Video clipping

Ask the chat assistant to turn a public YouTube video into short clips. For example: “Make five shorts from this YouTube video and draft them for my Instagram and TikTok channels.”

The clips appear in your media library. If you select channels, each successful clip also becomes a draft for each selected channel. Review the caption and platform settings before scheduling. Clipping does not schedule or publish anything automatically.

Options

Option	Default	Choices
Maximum clips	5	1 to 10
Fit	Blur	Blur or center crop
Channels	None	Up to 20 connected channels

Blur preserves the source picture over a blurred background. Center crop fills the vertical frame by trimming the sides. Crop does not track speakers or faces. Outputs are 720×1280 MP4 videos with burned-in captions and a thumbnail.

Reels created in the app or chat use complete-story editing. A reel can join one to six passages from different parts of the source, with a total duration of 10 to 90 seconds. The selected speech is reviewed for context, flow and a completed ending. The requested number is a maximum: a video may yield fewer clips when there are not enough distinct, complete stories. Source material is not reused across reels in the same run.

Results show the assembled duration and source segment count. Open “Spoken script” to review the exact selected transcript in playback order. Caption alignment uses source segment timings; review the video before scheduling.

Progress and failures

Clipping runs in the background. Ask the assistant for the job's status or for your recent clipping jobs. The processor reads source details and captions, transcribes audio when necessary, discovers story topics across the transcript, plans and reviews the assembled speech, then renders each clip. An unsuccessful story can be repaired once and receives a separate final review.

Successful clips are kept when another clip fails. If no clip succeeds, the reserved clipping minutes are refunded. Private, live, removed, age-restricted, and region-restricted videos are unsupported. YouTube may also reject downloads; the job reports a failure rather than bypassing access restrictions.

Allowances

Clipping requires an active paid subscription and is unavailable during trials. Usage is the source duration rounded up to a whole minute, regardless of how many clips are produced. The allowance resets on the first day of each month at 00:00 UTC.

Plan	Source minutes per month
Starter	30
Creator	120
Pro	300
Business	600
Agency	1,500

A source can be at most 180 minutes long and must fit within the remaining allowance. Each organization can run one clipping job at a time and start up to 20 jobs per UTC day. Outputs also count toward your media storage allowance.

Public API

Use the same organization-scoped API key as other REST endpoints:

• POST /api/v1/clips: start a job.
• GET /api/v1/clips: list recent jobs.
• GET /api/v1/clips/{id}: read progress and outputs.
• GET /api/v1/clips/usage: read the monthly allowance and usage.

Send a unique idempotencyKey for each intended operation and reuse it when retrying the same request. A create request accepts:

{
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID_HERE",
  "maxClips": 5,
  "editVersion": 2,
  "fit": "blur",
  "channelIds": [],
  "idempotencyKey": "my-video-clipping-request-1"
}

editVersion: 2 opts into complete-story editing. Omitting it preserves legacy single-range editing (editVersion: 1), including for existing jobs. Version 2 picks include ordered ranges, duration (the sum of the selected passages), and script (source speech in playback order). The retained start/end fields are the source envelope for version 2; they do not describe playback duration.

Replace the example URL with your video's URL. Creation returns HTTP 202 with the job in data; processing continues asynchronously. Reuse each successful result's mediaId when creating or editing posts.