One app on your phone can turn a long recording into multiple short clips in seconds, with full customization for fonts, captions, and layouts.
One app, your phone, and a few seconds. That's genuinely all it takes to go from a long recording to a set of polished short clips ready to post. No desktop software, no timeline scrubbing, no spending an afternoon on something you just want off your plate.
The app is Detail. You can record directly inside it using its built-in camera, or just import a video you already have. Either way, once your footage is in, the real work is one tap: Auto Edit.
Detail handles two types of content differently, and picking the right one matters.
Talking head is for solo videos: tutorials, commentary, anything where one person is on camera. Podcast is for two or more people, whether that's a formal podcast, an interview, or a casual conversation.
Both modes give you the same core options before processing starts: zoom cuts between edits, auto-generated titles for each clip, captions with customizable fonts and colors, background music, and language selection. Turn on what you want, tap continue, and the app analyzes the audio and builds the edits for you.
It doesn't feel like something is made for me. It still feels like my video.
After processing, Detail gives you two categories of output. At the top are long-form versions: lightly edited cuts of the full video with pauses removed. If you recorded in landscape, these stay in landscape. They already come with captions, background music, and cleaner cuts. Good for anyone who wants the whole video but with the dead air stripped out.
Below those are the short clips, each pulled from a distinct topic or moment in the recording. If you shot in landscape, the shorts default to portrait automatically, since that's where they're going to live anyway. You can change the aspect ratio per clip if you need to.
Each short clip is its own timeline, so nothing you change affects the original video.
That independence matters. You can customize one clip without touching the others, and nothing rolls back to your source footage. Tap the title overlay to reposition it, change the font, adjust the color, or enable masking so the text appears behind you on screen. One tap, genuinely useful effect.
Captions are moveable too: drag them anywhere, resize, change the style, or edit the words if the transcription missed something. Tap the video itself and go to framing to reframe and zoom, even after the auto-edit has already run.
"Just remember to apply it to all clips so everything stays consistent."
For multi-person recordings, the process adds one extra step before generating clips: speaker detection. The app plays a short audio sample and asks you to assign each voice to a person. You identify yourself, frame your shot, then do the same for your guest. This is how Detail knows who's talking and frames them correctly throughout.
Once speakers are assigned, you choose a layout. Switch Speaker shows one person at a time and cuts between them automatically as the conversation moves. Side by side gives you a split screen. Both work cleanly and both are fully editable afterward.
The long-form and short clip structure is the same as talking head. Open a longer edit and it's close to ready. One useful move: tap any clip, go to layout, and switch to split screen even if you only had one camera angle. Detail takes that single shot and turns it into two angles. It looks like proper production and takes about ten seconds.
For short clips from podcast recordings, the layout worth trying is 70-30. A wide shot sits at the top, taking up the majority of the frame. A close-up of whoever is currently speaking sits at the bottom, switching between guests automatically as the conversation flows.
To set it up: go to layout, select 70-30, apply to all clips. Then go to framing and frame the wide shot first, apply to layout. After that, find a clip where you're talking, frame yourself, apply to the same speaker. Then scrub to a clip where your guest is talking, frame them, apply to the same speaker. Done. Every clip now cuts between correctly framed close-ups underneath a consistent wide shot.
Wide shot on top, close-up switching at the bottom. The whole look takes a few seconds to set up.
It's a clean, professional result for something that genuinely takes less than a minute to configure. If you'd rather keep it simple, split screen with reframed speakers works just as well and is even faster.
The point isn't that automation replaces your judgment. You still decide the captions, the fonts, the framing, the layout. Detail handles the part that used to eat hours: finding the moments, cutting the clips, syncing the captions. The creative choices stay yours.
