Clipping guides & playbooks
How to turn long podcasts, streams and VODs into short vertical clips that actually get watched: hooks, captions, cadence, and what the algorithms reward.
Why do my AI clips look blurry? Five causes, in the order to check them
A vertical crop keeps 56% of the frame, then scales it up. Add a 360p source or a platform re-encode and clips turn to mush. How to find which step did it.
4 min readWhat makes a podcast clip go viral: the eight hook types we look for
The scroll decision happens in two seconds. The eight opening shapes that survive it, with examples, and the one rule that matters more than any of them.
5 min readShorts vs Reels vs TikTok: the clip specs that actually differ, and the safe zone nobody checks
All three want 1080x1920. Where they differ is length, the on-screen UI covering your captions, and what counts as a short. One clip, three uploads.
4 min readHow to turn a YouTube video into Shorts, Reels and TikToks (without re-editing it)
Paste the link, get clips. What actually happens to a YouTube video on the way to a vertical short, what resolution you end up with, and what to check.
4 min readHow much does AI video clipping actually cost to run? Our numbers, per video
A 60-minute upload with 8 clips costs us under 10 cents. A pasted link can cost 10x that. Where the money goes, measured in production, per video.
4 min readHow long should a short-form clip be? Why we settled on 20–45 seconds
Our first clips came out at 6 and 12 seconds. What the platforms reward, what the data on our own output showed, and why we settled on 20–45 seconds.
4 min readHow AI video clipping actually works: the four stages between a link and a clip
Transcription, moment detection, reframing, render. What each stage does, where it fails, and how to tell which one broke when a clip looks wrong.
5 min readFree AI clip generators: what "free" actually gets you on each tool
Most free tiers give you 60 source minutes, 720p and a 3-day expiry. One gives you up to 540 minutes, 1080p and keeps your clips. The free tiers side by side.
4 min readHow auto-reframe to 9:16 works, and why the first three versions of ours were wrong
A vertical crop keeps 56% of a widescreen frame. Where it sits is the whole problem. Centred, tracked, locked and per-shot framing, and what each got wrong.
5 min readAuto captions for short clips: what actually matters, and the one error nobody tests for
Word-timed, burned in, in the safe zone, spelled right. Where auto-captions fail on clips, and why a 98%-accurate transcript still misspells the guest's name.
5 min readWhy AI clips cut off mid-sentence, and how we measured it
Most AI clipping tools end clips mid-thought. The cause is a specific transcription limitation. We measured ours at 7 of 10 clips, then fixed it.
4 min readWhat clipping credits really cost: the arithmetic nobody does upfront
Credits, upload minutes and clip quotas sound generous until you map them to real source video. The maths on podcasts, VODs and client work.
3 min readWhy every AI clip scores 85: the score inflation problem
Our clip scores all landed between 83 and 89, useless for ranking. Why AI scoring collapses into a narrow band, and what we changed.
3 min read