Editor & settings

Choose “I’ll build it myself”and the editor opens. It’s a scene-by-scene workspace with a live preview that matches the final render exactly, what you see is what you download.

The editor

A Spotlight is a sequence of scenes, each scene is one clip from a Bite with its own title, optionally bookended by an intro and outro. The left panel lists your scenes; the center shows the live preview; the right panel holds the settings for whatever you’ve selected. The header shows a running estimate of the total length.

Scenes & clips

Add a scene by picking a published Bite, then trim it down to the four-to-eight-second moment you want. Reorder scenes by dragging. Per scene you can set:

• Clip range, a short window from the source Bite, with a visual preview of the framing.
• Entry direction, the clip slides in from the left, right, top, or bottom, holds, then exits.
• Video styling, corner radius, shadow, and a border.
• Tilt, a subtle perspective lean (none, lean-right, lean-left, look-up, look-down) for a little dynamism.

Titles & banners

Each scene carries a title (up to ~60 characters) and an optional tagline, rendered as a banner over the clip. You control where the banner sits and how it looks:

• Banner position, top or bottom center, or any of the four corners.
• Banner style, background color and opacity, text color, shadow, border, and text effects like stroke or drop shadow.
• Opinionated templates style the banner for you, these controls are there when you want to override.

Global style

Settings that apply to the whole Spotlight (most are template-driven, but Freeform hands them all to you):

• Background, a solid color or an auto-generated gradient from a base color.
• Text color, auto (picks light or dark to suit the background), white, black, or a custom hex.
• Scene padding, how much breathing room sits between the clip and the canvas edge.

Music & narration

Give the reel a soundtrack and a voice:

• Background music, pick from a library of curated tracks and set the volume.
• Narration (text-to-speech), toggle it on, choose a voice, and type a script per scene (and for the intro/outro). It's spoken in the render.
• Voices include premium and bring-your-own-key options, with previews so you can hear them first.

Captions

Turn on burned captions to show your narration as on-screen subtitles, ideal for social feeds that autoplay muted. Choose a dark style (dark background, white text) or an inverted one (white background, dark text).

Intro & outro

Bookend the reel with a title card and a sign-off. Each is optional and fully styled:

• Primary and secondary text, with their own sizing and line-height controls.
• A layout/typography preset, plus entry and exit animations (fade or slide from any edge).
• Your logo, placed in a corner, sized and dialed to the opacity you want.
• Optional narration text, spoken (and captioned) just like a scene.

Preview & render

The center preview is pixel-accurate to the final video, so you can iterate without rendering. When it looks right, hit Render. Rendering runs in the background, you’ll get a notification when it’s done, and the finished MP4 appears in the Spotlight’s render history with a Download button. Changed your mind? Edit and render again, each render is a fresh version.