Best UGC video editor / Glossary
Glossary
- UGC
- User-generated content: videos that look like they were filmed by a customer on a phone. Brands commission them from creators and run them as ads.
- Talking-to-camera take
- One continuous recording of a person speaking to the phone camera. The raw material of almost every UGC video.
- Retake
- A line the creator said again because the first attempt went wrong. A retake cutter keeps the best version and drops the rest.
- False start
- The first second or two of a sentence that gets abandoned and restarted.
- Dead air
- Silence inside a take: the pause before a line, the breath between sentences, the gap while you check the script.
- Filler word
- Um, uh, like, you know. Removing them without making the cut sound robotic is the hard part of automatic editing.
- Jump cut
- The visible jump when two parts of one take are joined. UGC audiences accept them; brands sometimes ask for them to be smoothed.
- Hook
- The first one to three seconds of the ad. Brands test several hooks on the same body, so editors that render hook variants save time.
- Body
- The part of the ad after the hook: the demonstration, the benefits, the call to action.
- B-roll
- Footage shown over the voice track: the product in use, a screen, a close-up. Some editors add it automatically from stock.
- Burned-in captions
- Captions rendered into the video pixels, so they show on every platform regardless of its caption settings.
- Clean audio
- Audio with background noise, echo and mouth sounds reduced. Clean Audio is also CapCut's name for its noise removal.
- Batch editing
- Editing several videos with one set of instructions, for example ten product takes at once.
- Whitelisting
- Running an ad from the creator's own account, with the brand paying for the reach. Also called Spark Ads on TikTok and partnership ads on Instagram.
- Usage rights
- How long and where a brand may run the video. Priced separately from the filming in most UGC contracts.
- Raw footage
- The unedited take. Some brands buy raws so their own team can cut variants.
- UGC generator
- Software that makes a synthetic presenter. Not an editor: nothing on this site generates people.
- Vertical video
- A 9:16 frame, usually exported at 1080x1920, the format of TikTok, Reels and Shorts.