Fourteen terms you will meet making vertical video, defined plainly.
This glossary defines the working vocabulary of short-form vertical video: word-level timestamps, burned-in and closed captions, b-roll, aspect ratio, safe zones, frame rate and render credits, alongside the four terms Cueits uses for its own parts. Each definition is one sentence, and the terms Cueits coined are marked as ours rather than presented as industry-standard.
Word-level timestamps are transcription output that carries a start and end time for every individual word, rather than one time range per line or per sentence.
Line-level timing is enough to display a subtitle. It is not enough to highlight the word being spoken, or to make anything else on screen arrive on a particular syllable.
Everything Cueits does rests on this: a caption highlight and an infographic reveal are both anchored to a single word's start time.
A talking-head video is footage of one person speaking directly to camera, framed from roughly the chest up, with no cutaways carrying the explanation.
It is the default format for founders, educators and analysts on short-form platforms, because it needs no crew and no location.
Its weakness is that everything the video knows is carried by speech alone, which is what a graphic layer is usually added to fix.
Burned-in captions, also called open captions or hardcoded captions, are text rendered permanently into the video's pixels rather than delivered as a separate subtitle track.
The trade is control against flexibility. Burned-in text looks identical everywhere and cannot be switched off, styled away or stripped by a platform; a subtitle track can be translated and toggled, and is rendered in whatever font the player decides.
Short-form platforms are where burned-in captions won, because autoplay is muted and the caption has to be part of the picture.
Closed captions are a separate, selectable text track delivered alongside a video, which the viewer can turn on, turn off, or switch languages on.
They exist for accessibility first and carry non-speech information — a speaker change, a sound effect — that subtitles usually leave out.
They are not what most short-form creators mean by captions. On a vertical feed, the styled text on screen is almost always burned in.
B-roll is supplementary footage cut over the main recording — a product shot, a screen recording, a stock clip — used to illustrate what is being said or to hide a cut.
It is the traditional answer to a talking-head video that needs something to look at, and it is expensive: either you shoot it or you license it, and either way somebody places it.
A generated infographic panel is an alternative answer to the same problem, and unlike stock b-roll it can state the actual figure being discussed.
An infographic video is a video whose information is carried by on-screen graphics — charts, figures, labelled lists, callouts — as well as by narration.
In short-form vertical video it usually means a panel above or beside the speaker, rather than a full-screen motion-graphics piece with a voiceover.
The useful distinction is between a template you type numbers into and a composition generated for one script. A template produces videos that look like each other; a composition follows the shape of the argument.
Aspect ratio is the proportion of a video's width to its height, written as two numbers — 9:16 for a vertical short, 16:9 for a landscape video, 1:1 for a square.
Short-form feeds are 9:16, usually delivered at 1080×1920 pixels. A 16:9 video posted there is either letterboxed or centre-cropped, and a centre crop of a talking head removes most of the frame.
Cueits renders a Cued Animation at 1080×1920 or 1920×1080. A caption video keeps whatever shape it was uploaded in.
A safe zone is the part of a vertical frame that platform interface elements never cover — roughly the middle band, once the top status area and the bottom row of captions, handles and buttons are excluded.
Text placed outside it is legible in an editor and hidden behind a share button in the feed, which is a mistake nobody catches until the video is live.
The exact margins differ per platform and change without notice, which is why designs tend to keep a generous margin rather than a measured one.
Frame rate is the number of still images a video shows per second, written as fps — 30fps is the short-form standard and 60fps is twice as smooth and twice as expensive to render.
For a talking head, 30fps is indistinguishable from 60 to almost every viewer. Motion graphics and fast camera movement are where the difference shows.
Because every frame is drawn, 60fps costs meaningfully more machine time. In Cueits it is a paid-plan option and carries a surcharge.
A render credit is a unit of metered machine time, spent when a video is exported rather than when it is edited.
Metering by credits rather than by video is what lets a twenty-second clip and a ten-minute one cost different amounts, which a per-video allowance cannot express.
In Cueits a Cued Animation costs 30 credits per minute of source video and a caption video 20, rounded up to the whole minute. The free plan includes 100 credits a month.
A Cued Animation is Cueits' name for a video in which a generated infographic panel is revealed in step with the speaker, each element appearing on the exact word that motivates it.
The word cued is doing the work. The panel is not playing on its own timeline alongside the speech; every part of it is cued by a specific word in the transcript.
It is the product's distinguishing claim, and the reason the transcription has to be word-level rather than line-level.
A beat, in Cueits, is one stretch of speech that makes a single point, and the unit the panel is planned in — one beat gets one panel.
Beats tile the video: no gaps, no overlaps, and the last one ends where the video does. Their boundaries are snapped to word starts, so a panel never changes in the middle of a word.
The beat is what you edit. Moving a boundary, changing the wording or swapping the element a beat draws are all beat-level operations.
An animation preset is one of Cueits' thirty-one complete panel identities — its own typefaces, palette, rule treatment and between one and six signature elements that no other preset draws.
It is deliberately not a colour scheme. Two presets given the same transcript produce panels that differ in typography and in which elements are used, not only in hue.
Five are available on the free plan. It is a different thing from a caption style, which applies to the captions product.
A caption style is one of Cueits' thirty-seven composed looks for animated captions, combining a layout, a typeface, a palette and how the words arrive and are emphasised.
Trying one costs nothing: styling repaints the preview instantly and no credit is spent until export.
Five are available on the free plan, and the font, size, colours and position can be adjusted on any of them.
Cueits makes the graphic layer these words describe. Free to try, no card.
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