Zella Glossary

Animated cards of Zella editing terms

Quick answer: Definitions of every Zella term - from anchor and auto-duck to ripple delete, scopes, and auto-track - in plain language, each with a pointer to the chapter that covers it. Terms marked (Mac) exist only in the desktop app; the iPhone terms get their own list at the end.

On this page: the A-to-Z of terms · on iPhone · how to use the glossary

Plain-language definitions of the terms used throughout this guide. Everything here applies to Mac and iPhone unless it says (Mac).

Anchor - The fixed point that a zoom or a move spins and grows around. It’s also the spot a title or callout stays glued to when you change the frame’s shape. Put the anchor on the right spot and your text and focus stay where you want them. (Chapters 12, 18.)

Aspect ratio - The shape of the video frame: 16:9 (wide, like YouTube), 9:16 (tall, like TikTok), 1:1 (square), 4:5 (Instagram feed). (Chapter 20.)

Auto-Duck - Turning background music down while you talk, then back up in the quiet gaps - automatically. (Chapter 14.)

Auto-Zoom - Zoom-ins that Zella creates for you, based on where you clicked while recording. (Chapter 12.)

Bubble (webcam bubble) (Mac) - Your camera shown as a small shape (circle, wide, or portrait) sitting on top of a screen recording. On iPhone the equivalent is a video overlay layer on its own timeline row. (Chapters 4-5.)

Callout - A mark you add on top of the video to point something out: an arrow, box, oval, label, keystroke, spotlight, number, or blur. (Chapter 19.)

Caption preset - A ready-made look for your subtitles (Word Pop, Hormozi, Karaoke, Pop Box, Neon Glow, Clean Minimal, Beast and more), each with an active-word highlight. There are 10 on the Mac and 9 on iPhone. (Chapter 11.)

Color Board - Controls that adjust the dark, middle, and bright parts of the image separately, with fine tuning for red, green, blue, and brightness. (Chapter 17.)

Color Match - Nudging one clip’s color to look like a frame from another clip. (Chapter 17.)

Cut (B-cut) - Splitting the clip at the playhead (the vertical line marking your current spot) to make an edit point. Press B. (Chapter 9.)

Export - Turning your project into a finished video file (MP4, MOV, GIF, or M4A) with every edit built in. (Chapter 21.)

Fill / Fit - Two ways to fit video into a new frame shape. Fill zooms in to fill the whole frame (the edges may get cut off). Fit shrinks it so nothing is cut, leaving bars around it. (Chapter 20.)

Filler words - Throwaway words like “um,” “uh,” “like,” “you know,” and a sentence-starting “so” or “OK” that Remove Fillers can cut out. (Chapter 10.)

Graph editor - A tool with a bendable curve that lets you control how a keyframe animation speeds up and slows down. (Chapter 12.)

J-cut / L-cut - Ways to make a cut feel smoother. In a J-cut you hear the next clip’s audio before you see it. In an L-cut you keep hearing the old clip’s audio after the picture has changed. (Chapter 14.)

Keyframe - A saved setting (size, position, see-through amount, or rotation) at one moment in time. Zella smoothly animates between keyframes. (Chapter 12.)

LUT / Look - A ready-made color style (like Teal & Orange or Kodachrome), with a slider for how strong it is. There are 28 on the Mac (3 of them Founder-exclusive) and 25 on iPhone. (Chapter 17.)

Loudness (LUFS) - A way to measure how loud audio actually sounds to your ears. Polish Voice aims for about −14 LUFS, the standard for social media and YouTube. (Chapter 14.)

Mask - A rectangle or oval (with soft edges) that limits an effect or color change to just one part of the frame. (Chapter 16.)

Motion blur - The natural blur that shows up on fast zooms and moves, so they look smooth instead of jumpy. (Chapter 12.)

Platform preset - A target like TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram that automatically sets the right frame shape and size for your video. (Chapters 20-21.)

Polish Voice - An automatic voice cleanup that cuts low rumble, softens harsh “s” sounds, evens out the volume, and sets a standard loudness. (Chapter 14.)

Region recording (Mac) - Recording just a rectangle you draw on the screen, instead of the whole display. Window and region capture are Mac-only; on iPhone you capture the screen or the whole device with ReplayKit instead. (Chapter 4.)

Reframe - Changing your project’s frame shape (for example, from wide 16:9 to tall 9:16) by cropping or fitting. (Chapter 20.)

