A Pre-Export Checklist for Your DepCut Video

Most re-exports come from something you could have seen in the editor: a clip that ends a beat early, a caption with a wrong word, a frame shape that does not match the platform. Five minutes of checking beats a second render. Work through these steps in order.

Read the Export button

The Export button tells you whether the project is ready. It stays disabled in three cases:

• The timeline has no clips.
• A cloud import is still uploading. Hover the button and the tooltip reads "Finishing uploads…".
• An import failed. The tooltip reads "Retry the failed imports first", and the top bar shows the failed count with a Retry link.

An export reads the saved project, and an import that has not landed is missing from that saved copy. Waiting keeps the clip in your video. Look for Saved beside the project name before you export.

Play the whole cut

Press Space to play and pause. A click on the preview does the same. These keys help you cover ground:

• Left and right arrows step one frame while paused. Hold Shift to step a second.
• Up and down arrows jump to the next or previous edit point on any track, which makes it quick to check every join.
• During playback, the arrows skip a second at a time.

The preview and the export draw from the same plan, so a flaw you see in the preview will be in the file. Listen as well as watch. Check the music level under speech, the point where each clip ends, and any gap between clips, since a gap exports as black with silence.

Check captions, frame and fades

Three settings change what the file contains, and each lives in a different tab.

• Captions. Open the Subtitles tab, then Options. The Show subtitles switch, on by default, controls whether captions appear on the video and on the timeline, and captions that are showing are drawn into the exported file. Read the transcript through for misheard words, since each caption is editable.
• Frame shape. Open the Aspect ratio tab. Choose Widescreen · 16:9 for YouTube, Vertical · 9:16 for TikTok, Reels and Shorts, or one of Square · 1:1, Classic · 4:3, Portrait · 3:4, Cinematic · 2:1 and a custom ratio. The exported frame follows this setting, so change it before you export.
• Fades. Open the Details tab. Under Video, Fade in and Fade out fade the whole video in from black and out to black. Each reads Off at zero. A short fade-out softens an ending that would otherwise cut off on the last frame.

Then export

Press ⌘E or Ctrl+E, pick a preset and press Export video. With the checklist done, the file that comes out is the one you meant to make.

Make it a habit

Run the checks on your next project in DepCut and see how often the first export is the final one.