Best AI to turn a podcast into short clips (and which plan to buy)

The clips are cheap. Picking them is the work

Every AI clipper hands you more clips than you can use. One OpusClip user on r/opusclip gets about 30 clips per video and posts one or two. On r/podcasting, people call the raw results hit or miss, and say they still trim the first few seconds and add a text hook on screen before posting.

So the real cost is your time going through the batch, not the subscription. A clipper is worth paying for when watching 30 short candidates is quicker than scrubbing an hour of tape, which for most weekly shows it is.

OpusClip, and the plan to buy

OpusClip finds the highlight moments in a long video, crops them to vertical and adds animated captions. Its help page spells out the billing: one credit per minute of the video you upload. A 45-minute episode is 45 credits whether you keep two clips or twenty. There’s a slider to process only part of the video, so skip the intro and ad reads and you spend fewer credits.

The free plan gives you 60 minutes a month, enough for one episode. Clips carry a watermark and, per the pricing page, have to be downloaded within 3 days. Starter is $15 a month for 150 minutes and is sold monthly only. Pro is $29 a month for 300 minutes, and it’s the only plan with a yearly option: OpusClip says yearly credits cost half as much, which puts Pro at $14.50 a month. You get all 3,600 yearly minutes up front and they last 12 months, which suits a back catalog of old episodes. Monthly credits roll over for one extra month, then expire.

Pro also adds more places to pull episodes from, including Riverside, Apple Podcasts, Dropbox and Zoom links. Free and Starter take YouTube links and files from your computer, and Starter adds Google Drive, Vimeo, Zoom and StreamYard.

CapCut when you’d rather pick the moments yourself

If you post two or three clips a week and already know which bits were good, you don’t need a clipper. CapCut is a free editor on phone and computer with automatic captions and templates. Drop in the episode, cut the minute you want, and caption it. CapCut also has a Long video to shorts tool that tries the OpusClip trick. Some effects and AI tools sit behind Pro at $19.99 a month on the web, so try the free path before you pay.

Descript if the episode already lives there

Plenty of podcasters edit in Descript because you cut the audio by deleting words from the transcript. One host on r/podcasting says it saves him three hours an episode. Its Create Clips tool pulls short clips from the same project, so you skip uploading the episode twice. Hobbyist, the cheapest paid plan, lists it among its AI tools at $16 a month with 10 media hours and 400 AI credits. The free plan gives 1 media hour a month and exports 720p with a watermark.

The catch is credits. Descript’s AI tools draw from a monthly pool, and users on r/Descript say they run out fast. If clips are all you want, OpusClip is the simpler buy.

Recording in Riverside? Try its Magic Clips first

If you already record remotely in Riverside, its own clipper, Magic Clips, works on the recording without an upload. It’s on Riverside’s free plan, with a Riverside watermark and video up to 720p. Removing the watermark means Pro, $24 a month billed yearly ($288) or $29 month to month. That’s a good deal if you use Riverside to record anyway, and a poor one if clips are all you want.

If your show is audio only

OpusClip is built for video: it crops each clip around the picture. If you only record audio, the simplest fix is to turn on a camera next time you record, since a talking face holds people on a short clip better than a waveform. OpusClip’s sister tools include Audio to Image Video, which turns a voice recording into an illustrated video, but that’s a different product from the clipper.

What we’d do

Weekly video podcast: OpusClip free for one episode to see if its picks match yours, then Pro billed yearly if they do. A handful of clips you choose yourself: CapCut, free. Recording in Riverside: try Magic Clips first. Already editing in Descript: use its Create Clips before paying for a second tool. Whichever you use, watch each clip before it goes out and fix the first three seconds.

Related reading on ShipRadar: AI tools for making a podcast, AI tools for editing video and best AI for social media posts.