Most people open their camera roll, pick the longest clip, and start cutting. That's backwards.

Before I touch any editing tool, I ask myself three questions about every clip:

1. Does this clip have one clear moment?

Not two. Not "a few good parts." One moment that could stand on its own as a 15–60 second short. If I can't point to it in under 10 seconds of scanning, I move to the next clip.

2. Can I hear what matters?

I play the first 5 seconds with audio. If there's wind noise drowning out the voice, or the audio cuts in and out, that's a red flag. Clean audio is 80% of whether a short feels "professional" — and it's the hardest thing to fix after the fact.

3. Is the framing already close enough?

If the subject is a tiny dot in a landscape-mode clip, no amount of cropping will save it for a vertical short. I need the subject to already take up a reasonable amount of the frame.

If a clip passes all three — one clear moment, audible audio, close enough framing — it goes into the edit queue. Everything else gets skipped. No guilt.

This alone has cut my editing time in half. I used to spend 45 minutes trying to "save" bad clips. Now I spend 15 minutes cleaning up good ones.

If you want the full system — the traffic light framework, the pacing method, the export checklist — I put it all in an ebook built for people who shoot on their phone and want to post clean shorts without drowning in editing apps.