Ripple delete - Deleting a chunk and then sliding everything after it back to close the empty gap. (Chapter 9.)

Scopes - A live chart of how bright the image is, so you can judge brightness and contrast by the numbers instead of by eye. (Chapter 17.)

Setup panel (Mac) - The recording window that opens from the menu bar (“Ready to record”). (Chapter 3.)

Snapshot (versioned) - A saved earlier version of your project that you can go back to. (Chapter 22.)

Speed ramp - A speed change that eases in and out smoothly across a section, instead of switching to a fixed speed all at once. (Chapter 13.)

Still clip - A short video clip made from an imported photo. (Chapter 8.)

Studio (editor) - Zella’s editing window. It opens after you record or when you open a file. (Chapter 7.)

Studio Settings (Mac) - The panel where you set up your camera, bubble, and background (with tabs for Camera, Border, Zoom, Cursor, and Export). (Chapter 5.)

Transition - A blend between two clips where they meet at a cut. There are 25, the same catalog on Mac and iPhone. (Chapter 15.)

Transcript - The text version of your speech that Zella creates on your own device, used for captions and cutting filler words. (Chapters 10-11.)

Vision auto-track (Mac) - Follows a face or the main subject and keeps them in frame while you crop to a tall video. On iPhone the same job is done by Make Vertical, which is face-aware. (Chapter 20.)

On iPhone

These terms only come up on the phone. Full detail lives in the iOS chapters.

Auto-Polish - The flagship one-tap edit. It cuts silences and fillers, cuts again where you naturally pause, cross-dissolves every join, adds keyword captions with emoji, removes noise and polishes the voice, opens with a hook title and a punch-in, places emphasis zooms, lays a mood-matched music bed, and breaks up static stretches. It deliberately applies no colour grade and no sound effects. (43.)

Make it Viral - Auto-Polish’s bolder sibling, one row below it. Runs the same pass, then adds the two layers Auto-Polish leaves out: a colour pop (skipped if you have graded a clip yourself) and matched sound effects under the strongest cuts. On Mac and iPhone, free on every plan. (43.)

Clean Up - The narrow version of Auto-Polish: silences and filler words only. (43.)

Make Vertical - A one-tap, face-aware 9:16 reframe with auto-tracking. The phone’s answer to Fill plus crop offset plus auto-track. (43, 20.)

Cutaway card - A generated gradient card carrying a keyword from your captions, dropped onto the timeline as b-roll. Made on-device, so it needs no key and no account. (34, 43.)

Whole-device broadcast - ReplayKit capture across the entire device, including other apps, started from the system broadcast picker. (41.)

Live background - Blur, cut out or replace what’s behind you while you film, segmented on the Neural Engine and visible in the viewfinder. (41.)

Text Behind Subject - A title that sits between your background and you, using the on-device subject cutout. (44.)

Caption translation - Rewriting your caption track into any of 19 languages, entirely on-device via Apple’s Translation framework. Needs iOS 18 or later. (44.)

Auto sound at cuts - One tap that places a matched whoosh, impact or riser under every transition. Tap again to remove the auto-placed set; sounds you placed yourself stay. (45, 31.)

Voice tone - The character Polish Voice gives your narration: Natural, Warm, Bright, Podcast or Cinematic. (45.)

Depth toolset - Keyframes with the curve editor, luma scopes, Color Match, feathered masks, speed ramps and per-drum Beat Sync. It is Zella Pro on iPhone and Mac alike, and it gates the controls, not your video. (33.)

.zella file - The project handoff format. Export one on the phone and open it on the Mac, or the other way around; your timeline, cuts, captions and effects travel with it. (46.)

Pro Week - The first seven days after a new install, when the complete Pro feature set is free. No card, no account, nothing to cancel. On day eight the app becomes the permanent free tier and nothing you made stops working. (40.)

Universal Purchase - One payment of $89 unlocks Zella Pro on Mac and iPhone together. (47.)

End of documentation. Return to the index.

Animated cards defining Zella editing terms

How to use the glossary

Terms are grouped by where you run into them - recording, timeline, audio, color, and export.
Each entry links to the full guide for that feature, so you can jump from “what is it” to “how do I do it.”
Not sure what a button does? Search this page for its label before digging through menus.
Terms marked (Mac) exist only in the desktop app. The iPhone list covers the words you’ll only meet on touch.