AI Video Clipper for Long-Form Video
ClipSonic is a desktop AI video clipper that turns podcasts, interviews, streams and YouTube uploads into ranked short-form clips — with highlight detection, face tracking and animated captions built in.
An AI video clipper takes a long recording and does the part editors dread: it watches the whole thing, works out which 30–90 second stretches stand on their own, and cuts them into vertical clips you can post. ClipSonic does that on your own computer — a real desktop app, not a browser tab — so an hour-long video never has to be uploaded anywhere to be clipped.
Most AI video clipping software runs as a cloud subscription billed by the minute or by credits. ClipSonic runs the transcription, the highlight scoring, the reframing and the render locally through ffmpeg, and you can buy it once instead of monthly. The trade-off is that clip discovery is only as fast as your machine — but there's no upload wait, no render queue, and no cap on how many clips you export.
Two ways to find the moments
Smart Viral Clips is the no-key option. It transcribes the video, generates every plausible clip window, then scores each one against six signals pulled straight from the audio — keyword weight, hook quality, speech pace, dramatic pauses, audio energy and clean cut points — and keeps the highest-scoring, non-overlapping windows. It runs entirely on your machine.
AI Viral Clips sends the transcript to a language model — Groq, OpenAI, or a local model via Ollama — which returns ranked clips each with a written title, a hook reason and a viral score. Long videos are chunked and de-duplicated so a 60-minute recording still gets coverage end to end.
- Smart Viral Clips: on-device scoring, no API key, nothing metered
- AI Viral Clips: title + hook reason + score, cloud or local model
- Fixed-Length: no AI at all — split the whole video into even clips
Every clip is framed and captioned, not just trimmed
Finding the moment is half the job. ClipSonic then reframes each clip to vertical using face-aware cropping that sizes the crop from the speaker rather than the canvas, cuts the framing on every edit in your source instead of gliding across it, and burns in animated captions from the transcript. You review each clip, adjust the in/out points, swap the framing mode or caption style, and export.
What the clipper does
Ranked clip suggestions
Every candidate moment comes back with a viral score out of 100 and a plain-English hook reason, so you know why it was picked before you watch it.
Works without an API key
Smart Viral Clips scores moments on-device against six speech and audio signals — no LLM, nothing billed per clip.
Face-tracked 9:16 crop
The subject stays centred as the clip cuts between shots, with one-, two- and three-person layouts chosen automatically.
Animated captions
Six burned-in caption styles with word-by-word highlighting, positioned anywhere on the frame.
Batch export
Approve a set of clips and render them all in one pass — cut, framed and captioned together.
Nothing uploaded
The video file stays on your machine. If you pick a cloud AI model, only the transcript text is sent to rank moments.
Common questions
What is an AI video clipper?
It is software that analyses a long video, identifies the segments that work as standalone short clips, and cuts them out — usually reframing them to vertical and adding captions. ClipSonic is a desktop AI video clipper that does this locally on Windows and macOS.
Does ClipSonic upload my video to clip it?
No. Transcription, highlight scoring, reframing, captioning and rendering all run on your computer. If you choose a cloud AI provider for highlight detection, only the transcript text is sent — never the video file.
Can it clip video without AI?
Yes. Two of the three modes need no API key: Smart Viral Clips scores moments on-device, and Fixed-Length simply splits the whole video into back-to-back clips snapped to natural silence.
How long can the source video be?
There is no built-in limit. Long recordings are chunked automatically for highlight detection, and rendering is done locally so there is no per-minute cloud cost.
What formats can I import?
A YouTube URL (downloaded automatically) or a local file — MP4, MOV, MKV and more.
Is it a subscription?
There is a monthly and yearly plan, but also a one-time lifetime licence with unlimited clips and no watermark.
Related pages
Clip your first long video
Download ClipSonic free, point it at a video, and export a face-tracked, captioned clip — locally, no account required.