Most newsrooms treat every video as a fresh build. A reporter files footage, someone opens an editing app, and the same lower-thirds, colors and logo get rebuilt from memory — again. It works until the day the one person who knows the setup is out, and the queue stops moving. A template fixes this at the root: you do the hard design work once, and everyone reuses it.
This guide walks through building that template in Spearow's Template Editor — the designer-facing tool — so the desk can later fill it in the Video Tool. We'll cover the four pieces that make a template genuinely reusable: placeholders, brand variables, replaceable text, and permissions.
Have your brand kit ready: the exact hex colors, the fonts, and a transparent logo file. A template is only as consistent as the assets you feed it.
1. Start from the story, not the canvas
Before placing a single element, decide what kind of video this template is for. A breaking-news bumper, a two-minute report, a social explainer — each has a different rhythm. Pick one. A template that tries to serve every format serves none of them well, and the desk ends up fighting it.
Set your canvas to the primary aspect ratio you publish in. You'll export the other ratios from the same project later — but design against the one that matters most first.
2. Reserve space with placeholders
A placeholder is a fixed slot — position and size locked — where an image or video clip will go. This is the single most important habit for reusability. When the desk drops footage into a placeholder, nothing in the layout shifts: the headline stays put, the logo stays put, the safe margins hold.
“Design the hard part once. Everything after it should be fast.”
3. Store the brand as variables
Rather than hard-coding a red bar and a specific font into each element, store them once as brand variables: a primary color, an accent, an alert color, the logo, the headline font. Every element references the variable, not a fixed value. Duplicate the template for a second channel, point it at a different brand kit, and everything updates at once.
A reusable template has
- Placeholders for every visual that changes per story
- Brand colors, fonts and logo stored as variables
- Text fields marked replaceable, nothing else editable
- Transitions and text animations already applied
- A category, so the desk can find it
4. Mark what's replaceable — lock the rest
The goal is that the desk edits only what's meant to change. Mark the headline, the standfirst, the guest name and the main clip as replaceable fields. Everything else — the layout, the brand bar, the logo position — stays locked. This is what lets a producer with no editing background open the template and get it right the first time.
5. File it under a category with the right access
A finished template nobody can find helps no one. Assign it to a category — reports, breaking news, special programs — and link that category to the brand it belongs to, the designers who maintain it, and the users allowed to produce with it. Now the desk reaches it in one search, and permissions keep people inside their lane.
Hand it off
That's the whole loop: you designed once, and the desk now produces many times. A reporter opens the template in the Video Tool, fills the fields, drops in footage, lets Auto Scene and automatic captions do their part, adds a cover, and exports every aspect ratio from the same project. What used to take an editor an afternoon takes a producer minutes — and it's on-brand every time, whether or not you're in the building.