Many tools these days promise that they’ll use AI to automatically find and create viral short clips from a long video, and if you’ve ever tried to edit videos yourself, you’ll know that if this works, it will save hours and hours of painstaking, frustrating work.
I chose five popular AI video editing tools and uploaded a full-length recording of one of my most popular keynotes, “Discover Your Technology Psychology.” The results ranged from surprisingly good to oh-my-goodness great. So, as the TikTok-ers say, “Let’s get into it.”
Quick note: I spent 10+ hours on this experiment, and I gathered way more insights than I am including in this post. Comment below if you’d like to see more on this topic, such as a free webinar or a longer guide.
Quick Links
How AI clip generation works
All these tools basically work the same.
Step One: Upload the video or enter a YouTube link.
Step Two: Push a button (or two).
For this experiment, I took the first results that were generated and didn’t fine tune or regenerate. I wanted to see if they truly could create share-worthy content with almost no work on my end. Most of these tools have free starter levels, and you’ll pay $15-30 per month for enough capability to work through several projects.
The top five AI video clip generation tools
Best Overall: OpusClip
OpusClip
Effortless editing, thoughtful “scoring” to show you why it thought the clip was great and lots of editing/publishing options.
Some of the automatic edits were awkward, but it generated 38 short clips, so I had plenty to choose from.
A Close Second Place: Wisecut
Wisecut
Smart clips of different lengths with cool editing/publishing options. It didn’t do a great job of keeping the speaker in the frame, so I downloaded the horizontal video instead of the vertical.
Wisecut generated 44 clips and even broke up the program into individual chapters.
A Surprising Third Place: Adobe Express
Adobe Express
I had incredibly low expectations for the free version of Adobe Express, and I figured I’d hit a paywall really quickly.
But aside from having to reduce the file size for upload, it gave me surprisingly good instant clips — for free!
I like how it centered the video and did a reflective background to keep the vertical clips interesting.
These are much more pixelated than the other outputs because the starting video was a fraction of the quality of the others.
An Acceptable Fourth Place: Captions
Captions
Good automated editing for dead space, plus good alternative shots (zooms, etc.).
I use Captions all the time to fix audio and, well, add captions. It’s fast and handy.
A Complicated Fifth Place: Descript
Descript
Great output eventually, but it takes much longer to get it because you have to use its AI chatbot feature to describe what you’re looking for.
But Descript does so much more than this that it’s still one of my favorite tools of all time.
I especially love it for finding clips myself and being able to edit the text, although there are other tools on this list that now do the same.
Other common features of AI clipping tools
Note that these tools do A LOT more than what this experiment covers. In most, you’ll find other capabilities like these:
- Automatically find highlight clips
- Generate and edit captions
- Convert horizontal video to vertical or square
- Reframe video to keep faces centered
- Remove silence and filler words
- Control clip length and batch outputs
- Apply basic branding and templates
- Export for TikTok, Reels and Shorts
- Create transcripts
- Translate captions
- Offer AI dubbing or voice replacement in some tools
More AI Tools to Check Out
I asked ChatGPT to create a list of other well-regarded tools in this category. Here are its thoughts.
- Munch Studio
✔ Accurate: Great for business and thought leadership clips. It’s smart about analyzing platform trends.
Caveat: Might not be as flashy for pure social content.
Pricing: About $49/month. - Quso.ai (formerly Vidyo)
✔ Accurate: Excellent for long talking-head videos, and it’s quite precise in choosing clips.
Caveat: May require some manual fine-tuning for perfect pacing.
Pricing: Around $29/month. - Klap
✔ Accurate: Fast, social-first shorts with minimal effort. Great for punchy content.
Caveat: Less control if you want very detailed editing.
Pricing: Starts around $19/month. - WayinVideo
✔ Accurate: Budget-friendly with a good feature set. A bit less polished, but solid value.
Caveat: Interface can be a bit clunky compared to bigger names.
Pricing: Around $15/month. - VEED.io
✔ Accurate: Popular and easy to use, though more of a general editor with AI features.
Caveat: More manual work if you want truly automated shorts.
Pricing: Starts around $18/month. - Flowjin
✔ Accurate: Great for batch processing of webinars and podcasts into shorter clips.
Caveat: Interface can be a bit utilitarian.
Pricing: Often around $25/month. - Vizard.ai
✔ Accurate: Good for webinars and B2B content. It’s reliable but not always the flashiest.
Caveat: Clip selection is decent but not groundbreaking.
Pricing: About $30/month. - Pictory
✔ Accurate: Strong for turning long videos into short, branded clips, especially if you want lots of templates and easy customization.
Caveat: Can feel a bit template-heavy if you want something ultra unique.
Pricing: Around $23/month.
Thank you, Beth! This is very helpful. My son is in high school and in another year he will be eligible to start applying for scholarships. I am seeing more and more scholarship applications asking for a video vs written submission, and having absolutely no experience with editing videos I plan to use AI software. I just didn’t know where to start – and now I do!