How to make a highlight video

A highlight video (or highlight reel) is the best moments of something long, joined into something short: a match in two minutes, a stream in five, a wedding in one song. The steps are the same whatever the footage:

1. Get all the footage in one place, as files you can edit: your own recordings, a stream's replay, the camera's card. Copy it before you start, so a mistake can't cost you the original.
2. Find the moments and write down when each one happens. This is most of the work, and the next section is about doing it fast.
3. Cut each moment out, from just before it starts to just after the reaction ends.
4. Put them in order and trim them against each other, so the pace holds.
5. Add music and text: a song with the rights cleared, names or scores where they help, captions where people talk.
6. Export for where it's going: 16:9 for a YouTube video, 9:16 at 1080 × 1920 for TikTok, Reels and Shorts.

You can do all of it free, in your browser: the video splitter cuts the moments out, the merge videos tool joins them, and add music to video lays a song under them. Nothing is uploaded, and there's no watermark.

What counts as a moment depends on what you filmed. The four kinds people make most:

• A player's highlight reel (for a coach or a scout) is a different job from a game's highlights: only that player's plays, the best first, and a circle or an arrow on the player at the start of each, so nobody has to guess who to watch.
• Stream highlights can be made inside Twitch: its Highlighter lets you join several parts of a past broadcast into one video, and Highlights stay up after the broadcast itself expires. Step by step in how to clip on Twitch.

Watching hours of footage at normal speed to find five minutes is the slow way. Mark the moments as they happen, or let other people point at them:

• Mark them while you record. On Twitch, you and your editors can type /marker in chat (add a few words after it to label it), and the markers show on the Highlighter's timeline. OBS can put chapter markers in Hybrid MP4 recordings with an “Add chapter marker” hotkey, and most editors, like DaVinci Resolve, read them. At a game or an event, note the time on your phone whenever something happens.
• Log them as you watch. In the free YouTube timestamp generator, paste a YouTube link (or open a file), play it and press Add chapter at each moment: you end up with a list of times to copy. Started at 0:00, with at least 3 times 10 seconds or more apart, the same list can go in the full video's description as chapters.
• Use the most replayed graph. On a YouTube video, when you start seeking, a graph shows above the progress bar: where it's high, people have rewatched that part often. YouTube says it may not show on new videos or ones with few views.
• Read the comments. Timestamps people post under a video, and the clips viewers made of a stream, are the moments they remembered.
• Watch the rest fast. On YouTube, click and hold the video to play it at 2× (YouTube said in April 2025 that Premium members on phones can pick speeds up to 4×). Slow down to normal speed when something happens, and note the time.

Each moment needs a beginning that sets it up and an end that pays it off. Start a second or two before it happens (the pass before the goal, the enemy behind the wall, the question before the answer) and end just after the reaction, before the celebrating drags on.

• Many moments from one long file: open it in the video splitter, choose to split where you mark it, and press the Split at button at the start and end of each moment. Keep the shape as it is and the parts are copied without re-encoding, so it's quick on a file of any length and nothing is lost. Download them all in a ZIP and keep the parts you want.
• One moment at a time: the video trimmer cuts a video down to the part you want, up to 10 minutes at a time, with a player to get the ends right.

Name the parts by their order or what happens in them (“03-save.mp4”), so they're easy to arrange. If one is too long, trim the middle as well as the ends: a run-up the viewer doesn't need can go.

Order. For a game or an event, the order it happened in tells the story, and people expect it. For a montage, open on one of your three best moments (it's what keeps people from leaving), put the very best last, and move a weaker one between two strong ones rather than leaving them together. Join the parts in the free merge videos tool: 2 to 20 videos, up to 30 minutes in all, put in order by dragging, with clips of other shapes fitted on a blurred background, black bars or a crop. More in how to merge videos.

Pacing. Keep every moment only as long as it's good, and vary the lengths: three quick ones, then one that breathes. Show a replay or slow motion once, for the biggest moment, not for all of them. If the clips' own sound is noise, cut on the music's beats; if people talk, let the words land before you cut.

