Turn one long video into several short clips

A long recording already contains the short clips. The work is finding the passages that stand on their own and giving each one a vertical frame, captions and a clean start. In DepCut you can do the slow part, the transcript, once and reuse it for every clip.

Transcribe the whole recording

1. Create a project and add the recording with Upload in the Media tab, or drag the file in.
2. Open Subtitles, choose the spoken language or leave Detect language, and click Generate subtitles.

Transcription runs on a hosted service and spends credits from your account, and a long recording is a longer job. It runs in the background, so you can keep working.

Open the Content tab and read. The transcript starts a new paragraph after a pause of more than two seconds, and a chip shows the length of any pause over half a second. Click a timestamp to jump to that line. Note the start and end of every passage that makes sense on its own: one question and its answer, one story, one tip.

Make one project per clip

Go back to the Projects page and open the three-dot menu on the project's card (named Project actions). Choose Duplicate once for each clip you plan to make, then Rename each copy after its passage. A copy carries the edit and the media, and the transcript is part of the edit.

Trim each copy to one idea

Open a copy and cut it down to its passage.

1. Select the clip, put the playhead at the first word you want, and click Split and drop the left side.
2. Put the playhead at the last word you want and click Split and drop the right side.
3. Press Space and play the clip from the start.

When the main track is your only video track, the cut also removes the captions that belonged to the discarded footage, and the remaining captions slide to line up with the trimmed clip. Check that the first and last words arrive whole. If one is clipped, undo and cut a little further into the pause. Tighten long pauses inside the passage with S and Delete.

Reframe and caption each clip

1. Open the Aspect ratio tab and choose Vertical · 9:16.
2. Select the clip, open Framing in the right panel, and click Fill.
3. Drag the video in the preview so the speaker sits in the middle of the frame.
4. Press T at the start, and write a headline that states the idea.

If the speaker moves around, add keys with the diamond in the Keyframes row. Choose a caption look in Subtitles under Styles. In Details, write the caption for the post and add tags.

Export each clip

Click Export, choose a preset, and click Export video. Exports render in the background, and each finished file appears in the Exports list under Media. You can open the next copy and start editing while the first one renders.

Your turn

Open DepCut, add a long recording, and pull out the one passage you would send to a friend.