Reels cut from a finished render.

Two choices and a generated clip

Reels asks you for two things. First a template, which is the trend the clip is cut to: a renovation reveal that runs from a bare room through construction to your finished render, a furniture pop-in where an empty room fills piece by piece, or an unboxing where a box on the floor opens and the room assembles itself. Then the render it runs on.

Each template needs keyframes, which are stills of that same room at an earlier state. A renovation reveal wants a tired before frame and an under-construction frame. Pop-in and unboxing want the same room emptied, the second with a single white box at its centre. The tool generates those from your render, you confirm them, and the video morphs between exactly those stills. Every template lands on the render you picked.

That structure is worth holding on to, because it explains what the tool can and cannot do for you. It is not writing a film. It is building two or three still images of one room and then filling the gaps between them with motion, which is why a reel made this way stays recognisably the same space from the first frame to the last.

What survives a 9:16 crop

A reel is vertical whatever it started as, and your render almost certainly is not. Most renders come out landscape, so the source is centre-cropped to 9:16 rather than letterboxed. From a 16:9 still that leaves roughly the middle third of the width. The full height survives. The sides do not.

That single fact decides which images are worth a reel. A wide living room with the good sofa pushed to the left and a window on the right loses one of the two the moment it goes vertical. A room shot with the subject centred and depth running away from the camera keeps everything it had. Before you commit, cover the outer thirds of the render with two fingers and look at what is left. If the remaining strip still reads as a room, it will cut.

Vertical framing also rewards height, which landscape work trains you to ignore. A curtain falling the full height of the frame, a track of ceiling spots, a floor lamp standing clear of the sofa, the boards running out of the bottom of the picture: all of that reads beautifully in a tall frame and does very little in a wide one. The tall frame wants a top, a middle and a bottom.

None of this is a limitation of the render. It is the shape of the surface it is going to, and the fix is to choose for that shape from the start. A designer who works mostly on a phone tends to get this right by instinct, which is one of the quiet advantages of designing a room from your phone: you are already looking at rooms in the format you publish them in.

Choosing the render that will cut well

Pick for the crop first and the styling second. The renders that reel well tend to share four things: a clear subject near the centre, visible floor in the lower part of the frame, something happening at ceiling height, and perspective that recedes so movement has somewhere to travel. A flat elevation of a fitted wall has none of that, and no template can rescue it.

Scale matters more than detail. On a phone, a bouclé curve or a round fluted table holds its silhouette while a styled shelf of small objects turns into texture. Choose the render whose furniture has shape rather than the one with the most decoration in it. If the render came out of a plan rather than a camera, the same rule applies to how it was set up, which is worth remembering when you build the view in a render from a floor plan.

One more check that is specific to this tool: the earlier frames are generated from the render you chose, so the architecture has to be legible in it. Windows, doors, the ceiling line and the floor need to be plainly readable, because the model has to keep them while stripping the room back. A render where the walls are lost in shadow gives a poor emptied frame, and the emptied frame is where two of the three templates start.

How long a clip should run

Short. The tool seeds four seconds per clip, and four seconds is usually right, because a template carries exactly one idea and the viewer only has to notice one thing. A renovation reveal is generated as two clips, before to construction and construction to reveal, then stitched into one video at no extra cost. Pop-in and unboxing are a single clip each.

Resist stretching it. Longer clips give the video model more room to invent detail between your keyframes, and a room that drifts halfway through is worse than a room that changes quickly and stops. If you want more on screen, the answer is a second reel from a different room rather than a slower version of this one. That is also how a set of reels beats a single long walkthrough, which is the trade covered in turning a render into a video.

The keyframes are the reel

The clip is generated between stills, so the stills decide the result. Look at each generated frame at full size before you confirm it, and read it for continuity rather than beauty: the window is in the same place, the floor is the same floor, the ceiling line has not moved. A frame that quietly changes the room produces a clip that appears to cut to somewhere else.

Generated keyframes cost 150 credits each. Regenerating with a short instruction is the usual fix, and the instructions that work are small and physical: more dust sheets, keep the rug, put the box nearer the window. You can also hand over a frame you already have, from your gallery or as an upload, which costs nothing and is the obvious move when you already have a genuine empty shot of the room. If you are producing that empty shot yourself, the approach in clearing furniture out of a photo gives you a frame that matches the real space exactly.

Posting the finished clip

Everything a run produces saves to your project library: the stitched video and each clip on its own. Keeping the separate clips is useful, because the reveal half of a renovation reel often works as its own post while the full version carries the story. Whatever you overlay afterwards, keep it well inside the frame, since every platform lays its own interface over the top and bottom of a vertical video and a caption sitting near the edge disappears under it.

Stay honest about what the clip claims. A renovation reveal compresses a transformation that did not happen in that order, or in some cases at all, so present it as design intent rather than site documentation, especially alongside a property. The same care applies to video used on listings and to any clip a buyer might take as a record of the building.