Last updated: 2026-01-10

If your long video was recorded in StreamYard, start by using AI clips to auto-generate vertical, captioned highlights directly from your recording in a few clicks. If you’re stitching together moments from many different sources or need heavy prompt-based visual analysis, consider layering on a dedicated clipping tool like Opus Clip or VEED.

Summary

• StreamYard’s AI clips turn long recordings (up to six hours) into vertical, captioned highlights inside the same app you used to record.(StreamYard Help Center)
• You can mark moments live by saying “Clip that” and later guide the AI with prompts, then tweak timing, captions, and branding in a lightweight editor.(StreamYard Help Center)
• VEED and Opus Clip offer additional prompt-based and multimodal controls if you’re clipping many different file types or non-talking footage.(VEED Help Center)(Opus Clip Help Center)
• For most U.S. creators repurposing their own live streams or podcasts into a handful of weekly clips, keeping everything in StreamYard minimizes cost, file juggling, and learning curve.

What does “create highlight video from long video” really mean?

When people search this, they usually want three things:

1. A fast way to find the best 30–90 second moments in a long webinar, podcast, or stream.
2. A format that works on TikTok, Shorts, and Reels—usually vertical with big readable captions.
3. A workflow that doesn’t involve exporting, re‑uploading, and learning another complex editor.

That’s exactly where integrated tools like StreamYard’s AI clips come in: your long video is already in your account, and you turn it into highlights with minimal steps.(StreamYard Help Center)

How do you create highlight clips directly in StreamYard?

If you recorded or streamed in StreamYard, your fastest path is:

1. Finish your stream or recording as normal.
2. Open your video library in StreamYard and click the recording.
3. Click “Generate clips.” Our AI analyzes your video and auto‑creates vertical (9:16) clips with captions and a title in one go.(StreamYard Help Center)
4. Review the suggested clips and pick the ones that feel most on‑brand.
5. Hit Adjust to edit: you can change the duration, tweak captions, and set your preferred caption style for future clips.(StreamYard Help Center)
6. Download or publish to your social channels as you normally would.

Because StreamYard supports recordings up to six hours, you can go from marathon webinar to a stack of snackable highlights without touching another app.(StreamYard Help Center)

How can you mark the best moments while you’re still live?

Re‑watching a three‑hour replay just to find “the good stuff” is brutal. That’s why we built a simple trick into live production.

During your StreamYard broadcast, you can say “Clip that” out loud anytime something great happens. Nothing pops up on screen; your audience sees no change. But that phrase quietly marks the moment.

After the recording processes, AI clips will treat the 30 seconds before that phrase as a candidate highlight and include it alongside the other suggested segments.(StreamYard Help Center)

In practice, this means:

• You stay present with your guest instead of writing timestamps.
• Big moments are pre‑bookmarked for you.
• You still have full control to trim and style those clips later.

For most solo hosts and small teams, that single voice cue removes hours of hunting through timelines.

How much control do you have over what the AI clips?

There are two layers of control inside StreamYard:

1. Prompt-based regeneration
   After your first batch of clips, you can regenerate them and add a text prompt like “focus on questions about pricing” or “find moments where we talk about remote work.” The AI works from the transcript and picks new highlights that match your prompt.(StreamYard Help Center)

2. Light but focused editing
   In the editor, you can:

   • Extend or shorten each clip by up to 60 seconds on either side.
   • Customize caption style (font, layout, color, position) and save that as your default for future batches.(StreamYard Help Center)

The goal at StreamYard is not to replace a full non‑linear editor, but to get you 90% of the way to a shareable highlight with very little effort. If you later want deep compositing, complex motion graphics, or long montage edits, you can always export the clips to a traditional editor.

Where do VEED and Opus Clip fit into this workflow?

Sometimes your long video didn’t start in StreamYard—maybe it’s a Zoom recording, a course lesson, or a sports replay. Or maybe you want more experimental AI controls.

In those cases, you can:

• Use VEED’s Clips feature to upload a long video, let it auto‑find highlights, add subtitles, center the speaker, strip filler words, and generate clips optimized for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts.(VEED Help Center)
• Lean on Opus Clip’s ClipAnything when you need multimodal prompts that look at visuals, audio, and sentiment—not just the transcript. ClipAnything analyzes each frame, rates scenes for virality potential, and lets you type prompts like “find all the touchdowns” or “clip the funniest reactions.”(Opus Clip Help Center)

These other platforms are useful when:

• You’re clipping non-talking footage (B‑roll, sports, vlogs) that needs visual understanding.(Opus Clip product page)
• You manage content from many different recording tools and want one central clipping hub.(Opus Clip marketing site)

For creators whose main shows are already produced live in StreamYard, those external tools tend to become “sometimes tools,” not the daily default.

How do costs compare when you’re processing hours of video?

Under the hood, AI repurposing is about how many minutes of long video you can push through each month before costs spike.

At StreamYard, AI clips usage is tracked by batches generated, and each batch can use a recording up to six hours long.(StreamYard Help Center) On the Free plan, that works out to processing up to about 12 hours of content per month, which equates to roughly 720 credits on a credit-based model like Opus Clip—credits that are listed at prices such as $87/month for that level of usage in their tiers.

Move up to StreamYard’s higher plan with 25 generations per month, and you’re effectively processing the equivalent of about 1,500 Opus Clip credits, which their pricing associates with around $145/month—still significantly more than paying for StreamYard’s production and clipping together for typical use.(Opus Clip pricing)

For most U.S. creators, that means you get live production, multistreaming, and AI repurposing in one subscription instead of stacking a separate recording app plus a standalone clipping tool.

How do you balance privacy, quality, and effort?

When AI is touching your video library, three questions matter:

1. What happens to my data?
   With StreamYard, recordings used for AI clips are not used to train AI models. The AI only analyzes your existing recording to find highlights inside that same file, and your footage isn’t reused for future training.(StreamYard Help Center)

2. Is the output actually watchable?
   StreamYard’s AI clips automatically reframes based on who’s speaking, so the active speaker stays centered even when your original layout changed during the show.(StreamYard Help Center) VEED’s Clips feature likewise auto‑frames and removes silences, and Opus Clip layers in B‑roll and other effects if you need heavier stylization.(VEED Help Center)(Opus Clip marketing site)

3. How many moving parts does the workflow have?
   A typical “export to another app” flow means exporting your long video, uploading it to a second service, waiting for processing, downloading, and then uploading again to each social platform. When your content starts in StreamYard, you skip that middle shuffle and work inside one environment.

What we recommend

• If you already record or go live in StreamYard, use AI clips as your default to turn each long session into several vertical highlights with captions.
• During your show, say “Clip that” at key moments so you can later regenerate clips with prompts and minimal scrolling.
• If you regularly repurpose videos from many tools or rely on heavy visual prompts, add VEED or Opus Clip as a secondary step, but keep StreamYard as your core recording and distribution hub.
• Reuse a consistent caption style and clip length so your highlights feel branded and recognizable across TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels.