Short-form video glossary

The vocabulary of clipping long videos into Shorts, TikToks and Reels — defined in plain English. If you've wondered what "moment detection", "9:16 reframing" or "burned-in captions" actually mean, start here.

AI moment detection

The process of scanning a long video and ranking the segments most likely to work as standalone short clips — strong hooks, complete thoughts and clean boundaries — instead of cutting arbitrary fixed-length pieces.

9:16 (vertical)

The portrait aspect ratio used by TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. A 1080×1920 frame fills a phone screen. Most source video is 16:9, so clips must be reframed to 9:16.

Aspect ratio

The width-to-height proportion of a video frame. Common ratios: 16:9 (landscape/YouTube), 9:16 (vertical/Shorts), 1:1 (square/feed).

Reframing

Re-cropping a horizontal video to vertical while keeping the important subject — usually a face — centered in frame. Smart reframing tracks the subject as it moves rather than cropping the center blindly.

Hook

The first one to three seconds of a clip. On autoplay feeds the hook decides whether a viewer keeps watching or scrolls past, so the strongest moment of a video usually belongs at the very start.

Captions (subtitles)

On-screen text of the spoken words, burned into the video. Most short-form is watched on mute, so captions are essential for retention and accessibility.

Burned-in captions

Captions rendered permanently into the video pixels (as opposed to a separate subtitle track). They survive re-uploads and show on every platform without extra setup.

B-roll

Supplementary footage cut over the main audio — screen recordings, stock shots, illustrative clips — used to add visual interest and hide cuts.

Repurposing

Turning one piece of long-form content into many short pieces for different platforms. A single podcast can yield a dozen Shorts, several Reels and a handful of TikToks.

Source video

The original long-form input — a YouTube upload, a podcast recording, a livestream VOD or an uploaded file — that clips are cut from.

Clip / short

A short vertical video (typically 15–90 seconds) cut from a longer source, formatted for Shorts, TikTok or Reels.

Watermark

A small logo or mark burned into a clip to attribute its source. WurifyPeak's free tier adds a watermark; paid tiers remove it.

Virality reason

A short label WurifyPeak attaches to a detected moment explaining why it was selected — e.g. 'punchline', 'tutorial hook', 'hot take' — so you can prioritize which clips to publish.

Smart paste

Pasting a single video URL and letting the tool fetch, analyze and draft clips automatically, with no manual timeline scrubbing.

Render

The final export step where the chosen cut, captions, reframing and watermark are combined into a single MP4 file ready to upload.

Progressive MP4

An MP4 that can start playing before the whole file downloads. Used for public clip pages because search crawlers and social platforms index it cleanly.

Aspect-safe crop

A reframing crop chosen so no important on-screen element (face, text, product) is cut off when converting to vertical.

Retention

The share of viewers still watching at each point in a clip. High retention in the first few seconds is the single biggest driver of distribution on short-form feeds.

Hunt

In WurifyPeak, the action of submitting a source video to be analyzed and clipped. The Hunt page is where you paste a link or upload a file to start.

Public clip

A short a creator has chosen to publish on WurifyPeak's web archive, where anyone can watch it, download the MP4 and find the creator's profile.

Put the vocabulary to work

Paste a long video and watch moment detection, reframing and captions happen automatically.