AI clip maker

The hard part was never the cutting

Anybody can cut a ninety minute recording into thirty second pieces. A script can do it on a timer, and the result is a hundred and eighty clips of which roughly none are worth posting, because a good Short is not a slice of a video, it is a complete small thing with a beginning that grabs and an end that lands.

What actually costs you the afternoon is watching the recording back and deciding. You scrub, you overshoot, you go back, you find something you half remember being good and it turns out to need two minutes of setup that is not in the clip. That loop is the job, and it is the loop this tool exists to take off you.

So the useful measure of an AI clip maker is not how many clips it produces. It is how few of them you throw away. A tool that hands you forty candidates you have to evaluate has moved the work rather than done it. Twelve you can decide on in a minute each is a better afternoon than forty you cannot.

What the ranking is actually looking at

Every candidate is scored on four separate things rather than one blended number, because a single score tells you nothing you can argue with. Hook asks whether the first second gives somebody a reason to stay, which in practice means a question, a claim, a number, or a sentence that is missing its ending. Emotion asks whether anything in the passage moves, laughs, or lands rather than merely informing.

Quotability asks whether a single line could be lifted out and still mean something, which is a surprisingly strong proxy for whether a clip gets shared rather than just watched. Standalone asks whether the passage needs setup that is not inside it, and it is the one that most often kills a moment you liked. A brilliant answer to a question nobody heard is not a clip, it is half a conversation.

The scores are shown to you with the reason attached, and that is deliberate. A ranking you cannot see inside is something you either trust blindly or ignore, and both are worse than a ranking you can skim and overrule. When it puts a moment third and you can see it scored low on standalone because the speaker said "like I mentioned earlier", you know exactly what to do with it.

Why the crop is the part most tools get wrong

Turning a wide frame into a vertical one throws away most of the picture, and where you throw it away from decides whether the clip is watchable. The naive answer is to take the middle. On a single speaker centred in frame that works. On a two person interview it is a disaster, because the middle of a wide two shot is the gap between two people, so you get a beautifully composed shot of a wall while two voices argue off screen.

The frame here follows the subject instead, which means when the speaker changes the crop moves with them. That single behaviour is worth testing before you choose any tool in this category, ours included. Run one interview through it and watch what happens at the moment the second person starts talking. If the frame does not move, the tool cannot do interviews, whatever its marketing says.

The window can also be nudged by hand afterwards, because automatic framing is right most of the time and not all of the time, and a tool that will not let you overrule it is a tool that wastes the clip it got wrong.

What this will not do for you

It does not insert stock footage behind you and it does not schedule a posting calendar. It will strip filler words out of the captions, which is not the same thing as cutting them out of the audio, and the tools that do the larger version are named on the comparison pages along with everything else they do better.

It also cannot rescue a recording that has nothing in it. Ranking is relative: the best moment in a flat hour is still the best moment in a flat hour. What the tool genuinely saves you is the search, and the honest version of that promise is that you will still throw some of these away.

How to do it

Specifications

The numbers rather than the adjectives, including the limits. If one of these is a dealbreaker it is better learned here than after paying.

What people ask about this

Keep going