Music. The free add music to video tool puts a song under a video of up to 60 minutes: set both volumes, fade it in and out, loop it, and let it dip when someone talks. The song needs to be one you're allowed to use:

• YouTube's Audio Library, in YouTube Studio, has royalty-free music YouTube calls copyright-safe: it won't be claimed, and channels in the Partner Program can earn on videos that use it. Tracks under a Creative Commons license need the artist credited in the description.
• A song you don't have the rights to is the usual reason a highlight video gets claimed. YouTube scans every upload with Content ID, and when it matches music, the owner can block the video, run ads on it or just track it. You can often mute the song or swap it for one from the Audio Library afterwards.
• The apps' own libraries: a sound added in TikTok or Instagram as you post. Business accounts on TikTok only see its Commercial Music Library, which is cleared for business use. Instagram says the music in its library is for personal, non-commercial use, so some business accounts don't get it; they can use Meta's Sound Collection, which is royalty-free, instead.

More on choosing and mixing a song in how to add music to a video.

As long as it stays good. Every moment you add has to be as strong as the ones around it, and a tight two minutes beats a padded ten. Then check the limits of where it's going, from each app's help pages:

So a recap that runs past 3 minutes belongs on YouTube as a regular video, and anything for TikTok, Reels and Shorts should come in under it. See how long a short video should be for what holds people on each app.

A highlight reel is for people who already care: the team, the family, the fans, the people who missed the stream. On TikTok, Reels and Shorts, most viewers don't know you yet, and they decide in a second whether to keep watching. There, each moment on its own usually does better than all of them together:

• Each clip gets its own chance. The apps show a video to more people when the first viewers watch it through. A ten-moment reel lives or dies on its first moment; ten clips are ten tries.
• They post over a week, not all at once, so one match or one stream keeps your account going until the next.
• You don't have to choose. Cut the moments once, post each as a clip, then join them for the reel.

For a clip that holds people from the first second, see how to make clips that go viral.

Where Clyper fits. For talking videos on YouTube (podcasts, streams, interviews, talks), Clyper does the finding and cutting for you. Paste the link, or upload the file (MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV, up to 4 GB and 4 hours). It reads the transcript, picks the moments that stand on their own, 20 to 60 seconds each, scores each one's opening line, and cuts it on whole sentences. Each becomes a vertical clip framed on whoever's talking (a stream's webcam goes over the game), with every word captioned, up to one clip per 2 minutes of video and 30 in all. In the editor you can trim a clip or extend either end by up to 15 seconds.

Be clear about what it reads, though: it picks moments from what's said, not from what happens on screen. A goal nobody talks over isn't in a transcript, so for a match, a wordless gaming montage or a wedding set to music, mark and cut the moments by hand as above. Clyper also doesn't add music or join clips into one reel: each clip is its own 1080 × 1920 MP4, to post as it is or merge with the free tool.

Footage belongs to whoever filmed it, or bought the rights to it. Your own recordings are yours (though music playing in the background can still get a video claimed). Someone else's footage needs their permission, and broadcast sport is the clearest case: the NFL, for one, says NFL Films is the exclusive copyright holder of all NFL footage, and any use of it needs NFL Films' written consent.

• Credit isn't permission. YouTube's fair use page says there are no magic words: crediting the owner, or writing “I do not own”, doesn't make a copy fair use or give you the owner's permission.
• Compilations of other people's clips don't earn on YouTube. Its monetization policies list “short videos you compiled from other social media websites” and “clips of moments from your favorite show edited together with little or no narrative” as reused content, and say the policy applies even with the original creator's permission. Adding a storyline and commentary of your own is what it allows.
• Sharing a moment isn't the same as reposting it. YouTube's Clips feature shares a 5 to 60 second part of someone's video publicly, on YouTube, and the clip goes if the original is deleted or made private.

Making highlights for a creator or a streamer who asked for them is how clipping works: see is clipping legal? for where permission comes from (it explains the issues; it isn't legal advice).