Dr. M. Omar Reels · Project Management

Editor guidelines

Canvas 1080 × 1920 @ 30 fps Fonts Cairo Black · Cairo Bold 13 rules Full brand guide ↗

The rules

01

Respect the red zone

◆ No caption, no text, no important element may land in the red bands — on any layer, at any time. Instagram covers those edges with its own interface.
Instagram Reels safe zone diagram showing the top, bottom and side areas covered by Instagram's interface.
Instagram covers the edges — design inside the green band
ZoneKeep clear
Top250 px
Bottom380 px
Left & right120 px each
Safe bandy 250 → 1540
Usable width840 px

Measure the bounding box of the text, not the baseline — a descender or a second line sits lower than you think.

  • Put a guide layer at all four boundaries and keep it on while you work.
  • Check the widest caption in the episode, not the first one.
  • A background box counts as part of the element — its edges must stay inside too.
✳ One deliberate exception: the header (rule 08) sits above the 250 px line. That is intentional and matches the approved episodes — do not move it down to "fix" it.
02

No spelling mistakes — especially الهمزات and التاء المربوطة

This is the part the client notices. A single wrong letter undoes a well-built episode. Pay particular attention to the hamza forms (أ / إ / ا / آ) and to ة versus ه at the end of a word — by far the most common error.

Words that come up again and again, spelled correctly:

مهمة حاجة أسئلة أيوة حدة النتيجة
▲ Write the spoken words exactly as spoken. The doctor does not always say what the script says — what he said is what goes on screen. Never retype from memory, from the script, or from what you think you heard.

Use these sources, and double-check from your end:

CheckWhy it matters
ة vs ه at the endThe most common error by far
أ / إ / اThe wrong hamza changes the word
ى vs ي at the endVery easy to miss on screen
Shadda & dialect vowelsWrite what is pronounced — بتدّي not بتدي
NumbersDigits or words? Be consistent within the episode
Medical termsLens names, IOL types, procedure names — verify every time
Line breaksA break must replace a space. Never break inside a word

Never touch a timestamp, never merge or split a cue, never renumber — change wording only. Read the SRT out loud against the audio once before you build.

03

No quotation marks. No commas, dots or full stops.

On-screen text carries none of it. Let the line break and the caption timing do the work that punctuation would normally do.

Never use
Quotation marks" " “ ”
Commas, ،
Dots and full stops. …
04

Text inside a box must be perfectly centred — on all four sides

◆ Centre the box on the text's measured bounding box — horizontally AND vertically. Do not rely on centre justification, and do not centre on the text layer's anchor point.

With mixed Arabic and Latin text — which happens constantly here: medical terms, numbers, "IOL", "EDOF" — the text layer's origin sits at the left edge of the text, not its centre. Centre the box on the anchor and every pill in a stack drifts right by half its own width, each one by a different amount because they are different lengths. It looks like a mistake, because it is one.

Measure the rendered text rectangle, and place both the text and the box on that rectangle's centre. Then Position is the visual centre and everything lines up. Vertically, centre on the text's optical box, not the baseline — Arabic ascenders and descenders will otherwise push the text high in its pill.

05

Never use real surgical footage

◆ No exceptions. Not as b-roll, not blurred, not for a fraction of a second. Use the motion graphics and illustrated b-roll instead — see rule 06.
06

B-roll goes in the cornered box — same dimensions every time

Reference frame showing an illustrated eye anatomy b-roll inside a rounded-corner card, centred in the frame.
The rounded card is the default — not full frame
PropertyValue
Width929 px (86% of frame)
Heightpreserve source ratio
Corner radius71 px
Position[540, 960] — dead centre

The footage behind it stays full-frame and dims for the length of the window: opacity 100% → 45% → 100%, Gaussian blur 0 → 98 → 0. Ramp in and out — do not hard-cut the dim.

Any caption overlapping a b-roll window drops to y ≈ 1469 so it clears the card. Colour and style are unchanged — only the position moves.

07

Music and outro

AssetFileNotes
Music bed Open track ↗ Bottom layer, starts at t = 0, trimmed to comp length. Already mixed quiet — place at 0 dB.
Outro Open outro ↗ Exactly 5.400 s, full frame, starts at the end of the footage.

Composition length = footage length + 5.40 s. Nothing overlaps the outro. The voiceover must stay at least 12 dB above the music at all times — check the mix on phone speakers, not headphones.

