Long videos — webinars, interviews, tutorials — are full of short, shareable moments. Here’s a practical workflow for turning them into short clips using AI, with Clipto for finding the highlights and ClipZap AI for reformatting.
1. Choose Your Source Video
Start with a long video that has clear speech and distinct segments: a webinar, podcast recording, tutorial, or interview. Videos with speaker labels and chapters are easier to work with. Avoid heavily edited montages — you need clean, continuous footage to extract clips from.
2. Transcribe and Find Highlights with Clipto
Upload the video to Clipto, which transcribes it and lets you search the transcript. Look for: strong opening statements, surprising statistics, clear explanations, audience questions with good answers, and emotional moments. Clipto gives you exact timestamps for each highlight, so you can jump straight to the frame. See the Clipto prompts for specific search strategies.
3. Pick the Best Moments
Not every highlight makes a good short clip. Choose moments that: (1) work standalone without context, (2) have a clear hook in the first 3 seconds, (3) are under 60 seconds, (4) have clean audio. Aim for 3-5 clips per long video. Mark the timestamps.
4. Reformat and Crop with ClipZap
Take your timestamped clips to ClipZap AI. Use it to reformat horizontal footage to vertical (9:16) for Shorts/Reels/TikTok, or square (1:1) for feeds. ClipZap can crop and reframe to keep the speaker centered. See the ClipZap AI prompts for workflow ideas.
5. Add Captions and Hooks
Most short video is watched muted. Add burned-in captions — ClipZap can generate subtitles. Front-load a text hook in the first frame. Keep captions to 2-3 words per line, high contrast, and centered.
6. Build Reusable Templates
If you do this weekly, save a template: intro card (2s), clip, outro CTA (3s). In ClipZap, chain the steps (reformat, captions, export) into a repeatable workflow. In Clipto, save your highlight search queries.
7. Quality Tips
Export at the platform’s native resolution (1080×1920 for vertical). Keep file sizes reasonable. Check that captions are readable on small screens. Don’t over-clip — 1-2 strong clips beat 10 mediocre ones. And always keep the original long video; you can re-mine it later.
Once your clips are published, EasyComment can handle the social-media side — drafting captions and hashtags, and exporting comments for analysis.