Short-Form Video Editor for Daily Instagram Reels (CapCut, Long-Term, Start This Week)

I sell a product to local business owners. I walk into their store, talk to the owner, and try to sell to them. I record everything on Meta glasses on my face. I post 5 Reels a day on Instagram. The account is 16 days old and has done over 2.4 million views. I need one editor long-term to handle the edits and the scheduling.

Read this whole post before you apply. It is long on purpose and there are 5 steps at the bottom. I ignore every application that skips a step.

Here is how the work runs. This is not a daily deadline job. Every week I film 7 days of footage and dump all of it into a shared Google Drive folder. Sunday night I close that week's folder and message you. You then have the entire following week to turn that footage into 40 finished clips. 35 of them are for my Instagram. The other 5 are for a separate client project with a different format that I will brief you on separately, and those are delivered as files rather than scheduled.

There are two points in your week. By Wednesday I want 20 clips sitting in the folder. That is a progress check, not a delivery date, because nothing actually goes live until the following Monday. It exists so that if a week is going badly we both find out on Wednesday instead of Sunday night. Then by Sunday night, all 40 are finished and sitting in the folder, ready for the week starting Monday. Once you are doing the publishing too, that means uploaded, captioned and scheduled by Sunday night as well. Between those two points you work whenever you want. Do 10 clips one day and none the next. If you finish everything by Thursday and take the rest of the week off, that is a perfect week and I will not message you.

I want to be straight with you about the workload because I would rather lose you now than in week two. 40 clips a week at 20 to 45 minutes a clip is 13 to 30 hours of editing, plus going through the raw footage on top of that. Call it 3 to 4 hours a day. I film 30 to 40 businesses a day, so a week's folder is usually around 300 visits and you only need 40 clips out of it, but you are still going through most of that footage to find them. I am telling you that so it is not a surprise later. What you get in exchange is that you are never forced to squeeze clips out of a dead day. If Tuesday was garbage, skip Tuesday and pull more from Thursday.

Run that math yourself before you answer. If it does not work for you, please do not apply, and there are no hard feelings. I also need you to commit to at least 4 weeks. I have had an editor take this job and leave after 3 days, and that cost me a week of my schedule.

The pay is $300 a month, paid $70 every week through Wise or PayPal after that week is delivered. The rate is tied to the volume, so if the weekly clip count ever changes, the pay changes with it.

Now the raw files. My glasses have a 5 minute recording limit, so they stop automatically. I also turn them off myself sometimes, like when an owner tells me to come back in 10 minutes. That means one visit to one business often comes to you as 2, 3, or more separate files. The files come in unsorted with names like IMG plus random numbers. Sorting them and working out which files belong to which visit is part of the job.

Every finished video is one visit to one business, beginning to end. One video equals one story about one customer. If a visit was recorded across 4 files, all 4 go together in order and become one video. Never mix footage from different businesses into the same video. When you join files from the same visit, cut the dead time off the end of one and the start of the next so the viewer cannot tell the recording stopped. Skip footage where the person is not conversational or their English is hard to follow. I dump everything I record and not all of it is usable.

I post 5 Reels a day at 9 AM, 12 PM, 2 PM, 5 PM and 8 PM. 3 of them are rejections, where the owner says no, and 2 are sales, where the owner buys. The sales go at 12 PM and 8 PM. The rejections go at 9 AM, 2 PM and 5 PM. So out of your 35 Instagram clips a week, 21 are rejections and 14 are sales. Do not force a boring clip in just to hit the number. A boring video is worse than no video. If a week genuinely cannot produce the mix, tell me and tell me what it can produce.

Now how I want them edited. Fast, no dead air. Cut long pauses, my stutters and ums, long walking, and silence while the owner is thinking. If nothing is happening on screen, remove it.

Read this next part carefully, because most editors go too far one way. Fast editing does not mean cutting every 2 seconds. Do not manufacture cuts to make it feel busy. The rule is simple. If nothing is happening, cut it. If something is happening, leave it alone. If I am walking across a parking lot for 40 seconds, cut it to 3 seconds. But if the owner is talking, asking questions, reacting, or going back and forth with me, that is the interesting part and it stays exactly as it is. Some clips will have very few cuts in the middle because the conversation is good the whole way through. That is correct editing, not lazy editing. And never remove the story. The viewer has to understand what happened from beginning to end.

Here is what you always cut out of a video. First, go watch my Instagram. You will see what I sell and how I sell it. Before I walk into a business I set the product up on my phone. I almost always do this in my car, so it is usually not recorded at all. But sometimes it ends up on camera. If you see it, cut it out. I never want a viewer to watch me setting the product up. I never want a viewer to learn how to do it. That is the only part of my process I keep private. You can show my phone. That is fine. You can show the app on my screen. That is also fine. The only thing you cut is the part where you can see me using the app to set the product up. Keep the moment the product works. Keep the customer's reaction to it. That is usually the best part of the whole video. Never cut that. Cut my personal information every single time. If I say my phone number out loud, cut it. If I write my phone number down, cut it. If my phone number is visible on screen, cut it. Same for my email. Same for anything else someone could use to contact me. Cut boring small talk. Talking about the weather is the usual example. But if the small talk is funny, keep it. Ask yourself one question. Is this interesting to watch? If yes, keep it. If no, cut it.

