Instagram builds the first cut of your Reel

What changed

Filming was always the fast part. You record the before and after, you record twenty seconds talking through the job, and the clips sit in your gallery waiting for a free evening that never arrives. Putting them together was all manual: open each piece, trim the start, trim the end, join them, then check whether the sound got strange at the joins.

First Draft does that first pass for you. It reads the clips you picked, cuts the pauses and gives back an assembled video. Instagram says, according to TechCrunch, that first cut is ready in under ten seconds.

How to use it on your phone

1. Open the Instagram camera and record, or go straight to your Reels gallery.
2. Select the clips you want in the video.
3. Tap the First Draft option.
4. Wait for the automatic cut and watch what came back.
5. Adjust whatever you want: reorder the clips or work on each one, as WeRSM describes it.

Nothing it assembles is locked. The automatic cut is a starting point you edit on top of.

What this changes if you run a small business

Think about an ordinary Tuesday. You finish a job, record half a minute of the result, record another piece explaining what you did, and save both on your phone. At lunch you open Instagram to post, remember you still have to cut those two videos, and close the app. The week goes by and the clips are still there.

Recording is quick. Editing is what gets pushed to later, and later tends not to come. When the first version arrives already cut, the work left is watching it and adjusting, and that fits into a lunch break.

This step-by-step way of filming shows up in our reference base. Among the service Reels we collected on 7 August 2026, a car body shop in Santarém, Brazil, has a Reel of about two minutes that shows, in the owner's words (translated from Portuguese), "a bit of each step of this job to the end, through the bodywork, prep and paint". On the collection date it had 13.7 million views.

A practical way to think about it: record in short separate pieces, one for each step of the job. The feature was built to join several clips, and each piece becomes a section you can reorder or adjust later.

What to do this week

1. Record in pieces. On your next job, stop and record three or four short clips rather than a single continuous take. That way each step becomes a clip for the feature to join.
2. Start with what you repeat on WhatsApp. The explanation you type out every week for a new client is already a script, and you know it by heart.
3. Do not redo the whole cut. Watch the version it assembled and touch only the opening, which is where someone decides whether to keep watching.
4. Check the sound before you publish. Since it removes the pauses, your speech ends up tighter, so listen once to hear whether it still sounds natural.

What stays the same

• The first cut is a starting point. It assembles the sequence, and you still decide what stays in the video and what goes.
• At launch it was iPhone only. It reached the Apple handsets first, and the reports we checked up to 18 September 2026 give no Android date.
• The hook is still yours. It cuts what you already recorded, so the first line of the video depends on what you said while filming.
• Caption and CTA are still on you. The feature works on the picture and the cut, and the text under the video is yours to write.

If posting regularly is what you struggle with, have a look at the kind of content that brings new followers. This feature also arrived alongside two others of the same kind: swapping the audio on a post already published and reordering your profile grid.

Editing stopped being the excuse

For a long time video died at the editing stage, because assembling it meant sitting down with time to spare and nobody had that hour. With the first cut coming out automatically, what separates a saved clip from a published Reel is opening the app and looking. What stays with you is choosing the subject and talking the way you talk.

Frequently asked questions