Instagram will now edit the first draft of your Reel for you

If you’ve ever opened the Instagram Reels editor , selected a pile of videos, and immediately decided that posting might not be worth the trouble, Instagram would like to prevent that particular creative crisis.

On Aug.

25, the platform globally launched First Draft, a new one-tap editing tool that turns several videos into a short, fully edited Reel in under 10 seconds.

The process starts the same way as making any other Reel: You select the videos you want to use from your camera roll.

But instead of pressing “Next” and manually cutting them down, you can tap the new "First draft" button.

Credit: Instagram From there, Instagram's model works through three steps: analyzing the clips, identifying their highlights, and trimming them to reduce the overall length.

It then delivers a complete cut that users can preview, continue adjusting, add music to, or move directly to Instagram's usual posting screen.

Credit: Instagram The cuts can be pretty substantial.

In an example shared with Mashable, First Draft condensed four minutes and 54 seconds of footage into a 17-second Reel featuring highlights from several rollerblading videos.

The idea isn’t to let Instagram make every creative decision for you.

Instead, First Draft handles some of the repetitive work of finding usable moments and cutting them together, while still giving creators the option to change its selections before posting.

Basically, it eliminates some of the "staring at your camera roll and questioning your life" portion of the process.

Credit: Instagram First Draft is also built directly into Instagram’s existing Reels creation flow, so creators won’t have to move their footage into another app to use it.

That separates the tool from Edits , Instagram’s standalone video editor, which offers more advanced features, including a frame-accurate timeline, storyboards, effects, and performance insights.