Every One-Click Tool in Zella’s Sidebar

Quick answer: the right-hand sidebar in the Mac editor is a list of one-click tools. Each one does a whole job on its own - no keyframes, no settings to learn. Click it once to apply, click it again to remove. If a tool can’t run on your video it tells you why in a short message under the button, rather than doing nothing. On iPhone the same idea is one tap deeper: Auto-Polish runs a whole retention edit by itself, with Clean Up, Make Vertical, Remove background, Add cutaways and Auto sound at cuts available individually.

On this page: how the sidebar is organised · Smart Zooms · Auto-Transitions · Studio Glow · Cinematic Move · Beat Punch · Text Behind Me · Keep My Face Centered · UGC Cut · when a button refuses · on iPhone · FAQ

The button-by-button reference below describes the Mac sidebar. For the touch version, jump to On iPhone.

How the sidebar is organised

The tools are grouped by how often a typical video needs them, not by how clever they are:

• EVERY VIDEO - the ones almost every clip wants: UGC Cut, Enable Captions, Remove Noise, Polish Voice, Cut Empty Space, Remove Filler Word.
• OFTEN - Make Vertical, Remove Background, Auto-Zoom Clicks (or Smart Zooms), Auto-Transitions, Auto-Duck Music, Add B-Roll.
• FINISHING TOUCHES - Auto Sound, Beat Punch, Studio Glow, Cinematic Move, Text Behind Me.

Every one of them is a toggle. Applying a tool records one undo step, so ⌘Z always puts your timeline back exactly as it was.

Smart Zooms

What it does. Adds gentle punch-in zooms where a new phrase starts, aimed at your face.

When to use it. Smart Zooms is the version for camera videos with no recorded clicks - a talking-head, a phone import, anything that isn’t a screen recording. If Zella recorded your cursor, you’ll see Auto-Zoom Clicks in this slot instead, which zooms toward each click. You get one or the other, never both, because they solve the same problem from different signals.

How to use it. Click Smart Zooms. Zella listens for the gaps between phrases and places a zoom at each fresh start. Click it again to remove only the zooms it added - any zoom blocks you placed by hand are left alone.

If nothing happens. On a short or continuously-spoken clip you’ll see “No clear pauses found”. That is Smart Zooms telling you the audio has no phrase boundaries to work from, not a failure - try Auto-Zoom Clicks on a screen recording, or place zoom blocks yourself in the Effects tab.

Auto-Transitions

What it does. Picks a transition for each of your cuts, per cut, instead of stamping the same one everywhere.

How it chooses. Zella looks at what happens either side of the join: a zoom punch on a jump cut, a dissolve when the shot stays in the same scene, a fade on a scene change. If you’ve saved a look in My Templates that pins one transition, that choice wins for every join instead.

What you need first. Cuts. Auto-Transitions places transitions on joins, so a timeline with no cuts has nowhere to put them. Split your clip first (⌘B at the playhead), or run Cut Empty Space and let the silence removal create the joins for you.

Removing them. Click again to take every auto-placed transition back off.

Studio Glow

What it does. Adds a soft backlight behind you plus a contact shadow where you meet the background - the separation that makes a cut-out look like it was lit, not pasted.

What you need first. A background. Studio Glow works on a replaced or removed background, so it has nothing to light without one. Click Remove Background (or pick a background in the Background panel) first. Until you do, the button answers “Apply a background first” rather than silently doing nothing.

How to use it. Apply a background → click Studio Glow. Click again to switch the glow and contact shadow back off, leaving the background in place.

Cinematic Move

What it does. Adds a slow camera push-in across the clip - the drift a real operator gives a static shot so it never feels locked off.

What you need first. A clip longer than two seconds. Anything shorter has no room for the move to read, and the button says “Clip too short”.

Good to know. It works on any clip, with or without a background. If a background is active, Zella also drifts the subject a touch against it, which deepens the effect. Click again to remove the move (and the subject drift, if it added one).

Beat Punch

What it does. Pulses a zoom on the drops in your music - the loud, standout hits you actually feel, the way viral edits cut.

Beat Punch vs Beat Sync. These are two different tools and it’s worth knowing which you want:

Beat Punch deliberately ignores the steady kick-and-hat groove. Punching on every beat reads as “punching on everything”; punching on drops reads as editing.

What you need first. Audio with real dynamics. On a clip with none, Beat Punch reports how many drops it found - if that’s zero, there was nothing to punch on.

Text Behind Me

What it does. Puts a huge word behind you, with your outline cutting through it - the classic creator-intro look.

