Is an AI clipping tool like Opus Clip worth it for turning long videos into short clips?

I tested one recently. I dropped in a 37-minute edit and gave it one brief: grab all the educational moments that have a strong visual and audio hook. About eight minutes later I had usable clips for reels, trial reels and ads. On a bigger batch of long footage, it grabbed clips, put captions on them and made 50 usable shorts in about half an hour.

Do the maths. Even if it was a few hundred dollars a month, that’s still far cheaper than paying for the editing hours to do the same job. Short clips are where you need volume for ads and socials, and that’s exactly where human editing is slow and expensive.

That doesn’t mean the editor goes. I think a lot of the clips can just get built using AI, and that frees your editor up for the hero edits and the longer story pieces that need real judgement. Let the tool do the first pass, then tidy up the best results.

If you’ve got a back catalogue of long footage sitting on a drive, dump the whole lot in and see what comes out.