In this article
Stories have a length limit, and a video longer than it does not get refused. It gets cut into consecutive pieces, each one short enough to be a story, and posted as a run of them.
Useful, and slightly deceptive: what you selected was one video, and what your viewers receive is several stories they can walk out of between any two.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Know what happens to a long video before you pick it.
- check_circle Control where the cuts land instead of accepting them.
- check_circle Judge whether the footage should be here at all.
- check_circle Edit the resulting parts individually.
The segmented strip along the bottom of the editor is the split, shown before you commit to it.
content_cut The cuts fall where the clock falls
The segmentation is arithmetic, not editing. The video is divided at the point where a story runs out of room, then again, then again, until the footage is used up. Nothing looks for a pause in the speech, a change of shot, or the end of a sentence, because nothing in the process knows what the video is about.
That is completely fine for footage with no structure — a view from a window, a crowd, a road. It is a problem for anything where somebody is talking, because the boundary will land in the middle of a word roughly as often as anywhere else.
The fix is available and almost nobody uses it: the boundaries can be dragged in the editor before publishing. Moving a cut back two seconds so a sentence finishes is the single edit that separates a run of parts that reads as intentional from one that reads as a file being dumped.
You choose a three-minute video for a story. What does the app do with it?
The limit on a story is not negotiable, so the footage is divided into pieces that fit and each piece becomes its own story. Nothing is sped up and nothing is discarded. The thing to notice is that you now have a run of stories rather than a video, and everything that follows from that — viewers dropping out between parts, each one being kept or expiring separately — applies.
Where do the cuts land?
It is a measurement, not a judgement, so the boundary arrives at the same place regardless of what is happening in the video. For anything with speech in it that means a sentence cut in half at least once. This is precisely why the boundaries can be moved by hand in the editor before publishing, and why doing so is worth the twenty seconds.
How does a viewer experience the result?
Each boundary is a place where a thumb can take somebody out of your footage, and the later parts get watched by fewer people than the first. That changes what belongs where: the point has to be near the start rather than at the end, and a part that only makes sense after the previous one is a part most viewers will not understand.
So when is a long video actually right for stories?
The feature is a rescue, not a workflow. It rescues footage you could not trim in time and turns it into something postable, which is genuinely useful. But an audience that will sit through four consecutive parts is rare, and the version of this that works is almost always the one where you cut the footage down first and let the split handle what is left over.
task_alt
graphic_eq What a run of parts costs, and what it is good for
Posting four parts asks for four separate decisions from every viewer. The first gets seen by everybody who opens your stories; by the fourth, the audience is whoever was interested enough to stay, which is a much smaller and much more useful number than the one at the top.
Read that as information rather than as a failure. If the interesting thing is in part three, most people missed it and the fix is editing, not reach. If the footage genuinely earns four parts — a process, a journey, something where continuing is the point — the drop-off is simply the shape of an audience choosing.
The one case where all of this collapses is speech. A person talking for two minutes is the hardest thing to hold across boundaries, and it is also the thing that survives best as a single trimmed minute. If the video is somebody explaining something, the honest edit is nearly always shorter than the split.
settings Posting a long video
- Trim before you select it Or at least before you publish.
- Look at the segmented strip That is where the cuts will land.
- Drag the boundaries off the words The split does not listen.
- Put the point in the first part Later parts have a smaller audience.
- Caption each part separately They are ordinary stories now.
- Keep the good one on your profile The rest can expire together.
This page hands the cutting to the app. The curriculum step is doing it yourself: where to trim, how framing changes what a clip can be used for, and why a shorter version is usually the better one.
At a glance
- 1Auto-split
Long videos are cut into story-length parts.
- 2Move the cuts
Adjust where each part ends.
- 3Shorter is better
Editing down beats splitting.
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