are the five reasons people use it.
Where a finished Reel lands
It comes back at 1080 by 1920, which is what Instagram wants. Nothing to resize, nothing to crop.
Your Reel is finished, not started
Most tools hand you a project to work on. Cutroom hands you the Reel. Upload, wait about a minute, and there is something you could post, then change the parts you disagree with.
Everything is already done: the cut, the b-roll, the captions, the transitions. Most of the time that is the end of it.
It comes back at 1080 by 1920, which is what Instagram wants, so there is nothing to resize and nothing to crop.
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
The b-roll lands on the words that need it, not every 8 seconds
Most tools drop a clip in on a timer, one every six or eight seconds, fitting or not. Cutroom reads what you said and puts each shot on the words it belongs to. Drag it onto other words and it goes there.
You say "our warehouse in New York" and a warehouse shot covers those five words. Not the sentence before it, not the one after.
There is no timeline anywhere on the screen, because there is nothing to line up. You are editing the sentence.
One phrase, one shot, on a Reel
Five words get one shot. Drag it and it follows the words, not a point in time.
Your own clips get used before stock
Upload what you have already filmed and Cutroom labels what is in each clip. After that it reaches for yours first, and only falls back to the free library for what you never shot.
Say "back in my workshop" and you get your workshop. Not a stranger's workshop from a clip site, which on Reels is the fastest way to look like an advert.
And when you are talking about the product itself, Cutroom will not drop generic stock over it. It uses your own footage there or it leaves you on screen, which is the right call, because a stranger's hand holding a different jar is worse than no shot at all.
Somebody else's warehouse, or yours
A stock search gives you a clip everyone has used. Your library gives you the one nobody else has.
Fix one thing without starting over
The usual complaint about AI editors is not that the first result is bad. It is that fixing it means doing the whole thing again. Here you change the one bit that bothers you and the rest stays where it was.
Fix a word it misheard. Swap a shot. Move the captions up because they are sitting on your face. Pick a different caption style.
All of it is free, all of it is undoable, and nothing you already fixed comes undone.
One thing moves, nothing else does
You move the one thing that bothers you. The rest of the edit stays exactly where it was.
Six caption styles, and you pick the spot
Clean, Bold, Karaoke, Meme, Editorial and Minimal, with the colour, the weight, the size and the position under your control. They are part of the picture itself, not a separate subtitle file, so they survive being reposted.
The timing is measured from the sound of your own voice, so a word on screen never lands on the wrong word and never stays up while the picture changes.
Music is one tap away and starts switched off on purpose: the first thing you hear back should be your own voice. Turn it on and it follows your pace.
- Clean: one line in a pill. Out of the way.
- Bold: huge condensed caps with a hard shadow.
- Karaoke: a marker box on the word you are saying.
- Meme: white outlined text, top and bottom.
Karaoke, one of the six packs
A marker box on the word you are saying, burned into the picture, following your voice word for word.
What it will not do
Your Reel has to be under three minutes and shot upright with sound on it. Landscape footage is refused at upload, before a credit is charged, because a wide take inside an upright frame is a strip between black bars.
One size comes back: 1080 by 1920. There is no 4K and no dearer plan that exports a bigger file.
The free plan is three videos, editor only, and those three carry the Cutroom mark across the middle. Nothing else about them is smaller.
Questions people ask
- If I make a Reel, can I actually download it, or is there a paywall at the end?
- You download it. Exporting costs credits, and the price sits on the Export button before you press it, so nothing about the bill turns up at the end. The free plan gives you three videos, and those three carry the Cutroom mark across the middle. On Basic and Premium there is nothing of ours on the file. There is no card at the front door, and you get seven days to walk through it: the free tier is three finished videos, with 600 credits, which covers those three edits and re-exporting them after you change a caption.
- Will it work with my kind of video?
- Cutroom takes one upright video of a person talking, up to three minutes, with sound on it. You get back one upright video at 1080 by 1920. Landscape footage is refused at upload, before a single credit is charged. A wide take inside an upright frame is a strip between black bars, and we would rather stop you than sell you that. A video with no sound is refused for the same reason. There is no widescreen export and no 4K; a 4K upload comes back at 1080p, the same as everyone else's. If you shoot horizontal, or your videos run twenty minutes, this is not your tool yet, and we would rather you knew that here than after paying.
- How many videos do I actually get for this?
- Two charges make an ad, and you see both before you spend them. Cutting one upload is 100 credits: writing out what you said, the edit itself, and the b-roll search. Exporting is 20 credits for every finished minute, charged for the length you actually export, so a thirty-second ad is 10. That makes a thirty-second ad 110 credits from upload to finished file. Basic gives 2,500 credits a month, which is about twenty finished ads. Everything between those two charges is free: editing, previewing, undoing, searching for clips, uploading your own footage, changing your mind. Exporting the same cut again unchanged is free too. Credits you do not use stay in the account.
- Can I post what comes out, or will I still be in there for an hour?
- Two things make the difference, and both are structural rather than a promise about quality. First, Cutroom does not pick which parts of your video to keep. Your whole take stays in, in order. It tightens the dead air and drops the ums, and it only ever cuts where a sentence ends, never mid-word. Second, when it gets something wrong you fix it by pointing, not by editing. Highlight a phrase and a clip lands over exactly those words. Delete a line and the cut rebuilds around it. Correct a word it misheard and every caption of that word changes. All of it is free, all of it is undoable, and there is no timeline to learn.
- Does this work on my phone, or do I need a computer?
- It works on a phone. Cutroom is a website, not an app. There is no iPhone version and no Android version, so there is no feature that lives on one device and not the other. A big screen is more comfortable for marking up your words, and the app says so once, but nothing is locked away.
- Does this work in my language, or only English?
- Eight languages today, by name: English (US), English (UK), Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), German, French, Dutch and Italian. You pick yours from a list when you upload. If your language is not one of those eight, Cutroom will not do a good job for you yet. We would rather write that down than sell you a subscription and let you find out.
- If I want out, can I do it myself, and does the charging actually stop?
- Yourself, without emailing or calling anyone. In Settings, then Billing, you press Cancel subscription, a screen tells you exactly what that does, and you finish in Stripe's own billing portal, so the cancellation sits on the biller's books rather than on our word. Your plan then runs to the end of the period you already paid for and stops. Nothing is charged after that. There is no fee and we do not ask why.
- If it turns out not to be what I thought, do I get my money back?
- Your first charge: yes, in full, if you tell us within seven days that you did not mean to be billed. No argument. Later charges: we refund unused subscription time when something went wrong on our side, and we say so plainly when we think it did not. Credits already spent on finished videos are not refundable. That video was made and the machines were paid at the moment it ran. There is one case where we say no, and it is written on the refunds page rather than discovered by you. And if an export fails on our side, you do not need to ask at all: the credits come back on their own.
Upload a Reel you already filmed and watch where the b-roll lands. Three finished videos free in your first seven days, no card. They carry a Cutroom mark; Lite at $19.99 a month removes it.