Free AI Clip Maker: Turn Long Videos Into Shorts

One good hour-long video can hold a dozen good Shorts. Finding them is the slow part: scrubbing a timeline, writing captions and cropping to vertical. ReelForge, SceneGen's clip maker, does that for you. It transcribes the video, finds the moments worth posting and cuts each one into a captioned 9:16 clip. It costs no credits on any plan, including Free.

What ReelForge does

Give ReelForge a long video and it returns a ranked list of clips. Each has a title, a hook line, a caption, start and end times, and a short reason it was picked. When you're happy with the list, it renders the clips as vertical MP4s ready for YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels.

It works best with talking videos: podcasts, interviews, commentary, lectures and webinars, where the words carry the moment. Open it at /dashboard/cliptube.

What you can feed it

• A YouTube link or another public video link.
• A direct link to a video file.
• An upload of up to 500 MB.
• A transcript, if you only want the moments picked.

Sources can be up to four hours long. Live streams and ten-hour loops are refused up front. You choose how many clips you want (1–20, default 10) and the longest a clip may run (10–180 seconds, default 60).

How it picks the moments

It runs in three stages, all on SceneGen's own servers, with no paid API anywhere in the path.

1. Transcribe. An on-server speech-to-text model gives every spoken segment real start and end times, each word's own timing and the language.
2. Detect. A local AI model reads the transcript in windows of about seven minutes, with a minute of overlap, and picks each window's best moments by line. Every pick is snapped to whole sentences, fitted to your clip length, de-duplicated across windows and ranked.
3. Always an answer. A deterministic scorer rates every possible clip too. It looks for questions, exclamations, numbers, hook words, story beats, audience reactions, bursts of fast speech and pauses, and it counts filler and "don't forget to subscribe" outros against a clip. The scorer fills anything the model didn't return, and it does the whole job when the model is busy or down, so detection never fails for want of an AI.

On very long videos, the model reads the windows the scorer rates highest first, rather than every minute. That keeps clip jobs from slowing other people's renders. Each clip's score is a heuristic ranking, not a prediction of views.

What the rendered clips look like

• Vertical 9:16, 1080×1920, centre-cropped from the source. Talking-head footage framed in the middle works best. Wide shots with the speaker at the edge may need a different crop.
• Burned-in captions built from the words actually spoken, timed from the per-word timings and shown phrase by phrase with the spoken word highlighted.
• A headline over the first seconds, to help the clip hook on its own.
• Levelled sound, so clips cut from quiet and loud sections play at a similar volume.
• Each clip starts a touch before its first word and lets the last word breathe.

How to turn a long video into Shorts, step by step

1. Open ReelForge and paste a link or upload the file.
2. Set the number of clips and the maximum length. For Shorts, 30–60 seconds is a safe start. YouTube allows Shorts up to 3 minutes.
3. Start the job. It downloads, transcribes and detects, and progress updates on its own. A workspace can run two clip jobs at once.
4. Review the list. Read each clip's reason and hook, and drop the ones you don't want.
5. Render the clips you're keeping, then download the MP4s.
6. Before posting, make a vertical cover in Thumbnail Studio. Write a title that works without the original context.

Only clip what you have the rights to

ReelForge will fetch a public link, but a link being public doesn't mean you're allowed to repost it. Clip your own videos, or videos you have permission to use. On YouTube, reposting someone else's content without significant original commentary or changes falls under the reused content policy, and it can also bring copyright claims.

ReelForge vs. paid clippers

Paid clip tools usually charge by the upload minute. ReelForge costs no credits because transcription, detection and rendering all run on SceneGen's servers. What you give up is speed: a long source takes minutes, not seconds, because the servers are shared. For the broader repurposing workflow, read how to repurpose long videos into Shorts and the content repurposing workflow.

Try it on your last long video

Create a free account and open ReelForge. It's free on every plan. Compare everything else on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

Is ReelForge really free?

Yes. ReelForge clips cost 0 credits on every plan, including Free. Transcription, moment detection and rendering all run on SceneGen's own servers.

Can I paste a YouTube link?

Yes, or another public video link, a direct file link, or an upload up to 500 MB. Only clip videos you own or have permission to use.

How long can the source video be?

Up to four hours. Clips can be 10–180 seconds, and you can ask for 1–20 clips per job.

Does it reframe to follow the speaker?

No. It centre-crops to 9:16, which suits centred talking-head footage. Captions are burned in from the real word timings.