An episode editor inside the series page
The most common support request we get is not about money. It is a black bar, or three seconds of a title card nobody wants.
In short
Generated Worlds creators can trim an episode's start and end and crop its frame from the series page in Creator Studio. The edit re-encodes the stored master rather than asking for a new upload, so a mistake that used to cost a re-export and an upload now costs a few minutes and no bandwidth.
Two flaws account for most of what looks wrong in a short drama feed, and neither is a writing problem. The first is a few seconds of dead air at the top of an episode — a title card, a logo sting, a beat of silence before the first line. In a feed where a viewer decides in the first seconds, that is the whole decision spent on nothing. The second is a vertical video that was exported inside a horizontal frame, so it arrives with black bars down both sides and plays as a small picture in the middle of a phone.
Until this month the fix for either was: open the editor you made it in, export again, upload again, wait for processing again. For a creator with a fifty-episode season and a habit of the same three-second sting, that is a day of work for something that is not work.
01What it does
- Trim: set a new start and end on an episode, preview it, apply it.
- Crop: pick the part of the frame that should fill a phone, including rescuing vertical video that was exported inside a horizontal frame.
- Apply a crop across a whole series, because the flaw is almost never in one episode alone.
02Why it re-encodes instead of re-uploading
We keep the master an episode was made from. An edit is therefore a job on a file we already hold: the new cut is rendered, the playback versions are rebuilt, and the episode keeps its place, its URL, its view history and everything a viewer might have unlocked. Asking for a new upload would have been easier to build and would have thrown all of that away, which is how you end up with creators whose episode 7 is a new episode 7 and whose analytics no longer make sense.
Encoding runs on the systems built for it rather than anywhere near the ones serving pages. Video work and page serving have nothing in common except a tendency to want the same machine at the same moment.
What it does not do
This is a repair tool, not an editing suite. There is no timeline, no multi-clip assembly, no audio work, no captions burnt in. If your cut needs a decision rather than a correction, it belongs in the editor you already use — we are not trying to replace it, and we do not think a platform should.
Questions
- Can I fix an episode after publishing it on Generated Worlds?
- Yes. Open the series in Creator Studio, choose the episode, and trim its start and end or change its crop. The episode keeps its number, its link and its history; viewers who had unlocked it keep access.
- My vertical video has black bars on both sides. Can that be fixed?
- Yes, with the crop tool, and it can be applied to a whole series at once. That case — a vertical picture exported inside a horizontal frame — is the most common upload flaw we see.
Keep reading
- Viewer Journey: see which episode loses your audience
Viewer Journey shows a short drama creator how far viewers get through their series, which episodes hold them and what they did next — with a worked example of how to read the charts.
- Tap to send a heart, hold to send a token
One control on the player does two things: a tap sends a free heart to the creator, a hold sends a token from the viewer's wallet. Both reach the studio that made the episode.
All posts from the Generated Worlds Tech Blog.