Every clip follows the same structure. A 3 to 5 second POV style hook text overlay at the top. Then cut straight to me getting out of my car, closing the door and walking to the store, with jump cuts so it feels fast. Then the conversation with the owner, which is the main part. Then the ending, me walking out, turning around, or reacting. Do not delete the ending. Clips run 45 seconds to 2 minutes 15 seconds. The length depends on the conversation. Never force a clip short.

On the technical side, everything is edited in CapCut and you supply your own CapCut Pro. Audio boosted 20 dB. Use meme sound effects like a BRUH or a laugh occasionally when something is funny, but not in every video.

The captions and text look identical on every single video and this is not something you change or get creative with. Captions are CapCut auto captions, Proxima Nova Extra Bold with bold turned on, color hex 00B209, using a specific CapCut text template I will show you in a screenshot. The hook overlay is Montserrat Extra Bold with bold turned on, centered at the top of the screen, placed where Instagram's buttons will not cover it. If you cannot find either of those exact fonts in your CapCut, message me before you pick a substitute. I will send you the font files. Do not quietly swap in something close.

Here is how you export. Use MP4. Use 1080p. Use 30 frames per second. Keep the file under 200 MB. In CapCut, set the project to original ratio. Do not set it to 9:16. Do not crop the video. Do not zoom in. Do not scale the video up to fill the screen. My footage already comes in close to vertical, so leave it exactly the size it is. When it gets posted, Instagram will add black bars at the top and bottom. That is normal. That is what I want. Do not try to fix it.

For all the text I will give you ChatGPT prompts. One for the hook overlay, and separate ones for the Instagram caption, the TikTok caption, and the YouTube Shorts title and description. You watch the clip first, write the context yourself based on what actually happened rather than guessing from the filename, run the prompt, and pick the funniest option. Not the first one. On some clips I say a specific line out loud near the end asking people to comment. When I do, that exact line goes in the caption word for word. When I do not say it, it does not go in.

You will also be publishing, but not right away. Here is how that works. First you do the paid test. Then you do your first full week of 40 clips. I will watch all of them and tell you what needs to change. Until I am happy with your editing, all you do is edit and put the finished files in the folder, and I publish them myself. Once your editing is where I want it, you take over the publishing. When that happens, I will add you to my OpusClip account as a Team Member. You get your own login. You will never have my password. You upload the clips there, paste in the copy from my prompts, tick Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, and schedule the whole week.

Before you tell me a week is done, check all of it. Play every exported file start to finish and confirm it actually works. Do that every single week, starting from your very first one. Once you are doing the publishing, there is more to check. After uploading, confirm each clip is really in OpusClip and not corrupted. Then confirm every clip is scheduled on the correct day of the coming week at the correct time, with sales at 12 PM and 8 PM and rejections at 9 AM, 2 PM and 5 PM. Confirm the caption is attached to each one. Then message me that the week is scheduled.

All times are Michigan/Detroit Eastern Time, not your local time. Before you schedule anything, check that the time zone setting in OpusClip is on Eastern. If you are in Asia you are roughly 12 hours ahead of me, so if that setting is wrong, a 9 AM post goes out at 9 PM my time and the entire week is wrong.

One more thing on delivery. In your first weeks, done means the file is in the folder and it plays. Once you are publishing, done means it is uploaded, it plays, and it is scheduled. Not exported. Not sitting on your desktop. Not "finished." I have had dead files delivered and found out the morning they were supposed to go live. If it is in the folder I am going to assume it is good.

Before the ongoing work starts there is a paid test. I pay $25 flat for 5 clips, and I pay you whether or not I hire you. That $25 is a one-time test payment, not the ongoing rate. If you make my shortlist I will also send you my full training videos covering my editing workflow and settings, and I will ask you to send me a summary in your own words before the test.

Before you apply, please do all 5 of these things, because I will ignore any application that skips a step.

First, open my Instagram, which ---------- and watch 3 videos.

Second, write one sentence telling me what specific product I am selling and who I am selling it to. Name the product.

Third, write the word CUSTARD at the top of your application.

Fourth, send me a short screen recording, under 60 seconds, using Loom or any screen recorder. Open one clip that you edited yourself, play part of it, and talk over it explaining why you cut where you cut and what you removed. Your voice is enough, you do not need to show your face. Do not introduce yourself, do not tell me about your experience, and do not send me a portfolio. Just one clip and your reasoning. There is no attachment button on this site, so upload it to Loom, Google Drive or Dropbox and paste the link directly into your message.

Fifth, answer these four questions. How many minutes does it take you to edit one 60 second video from raw footage? How many hours per day do you actually have available, and what else is using your time right now, including school, other clients, and family? What is your time zone and what hours of the day do you work? Can you commit to at least 4 weeks?

Please do not send a copy paste application, because I read all of them.

You also need good written and spoken English. We will be messaging most days about which clips work and which do not, so I need to be able to explain things and know that you understood. I am not looking for perfect English, but I need you to be comfortable having a real conversation.

After I read the applications I will shortlist 3 people, send them my training videos, and run the paid test. All 3 get the same raw footage and make 5 clips from it. Whoever's editing matches my style the best gets the ongoing work. This is steady work every single week and I want one editor to stay with me for a long time.