From long video or article to reels, and out the door

A one-hour meeting video holds five or six reels. A 1,500-word article holds three or four. Most people post the long thing once, put a link in the caption and wonder why nobody watched. The work that reaches people is the work of cutting the long thing into short things that stand on their own.

Finding the clips

Start with a clip log. Play the long video at normal speed or a little faster and write down a timestamp every time one of these happens:

• Someone states a fact with a number in it
• Two people disagree out loud
• A vote, a decision or a promise
• Someone says a sentence so clear it could be a headline
• A visual moment: a document held up, a packed room, an empty room

For each entry, write the in point, the out point and one line on what it shows. A 90-minute meeting usually gives you 10 to 20 entries. Most will not make it. That is fine. The log is a menu, and you will order from it more than once.

Articles work the same way, with no footage to mine. Each section with a single strong fact is a candidate. Record yourself saying that fact in two or three sentences, lay the document or a photo under your voice as a cutaway, and caption it. A chart from the article can become a reel on its own if you build it at 1080x1920 and reveal it one bar at a time.

One idea per reel

A reel that tries to cover the cost, the hearing dispute and the vote in 60 seconds makes all three blurry. Split them. Each reel opens with its own hook (lesson one of this module), carries one claim or conflict, and ends with one useful fact, like the next meeting date.

Each reel has to make sense to someone who has never seen the others, because most viewers will meet only one. Do not open with "As I said in part one." Give the one sentence of context the viewer needs and move.

Building a series

Related reels posted a day or two apart, with a shared look, become a series. A series helps people who liked one reel find the rest, and it gives you a posting plan for the week instead of one burst.

• Same cover style: same font, same color band, same placement for every part.
• Part numbers: "Jail vote, part 2 of 4" in the cover text and the post caption.
• Same title words: a short series name that repeats, so people can search your profile for it.
• Link back to the full source: the meeting video or article, in the caption or your profile link.

Lyric videos follow the same idea. A song can give you a verse reel, a chorus reel and a behind-the-song reel. Lyric Bench builds the lyric version.

Export settings

Every major app accepts the same safe file. Use these settings unless you have a reason not to:

YouTube's Shorts help page says Shorts top out at 1080p resolution (as of October 2026), so uploading 4K vertical buys you nothing there. The apps all re-encode your upload anyway. A clean 1080x1920 file at a healthy bitrate gives their encoders good material to start from.

Do not change the frame rate partway through, and do not export at 60 fps just because the option is there. 30 fps is the normal rate for phone footage and the files come out smaller.

The AV craft chapters Getting it out the door and Why the export looks different go further on codecs and the re-encoding that happens after upload.

File size limits

A 60-second reel at 10 Mbps is about 75 MB. That is well inside what the platforms accept for normal uploads. Published limits, as of October 2026:

• YouTube: 256 GB or 12 hours, whichever is less, per YouTube Help.
• Meta (Instagram and Facebook) Reels ads: up to 4 GB, per Meta's ads specs as summarized by Sprout Social. Meta's help pages for ordinary reels do not state a size limit that I could find.
• TikTok: TikTok's ads help center lists 500 MB for some video ad placements. TikTok's help center does not state a limit for regular posts. Third-party guides report figures like 72 MB on Android, 287.6 MB on iOS and 10 GB on the web, but those come from 2024 reports, not from TikTok.

Where you will actually hit limits: email attachments (often 20 to 25 MB), text messages, some scheduling tools and shared drives on slow connections. That is where StudioConverter comes in. It compresses a video to a target file size, converts formats and can set loudness. Give it the size you need, and it works out the bitrate. For a 60-second reel that has to fit in 25 MB, that works out to roughly 3 Mbps, which still looks decent at 1080x1920 for a talking head. Busy footage like crowds or water gets blocky sooner.

Before you post, run the file through AVPrep if it came straight off a phone. Its metadata strip removes location and device data you may not want to publish.

Cover frames and thumbnails

The cover frame is what people see on your profile, in search and in shares before the reel plays. Every app lets you pick a frame from the video, and most let you upload a separate image. Upload one for anything that matters. A random mid-blink frame makes your best work look like an accident.

Make covers at 1080x1920. ImageStudio makes images at exactly that size. Then plan for the crop. Instagram changed its profile grid from squares to taller rectangles in January 2025 (3:4, according to third-party size guides), and other apps crop covers in their own grids too. A 3:4 slice of a 9:16 cover cuts a strip off the top and bottom. Put the title and the face in the middle half of the image and they survive every crop.

• A face or a single strong object, big
• Three to six words of title text, large and high contrast
• For a series, the part number in the same spot every time
• No fake play buttons or false promises
• No other platform's watermark. Instagram's creator guidance says reels with watermarks are less likely to be recommended, so export a clean master from your editor and do not repost a file downloaded from another app.