Your first Reel

Open Content Hub from the sidebar and click the REELS tab.

The same filters apply — Pillar, Topic, Season, Audience — and the yellow EDITOR badge still marks the templates you can open and edit here.

Click a card. The preview shows the reel playing, an About this template section, an example Caption, and How to use it.

That last section usually tells you what footage the template expects. Reels ask for more than posts do — often four or five separate clips — so it's worth knowing before you start whether you've got them.

Hit Open in Editor. That makes a project on your account, which you'll find later under My Projects. It does not save on its own — hit Save before you close the tab. The title bar shows (unsaved) while there's work you haven't saved, and the editor asks before letting you leave.

The editor opens in Basic mode. The panel on the right lists a slot for every clip in the template — Clip 1, Clip 2 and so on — and nothing else. Everything that makes the template work, the timing, the text, the music, is left alone.

The player underneath the canvas is a real preview: press play and watch the whole thing before you commit to a render.

This is the whole job. There are two ways to do it, and you only need one — pick whichever suits what you've got.

Either: pick each clip yourself

Stay on the Edit tab, click a slot, and choose the replacement. Straightforward, and the right call when you know exactly which clip goes where — say you filmed the five shots this template asks for, in order.

Or: let Autofill do it for you

Open the Media tab and choose Autofill.

Instead of hunting for each clip yourself, it suggests matches for every slot at once, ranked. ORIGINAL is what the template shipped with; BEST is the strongest match from your own library. Take them one slot at a time, or fill every slot in one go with the button at the top right.

The Media from dropdown decides where the suggestions come from — your own uploads, or the TST stock library if you haven't uploaded anything yet.

Either way, you can mix the two: Autofill everything, then go back to Edit and change the one slot it got wrong.

Basic mode gives you the slots and nothing else, which is what makes it quick. If the template is nearly right but something needs moving, flip the Basic / Advanced toggle at the top.

Advanced opens the full timeline. Every clip and every line of text is a block you can drag, trim, re-order and re-time, on its own track, with the audio underneath. Use it when a clip needs to run longer, the text lands too early, or you want to add something of your own.

You don't need any of it for a first reel — and Basic is deliberately harder to break. But it's the difference between abandoning a template and fixing it. See The timeline when you're ready.

Open the Caption tab. The template comes with an example caption; Generate with AI rewrites it in your voice using your Settings → AI Settings profile.

As with a feed post, you can leave this until the scheduling step — the caption follows you there.

Hit Export. There's no dialog to fill in — the render starts straight away.

This is the one part of the process you wait for. Video is rendered on our servers, not in your browser, so a reel takes a couple of minutes depending on how long it is and how many clips it has.

You don't have to sit and watch it. Progress shows bottom-right, and you can close the tab — the render keeps going and the finished file will be waiting for you in Settings → Exports.

When the render finishes you get the same Download to Phone QR code as a feed post.

Scan it with your phone camera and the video downloads straight to it — no cable, no emailing it to yourself. This is the fastest way from "finished on my laptop" to "ready to post on my phone", and it's the step most people miss.

Hit Schedule.

Three things to set:

• When — Next available picks the next slot from the posting times in your settings,

which is usually the right answer. Pick a date and time if you have something specific in mind.

• Platform — Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X or TikTok. This decides which reminder you

get; the file is the same either way.

• Caption — the one you wrote, still editable. Personalize rewrites it in your voice

if you skipped that earlier.

Down the left it shows the export that's going out with the reminder, with a QR code so you can send it to your phone from here too — you don't have to go back and export again.

Then hit Schedule. It lands on Content Calendar in the sidebar, where you can see the week and drag things around.