Alex Romero
Founder & Lead Editor, cutraw
Alex has been cutting video professionally since 2013 — starting as an in-house editor for a documentary shop, then five years freelance for YouTube channels between 100k and 4M subscribers, and since 2022 running cutraw's remote editing studio. He's shipped roughly 6,000 finished edits across YouTube long-form, short-form vertical, direct-response ads, podcasts and course content.
- ■YouTube long-form (retention, pacing, thumbnail-hook alignment)
- ■Short-form vertical (Shorts, Reels, TikTok hook frameworks)
- ■Direct-response ads (UGC, VSLs, hook A/B testing)
- ■Podcast production (clip systems, multi-cam sync, dialogue cleanup)
- ■Colour grading in Resolve, sound design, motion graphics
Recent writing
The 2026 YouTube retention playbook
Five editing levers that move the retention curve more than any thumbnail change.
UGC ad frameworks that actually scale
We tore down 200 winning UGC ads. Here are the four structural patterns every one of them shares.
Subscription editing vs freelancers: the math
A real cost comparison across 12 months for a creator publishing 8 videos/month.
Seven hook frameworks that still work on Shorts, Reels and TikTok
The opening three seconds decide the next thirty. Here are the hook shapes we keep reaching for in 2026 — and the ones we stopped using.
The clip system: how we turn one podcast episode into 40+ social posts
A repeatable pipeline for podcast clip production — timestamps, captions, brand system, and the batching rhythm that keeps it sustainable.
Color grading that doesn't look graded
Why most creator videos in 2026 look over-graded, and the four-node grade we use as a starting point on almost every project.
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