At the end of July Instagram published on its creators blog a five-step guide to editing short videos. Beat markers, a library of popular formats, templates, statistics after publication. Each of those tools is part of Edits, the app Meta released last year and which is meant to push out the rival CapCut.
The text is at the same time a free helper for the audience and a manual for one app. For a brand director who commissions short videos both externally and internally, the second level matters more. Whoever owns the production tool also holds the format into which the content has to fit.
What is in the guide
Instagram lists five points: open a video with a hook, cut to the rhythm of the audio, add text and graphics for viewing without sound, read statistics after publication, and keep production in one environment through templates and popular formats. The whole piece is framed by the line: “The difference between a video people skip and a video people save usually comes down to the edit. It’s not about expensive gear or a film degree.”
The tools the text points to are, by coincidence, all in Edits. Beat markers mark where the beats fall in the audio. The Inspiration tab offers current formats. Templates and direct publishing shorten the path from camera to feed. The Insights tab shows watch time, the points where viewers leave, and the save and share rates. Although the post is headed “from creators”, it does not name a single creator. It reads as a product manual.
Edits as a response to CapCut
Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced Edits on 19 January 2025, in the middle of the US TikTok ban, when CapCut had been pulled from the App Store and Google Play in the US. “There’s a lot going on right now, but no matter what happens, it’s our job to provide the best possible tools for creators,” he wrote at the time. According to him, Edits is meant to be “more for creators than casual video makers”.
The app launched on 22 April 2025 for free on iOS and Android. It exports without a watermark and offers filters, transitions, automatic captions in several languages and access to Instagram’s music library. Projects can be shared directly to Instagram or Facebook and tracked with the same statistics as Reels. That keeps creators inside Meta’s ecosystem from the first cut to publication.
The target is clear. CapCut belongs to ByteDance, the same owner as TikTok, and is one of the largest non-gaming apps in the world. According to Sensor Tower, in the second quarter of 2025 it ranked among the ten non-game apps with the highest in-app purchase revenue. With this step Meta is trying to replace a tool on which a large part of short video is built.
Whoever owns the tool controls the format
In Edits the editor and the statistics form one loop. The app that shows creators where viewers leave and what they save also teaches them to cut in exactly the way the platform’s algorithm rewards. The data on that behaviour stays with the platform. The creator or the brand that paid for the video does not have the same access to it.
YouTube is making the same move. It launched its own editing app, YouTube Create, in beta on Android in September 2023 and presented it on iPhone in December 2025. It competes directly with CapCut, InShot and KineMaster, and in 2025 YouTube added AI-assisted editing to it. Alongside Edits, Meta also has Trial Reels, a feature launched on 10 December 2024 that lets a video be tested on people outside a creator’s followers. A LinkedIn post that summarised and expanded the editing guide also pointed precisely to Trial Reels.
The European layer
For European brands the choice of tool also has a regulatory dimension. CapCut shares its owner with TikTok, and that owner is under pressure in Europe. On 24 July 2026 the European Commission preliminarily charged TikTok with breaching the Digital Services Act, because its default settings did not keep minors’ profiles private. The same tool was temporarily removed from US app stores at the start of 2025 during the TikTok ban. The concrete impact on CapCut’s availability in Europe will depend on how the rules are interpreted and enforced.
Meta and YouTube offer a production tool with a clear owner and availability in Europe. That is the card they hold against an app with an uncertain legal status. An editing tool is not neutral. It determines where content is made, who owns the data on its performance and which feed it ultimately lands in.
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