FOR SOCIAL & REELS
Reels that stop the scroll, made on Mac or iPhone.
Kinetic captions, callouts and auto-duck music are built in. Make a 9:16 reel from a screen recording in one pass.
THE PAIN
- Generic captions blend into the feed
- Music drowns out your voice
- Manual cropping ruins the framing
THE WORKFLOW
Record or import footage
Captions, callouts and a ducked music bed
Auto-track reframe to 9:16, export
FROM YOUR PHONE
The whole reel workflow is on the phone: record, Auto-Polish, word-pop captions, a ducked music bed and a 9:16 export straight into TikTok, Reels or Shorts. Start on the phone and finish on the Mac if you would rather.
Zella for iPhone →WHEN THIS OUTGROWS THE FREE TIER
Reels are short, so the 2-minute ceiling rarely bites. What does is volume: saved templates and the multi-aspect queue turn a daily post from a chore into a habit.
Everything else here is free forever: the complete editor, all the AI, unlimited recording, and watermark-free export up to 2 minutes at 1080p. Pro is $89 once and covers Mac and iPhone on a single purchase. See pricing →
Short-form punishes slowness. The window between filming something and it being worth posting is short, and by the time you have opened a desktop editor, trimmed the dead air, typed the captions and re-cropped for a second platform, the moment has usually passed.
Zella is aimed squarely at that loop. Auto-Polish cuts the silences and filler, adds keyword captions with the active word popping as it is spoken, drops a matched sound under each cut and scores the thing with music that ducks under your voice. Make Vertical reframes a horizontal recording to 9:16 around your face rather than a blind centre crop.
The result is a post-ready vertical cut in a couple of taps, made on the phone you filmed it with, with nothing uploaded to anyone.
WHAT YOU ACTUALLY SHIP
A hook that survives the first second
Auto-Polish adds a hook title with an opening zoom, which is the part most people skip and the part that decides whether anyone stays.
Captions that read on mute
Nine caption presets on iPhone with active-word highlighting, including styles built for the way short-form actually gets watched.
A horizontal take, made vertical
Make Vertical tracks your face and reframes to 9:16, so a video you shot the wrong way round is still usable.
Zooms that land on the beat
Beat Sync detects the beats in your music and punches a zoom on each one, tuned by how many beats it catches and how hard each pulse hits.
THE HONEST ANSWERS
I make these on my phone. Is this a desktop tool?
It is both, and the phone version is not a cut-down companion. Recording, Auto-Polish, captions, background removal, Make Vertical and export all run on iPhone. The Mac is there for when you would rather finish a long edit with a keyboard.
Two minutes is short for a free export.
It is, and for most other jobs it would be a real limit. For Reels, TikToks and Shorts it usually is not - the formats themselves reward well under that. If you regularly post longer, Pro lifts the cap for $89 once rather than monthly.
Will the captions get my words wrong?
Sometimes, like every transcription. The difference is that fixing one is a tap: click the caption line, correct the text, and the change sticks in both the preview and the exported file. On iPhone captions also translate on-device into 19 languages on iOS 18 or later.
FREQUENTLY ASKED
Can I turn a horizontal video into a vertical Reel?
Yes. Make Vertical reframes to 9:16 using face-aware tracking rather than a centre crop, so you stay in frame instead of being cut in half.
Does Zella add captions automatically?
Yes. Auto-Polish transcribes on-device and styles the captions with active-word highlighting, so the spoken word pops as it is said. You can change the preset or edit any line afterwards.
How many caption styles are there?
Ten on Mac and nine on iPhone, each visibly different rather than a colour change on the same design.
Can I post the same cut to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube?
Yes. Pick the platform preset at export, or use the Pro multi-aspect queue to render 9:16, 1:1 and 16:9 from one edit in a single action.
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