Video clipper

1. Choose your video, or drop it on the player: a podcast episode, a stream, an interview, any length. MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV work.
2. Mark each clip. Play the video (the arrows skip 5 seconds), press Now beside Start where the moment begins and beside End where it ends, then press Add clip. Drag the ends of the bar to adjust, and do the same for the next moment.
3. Or paste the times. A list from a chatbot, YouTube comments or your notes goes in the box under the player, one clip a line, and Add puts them all in the list at once.
4. Check the list. Name each clip, play it, and move its start or end a second at a time with the minus and plus buttons, or type a time.
5. Choose the shape and cut. As it is copies each clip without re-encoding; 9:16 crop fills a phone's screen and 9:16 fit keeps the whole picture on a blurred copy of itself. Then download the clips one by one, or all at once in a ZIP.

The box reads times however they're written: with a dash or “to” between them, in brackets, after a number or a bullet, with hours or without. Whatever is left on the line becomes the clip's name, and a line with no name gets Clip 1, Clip 2 and so on.

A chatbot's answer can go in whole: a heading on the line above the times names that clip, and lines without times, like its reasons, are left out. To get a list from a transcript, see how to use ChatGPT to find clips. The video highlight finder finds the liveliest moments of a recording by its sound, and its Copy timestamps button gives a list this box reads.

Kept as it is, each clip is copied straight out of your file, without re-encoding. That's why it takes seconds even for a long video, and why the clip looks and sounds exactly like the original. A video file keeps a full picture, a keyframe, every second or few, and only the changes in between, so a copied clip starts from the keyframe before your start, with a mark that tells players to skip to your start. Most players do; if an app you post to shows a second or two of extra picture, start the clip at a pause, or make it 9:16.

Made 9:16, each clip is redrawn frame by frame at 1080 × 1920 and re-encoded, from the exact second you set. 9:16 crop keeps a slice of the picture the height of the frame (slide it to the person talking); 9:16 fit keeps all of it, on a blurred copy that fills the screen. Re-encoding in a browser takes about as long as the clips play, so it works on up to 30 minutes of clips at a time.

Either way the work happens on your device, so the video never leaves it, and the clips are saved as MP4 (WebM only for a WebM video kept as it is, or where a browser can't make MP4). Clips can overlap: a 30 second cut and a 60 second cut of the same moment are two clips.

• Start on the line that hooks. People decide in the first second or two whether to keep watching, so begin on the sentence that makes them want the next one, not on a greeting or a breath.
• End right after the payoff: the answer, the punchline, the point. Anything after it is where people scroll away.
• Cut between sentences. A clip that starts or stops mid-word feels broken. Play each one through and move its ends a second at a time until the first and last words are whole.
• Keep each clip to one idea that makes sense to someone who never saw the full video. If it needs five minutes of context, skip it. More in how to find the best moments to clip and how to make clips that go viral.
• Name the clips as you go. The names become the files' names, so a folder of 20 clips is easy to post from. Copy times keeps the list, to paste back in later.

For how long a clip should be, rather than how long it can be, read how long a short video should be, and check a finished clip against each app with the video size checker.

Your own recording is best: the file from your camera, OBS or your podcast studio is at its full quality. From YouTube, you can download a video you uploaded in YouTube Studio: Content, the video's menu, then Download. It comes as an MP4 at 720p or 360p, up to five times a day for each video.

Clipping someone else's show or stream? You need their permission, which clipping campaigns give. See how Clyper handles podcast clips, stream clips and YouTube to Shorts.

This free clipper cuts the moments you choose, where you set them. Clyper finds the moments itself, and does the rest of the work on each clip.

Cutting by hand? Caption the clips with the auto caption generator and burn them in with add captions to video. For other jobs: the video splitter cuts a whole video into consecutive parts, the video trimmer keeps one part, and merge videos joins clips into one. For a YouTube video you can't download, the YouTube clip maker makes a link and an embed of a moment.