Export

The cut is on the timeline, you played it end to end, it flows. Now it has to become a file, and this is where most editors make you an expert in codecs before they let you leave. Splicer, by PITO MD, asks you three things: the shape, captions or not, and where to save. Then it goes, and you go do something else.

This guide covers the shape of the export, the vertical layouts, captions, and the sheet itself.

Original, wide or vertical

The export comes in three shapes, and on the export sheet one key picks each: o for Original, w for Wide, 9 for Vertical. Splicer remembers Vertical for each Splice and Wide for the app.

Original keeps the video as shot. If you recorded 16:9 for YouTube or a screen, this is the one, and nothing about the picture changes.

Wide makes it 16:9, sized from the video’s shorter side, between 1080 and 4320 lines: 1920x1080 from a 1080p recording, 3840x2160 from 4K. The sheet offers it only when the video isn’t 16:9 already and isn’t upright, a 4:3 webcam or a square clip for instance. The picture sits whole with black bars (at the sides, or above and below on a video wider than 16:9) or a blurred copy of itself behind it, or it’s zoomed to fill the 16:9 frame, trimmed at the top and bottom or at the sides. On the sheet, l switches between filling the frame and showing it all, z and Z zoom, b swaps black bars for the blurred copy while the picture doesn’t fill the frame, and , and . nudge it while it’s cropped; a key shows only while it applies. The export sheet’s preview shows Wide, as the export’s own first frame; the rail and the cut keep the picture as shot.

Vertical is 9:16 for phones: 1080x1920 from a 1080p recording, 2160x3840 from 4K. On the desk, 9 turns vertical on and off from the rail or the cut, and the desk preview shows what you’ll get. Off goes back to Wide if Wide is your pick and the video offers it, otherwise to Original. Vertical has two layouts, Fill and Frame, and l switches between them.

Fill the screen

In Fill, the picture fills the phone screen, which means the sides of a wide recording are cut off. So you nudge: , and . move the picture left or right for the clip you are on, < and > move every clip at once, and 0 centers it again. Keep your face on the phone, clip by clip, and leave the rest.

Frame the picture

In Frame, the whole picture sits in a window on the phone screen, and nothing is cut off. f reshapes the window: 16:9, 4:3 or 1:1. p pushes it up from the center, so the bottom stays free for the phone app’s buttons and nobody’s thumb lands on your face. z and Z zoom the picture inside the window.

The backdrop behind the window is black, or a blurred copy of the picture, and b flips between the two.

Captions, if you want them

Captions are burned into the export, karaoke style, and they’re off until you turn them on. On the export sheet, c turns them on or off, and pick the look from ten (anton, pixel, fraktur, neon, bungee, marker, fredoka, courier, inter, bangers), and + and - size them.

What you see on the desk is what the export does. The preview matches the file, so judge the look there and stop guessing.

Press Export

Ctrl+E opens the export sheet (Cmd+E on a Mac). The big Export button starts it, or just press Enter. The sheet shows progress as it goes: which clip it is on, like “CLIP 3 OF 6”, and a percent, then “48 fps · 0:42 left” once it has an estimate, so you know whether to wait or to walk the dogs. A short export can finish before the estimate shows. When it’s done, Enter opens the folder.

Exports land in ~/Videos/Splicer. The desk has no folder setting; splicer export --out puts a file somewhere else. If the disk doesn’t have room for the file, Splicer says so before it writes anything, not halfway through.

The fast path

If you export as Original, without captions and without the Splicer mark, and the recording is an MP4 or MKV that Splicer reads by itself, OBS recordings included, the export is a smart cut: the untouched video between your cuts is copied as it is, not re-encoded, so a long export with a few cuts is fast. Captions, the mark, a Wide or Vertical export or a size change re-encode the whole export, because there is something new to draw. The free version always carries the mark, so the fast path is Pro’s, with the mark off. A recording that stands upright exports only vertical, so the fast path is for landscape and square recordings.

The free version

After the 30-day trial, Splicer stays free, with two limits and both of them on the export: it stops at 5 minutes, and it carries a small Splicer wordmark. Pro lifts the limit and lets you turn the mark off: m on the export sheet switches it, and Splicer remembers your choice. Everything else on the sheet works the same.

Next, the same cut without a window: the terminal workspace.