How to edit a short for the metrics you are judged on
Give Vizard Agent the actual list of numbers you are working to, not a summary of it. Some of them, such as retention, average percentage viewed and end-screen behaviour, are decided inside the cut. Others are decided by the thumbnail, the title and how the platform hands the video out. Separating them is the first useful step.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Hand over the list verbatim and say what you want done about it. The instruction that matters is not "make it perform" but "work the parts of this list that live in the cut". Asking Vizard Agent to tell you which items it can act on is how you learn that two of them are a thumbnail problem.
Turn this cooking video into a vertical short. I am working to these: 30-second retention, average percentage viewed, average view duration, end-screen behaviour, and click-through from Home and Suggested. Tell me which of those the edit can act on, and work those properly.
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
It works the cut against the items that belong to the cut, and it verifies by looking rather than assuming the render matched the plan. Reframing onto the action keeps the middle watchable, and an end card that covers nobody makes the end usable. Most of the work was checking, not cutting. In the session behind this article it:
- Built a shot log, a transcript and word-level timings, then sampled frames across the video and looked at them.
- Cut and reframed every segment to vertical, checked the framing of each one and re-cut three that were wrong.
- Located the specific action in the shots, such as where a pour happens and where the pan sits, so it stayed inside the vertical frame.
- Measured speech and music loudness separately before balancing them, then built and previewed the captions and overlay graphics.
- Rendered, reviewed the frames, and re-rendered with the end-screen card moved off the presenter's face.
- Re-cut tighter with cleaner audio tails, then checked the audio across the cuts.
When does this not work well?
When the target is not an edit target. Click-through from Home and Suggested is decided by the thumbnail, the title and how many impressions the platform gives you, so an edit that tries to serve it just becomes louder. Eight targets treated as equally important produce compromises in every direction, and a source with no payoff cannot be edited into one.
Common questions
Which metrics can an edit actually move? Retention, average percentage viewed and end-screen behaviour. Vizard Agent works those.
Can it help with click-through from Home? No. That is the thumbnail and the title, and Vizard Agent will say so.
Will it predict my numbers? No. Vizard Agent reports what it did, not what will happen.