What you need first. A camera-only clip. The effect masks the subject of the main clip, so the person has to be the main clip. On a screen recording where you appear in a camera bubble, the button answers “Only for camera-only clips, not a bubble” - the person there lives inside a picture-in-picture, and there’s no full-frame subject to cut around.

How to use it. Click Text Behind Me on a camera clip. Zella drops in a large word, sets it to sit behind you, bakes the subject cut-out, and opens the text editor so you can type over the placeholder straight away.

Keep My Face Centered

What it does. Follows your face so you stay in frame - essential when you reframe a wide recording to a vertical crop and your head would otherwise drift out of the shot.

How it behaves. Zella tracks the face across the clip and pans the crop to match. On a recording with a camera bubble it centres on the bubble instead, and tells you which of the two it did.

Where it matters most. Run it after Make Vertical - going from 16:9 to 9:16 throws away most of the width, and this is what decides which width you keep.

UGC Cut

What it does. Cuts you out of the room so you float over the screen recording - the UGC look Zella is built for. It leads the sidebar because it’s the thing most people come here to do.

Re-running it. Pressing UGC Cut forces a fresh cut-out at full quality rather than reusing the existing one. That’s deliberate: the reason you press it a second time is that the edge looked wrong, so reusing the same edge would visibly do nothing.

What it produces. A durable cut-out saved beside your recording, so reopening the project is instant and never re-does the work. See Camera & Backgrounds for edge quality and background options.

When a button refuses

Every one-click tool that can’t run says why in a short message under the button, then clears itself. It never just sits there. The messages you’re most likely to see:

If you click a tool and see nothing at all - no change and no message - that’s a bug worth telling us about.

On iPhone

The phone has the same philosophy with a different shape. Rather than a column of single-purpose buttons, the headline is Auto-Polish: one tap that runs the whole retention edit - silences and fillers cut, extra cuts where you naturally pause, a cross-dissolve on every join, keyword captions with emoji, noise removal and voice polish, a hook title with an opening punch-in, emphasis zooms on your strongest words, a mood-matched music bed that ducks and swells, and a final pass that breaks up any stretch still static after six seconds.

Notably, Auto-Polish applies no colour grade and no sound effects - both were removed after real takes came back too busy. Directly beneath it sits Make it Viral, which runs that same pass and adds exactly those two layers back: a colour pop, and matched sound effects under the strongest cuts.

Everything it does is also available on its own:

Auto-Zoom Clicks has no counterpart on the phone, and it can’t: it reads the cursor clicks recorded during a Mac screen capture, and a touchscreen produces none. Emphasis zooms replace it by reading your speech instead of your mouse.

Two habits carry over unchanged. Every tap is undoable, and re-running Auto-Polish never stacks doubles - it replaces its own previous work, so a second run is always safe.

Full detail: on-device AI · sound · captions, titles & callouts.

One-click tools FAQ

Can I use several at once? Yes, and most videos do. A common stack is Cut Empty Space → Auto-Transitions → Smart Zooms → Studio Glow. Each records its own undo step.

Do they change my original file? No. Everything here is an edit on the timeline. Your recording on disk is never modified.

Why do I see Auto-Zoom Clicks on one project and Smart Zooms on another? Because they read different signals. Screen recordings carry your cursor track, so you get the click-driven version; camera clips don’t, so you get the phrase-driven one.

Does clicking again always undo it? Yes - every tool on this list is a toggle, and ⌘Z works as well.

Is there a one-click sidebar on iPhone? The same jobs are there, arranged differently. Auto-Polish does most of this list in a single tap, and Clean Up, Make Vertical, Remove background, Add cutaways and Auto sound at cuts run individually. See On iPhone.

Can I run Auto-Polish twice? Yes - it replaces its own previous work rather than stacking doubles, so a re-run is always safe.

Does Auto-Polish colour-grade my video? No, deliberately. Grading is a taste call, so it leaves your colour alone and the looks stay one tap away in Effects → Looks.

Pro tips & gotchas

• Cut first, then transition. Auto-Transitions has nothing to do on a timeline with no joins. Run your cuts before reaching for it.
• Background before glow. Studio Glow is a lighting pass over a background, not a background itself.
• Beat Punch is for drops, not beats. If you want a pulse on every beat, you want Beat Sync in the Effects tab.
• Read the little message. These tools are chatty on purpose - the line under the button usually names exactly what’s missing.
• On the phone, start with Auto-Polish, then fine-tune by hand. It does the boring 80% of this whole page in one tap - and leaves your colour alone on purpose.

Related: Reframe → · Camera & backgrounds → · Beat Sync → · Auto B-Roll → · On-device AI on iPhone →