08

Series name & episode number — respect each series' colours

Frame from Series 1 showing the series name top-left in copper and the episode number top-right.
Series 1 · Refractive — copper
Frame from Series 2 showing the series name top-left in blue and gold and the episode number top-right.
Series 2 · IOL — blue + gold

Both header elements are Cairo Bold, 27 px. They appear at the start of hook caption 2 and run until the end of the footage. Fade them in and out — do not pop them on.

ElementTextPositionColour
Series name (top left) سلسلة عدسات العين [253, 168] First word #0F48B5, rest #C08B23
Signature (under it) signature.png [248, 211] @ 23.1% Has its own alpha — do not key it
Episode number (top right) الحلقة - 3 - [886, 190] First word #0F48B5, rest #C08B23
▲ The values above are the Series 2 specification. Series 1 uses its own copper palette as shown in the reference frame — match each series to its own colours, never carry Series 2's blue onto a Series 1 episode.
09

The side view — scale down and drop it to the bottom edge

StepValue
Scale down to~95%
Move tothe bottom edge
Horizontal placementcentred between the series name and the episode number
BackgroundOpen background plate ↗

Pulling the side camera back leaves a transparent strip across the top of the frame. Fill it with the background plate. Do not mask it, and do not scale the footage up to cover it — that is exactly what causes the pixelation in rule 13.

10

Caption defaults

▲ Confirm this number before you build. The brief specifies a default caption size of 30–34 px. The full brand guide specifies 53 px on a 1080 × 1920 canvas. These describe different working canvases — check which one applies to your project setup before you commit an episode.
PropertyValue
Default size (per brief)30 – 34 px
Equivalent on 1080 × 1920 (per brand guide)53 px — confirm
FontCairo Black
Leading78 px — set manually, never Auto
AlignmentCentred, RTL
Max characters per line28
Max lines3

Every even line is orange. Line 1 white, line 2 #FFA806, line 3 white. On a 2-line caption that is the second line; on a 3-line caption the middle line. This is the signature caption look — do not skip it.

Drop shadow (the effect, not a layer style): black, 75% opacity, 210°, 5 px distance, 5 px softness. Do not replace it with a stroke — a stroke thickens the Arabic letterforms and reads worse.

11

Bullets — use this style

Frame showing six white rounded pills stacked vertically with deep blue Arabic text, over the doctor.
Stacked white pills, deep blue text
Frame showing a white heading line above three smaller white pills containing lens type names.
Title line above the item pills
ElementSizeTextBox
Title pill56 px#FFFFFF#FFA400 @ 100%
Item pill53 px#122472#FFFFFF @ 92%
Padding28 px all roundBox height = text height + 2 × padding
Gap between pills25 pxStack centred on [540, 960] — measure the assembled stack

The whole block is centred both horizontally and vertically on the middle of the frame — not pinned to a fixed top position. See rule 04 for how to centre the box on the text correctly.

The footage behind a bullet scene stays full-frame — do not shrink it or slide it away. Instead ramp opacity 100% → 30% → 100% and Gaussian blur 0 → 71 → 0 across the scene. Keeping the doctor visible behind the graphics was a deliberate decision.

12

Colour reference

Series 2 — series name & episode number

#0F48B5
Blue — first word of both header lines
#C08B23
Gold — remaining words of the header

Captions & highlights

#FFFFFF
Caption lines 1 & 3, bullet pill fill
#FFA806
Caption line 2 — every even line
#FFA400
Hook text, bullet title pill fill
#F8A104
Closing card pill text
#122472
Bullet item text
#111111
B-roll label pill
▲ White and orange are the first colours to fail. Recheck contrast every single time text lands on a bright background — the seamless plate, the grey plate, a white b-roll card, a lab coat, a reflection on glass. If you are unsure whether it passes, it doesn't: switch on the caption's black pill (#000000 @ 40%). Check it at 100% zoom, and on a phone in daylight.
13

Avoid pixelation when masking or removing a background

◆ Never scale footage up to cover a gap. Fill the gap with the background plate underneath instead — it costs nothing in quality. Scaling up to hide a transparent strip is the single most common cause of pixelation in these episodes.

The source footage is 1920 × 1080 landscape. At 1080 × 1920 you have to scale it to 177.78% to fill the frame — that is already an upscale, and it softens every shot. Before you start, either pre-upscale the source to 3840 × 2160 (the preferred fix — Series 1 already works this way), or build the comp at 608 × 1080 so the footage sits at 100% native pixels and upscale once on export.

When you key or mask, keep edges clean: do not feather away detail, and do not re-scale a keyed layer after the key. Any softness you introduce before the final upscale gets multiplied by it.