StudioCreating a Reel
A reel is built from a SmartDoc session. Open the session and create a reel from it — the recording is the source, so there is nothing to upload and no separate asset to manage.
Studio offers presets: recipes that set format, length and engine together. Start here rather than assembling settings by hand.
The settings are not independent. Some engines only render well at certain formats, and some story shapes need a runtime the preset already accounts for — so a preset is a set of choices known to work together.
Some presets deliberately carry no maximum duration. Their length comes from the source recording rather than from the template. That is intentional: a walkthrough of a twelve-step configuration should not be cut to fit a sixty-second slot, because the last four steps are usually the ones people were confused about.
💡 Generate your first reel from a preset without changing anything. A real clip to react to beats predicting settings from a form.
One behavioural difference is worth knowing: the avatar engine renders 4:5 natively, producing a true 4:5 clip. Every other engine produces 9:16 and art-directs it into the 4:5 frame. The result is perfectly usable, but it is composition rather than native framing, and you may notice it on shots with text near the edges.
💡 For documentation embeds, 16:9 is almost always right. The reader lays out for it. A vertical clip in a prose column either shrinks to unreadable or pushes everything below it off the screen.
The most consequential setting on the form, and deliberately yours rather than the AI’s.
The trade-off is attention versus completeness. all guarantees nothing is missing but asks a lot of a casual viewer. none gets watched but teaches nothing. mixed is the compromise most documentation video actually wants.
⚠️ Whichever mode you pick, the guarantee holds. auto deciding to show a screen means showing a recorded one, never generating a substitute.
Legacy note: screen-mode values persisted by older reels (all and auto in some positions) are read as mixed by the server. If an older reel does not match what you remember choosing, that mapping is why. It does not need fixing.
A reel reports a phase while it works. Knowing what they mean turns a long wait into a legible one.
planning → scripting → imaging → voicing → framing → awaiting_review → animating → presenting → scoring → composing
Not every phase runs for every engine. scripting, framing, awaiting_review, animating and presenting belong to engines that put characters on screen; a plain screen-led reel skips straight past them.
⚠️ awaiting_review is a pause, not a failure. The reel has drawn its story and is holding before the long, expensive part until you approve it.
This is the most important thing to understand about the pipeline, and the thing most often misread as a stall.
Character animation is the slowest and costliest stage. Running it on a story you were going to reject is money spent on nothing. So the engine does all the cheap thinking first, then stops and shows you what it intends to make.
💡 Treat the review gate as the actual decision point. It is where your judgement is worth the most and where changing your mind is cheapest.