How to cut a long video into shorts

Analyze does not guess at highlights. It cuts the source into segments, transcribes them with our own Whisper service, captions each one with a vision model, and leaves you with a timestamped index you can search in plain language. Picking moments out of that index and exporting them as a short is the last and cheapest step. The expensive step is the first one, and this page starts with what it costs, because the number surprises people.

What it costs, before anything else

Analyze is the most expensive thing on this platform per minute of input, and it is the one lane where the free green wallet is no help at all. The frame pass runs on a vision model and is billed straight out of the gold wallet. There is no green rung, no partial payment, and no fallback.

Which plan: Starter and up. Below Starter the Analyze section shows a plan pitch instead of the workspace, and the billing settles it anyway: Analyze is charged 100% in ✦ gold, and signing up grants zero gold.

The frame pass costs about ✦0.07 per analysed frame at default sampling, and a moment search over the finished index is a flat ✦1. That works out to roughly ✦4 per minute of source. Set against the monthly gold grants, it looks like this:

How much video a plan's monthly gold grant analyses, at default sampling
PlanGold a monthAnalyze minutes a dayVideo the grant covers
Freenone10none — no gold to spend
Starter✦5060about 12 minutes a month
Creator✦380120about 90 minutes a month
Pro✦900300about 3.5 hours a month
Ultra✦10,000900about 39 hours a month

Read that table twice, because it says something the daily minute meter hides: on every plan below Ultra the gold wallet runs out long before the daily minutes do. Starter's 60 minutes a day is not a budget you will reach — ✦50 is. Buying gold credits is what actually extends Analyze, and buying credits does not change your tier.

Watch out: Minutes are charged up front when a run starts and are not refunded if it fails — a failed run still spent the vision calls. Start with a short source, or trim before you upload, rather than testing settings on a feature-length file.

The two meters, and why there are two

Analyze is metered twice, in two different currencies, and both have to clear. The credit charge covers what the vision pass costs to run. The minutes-per-day allowance exists because the captioning rides a shared, non-elastic subscription rather than an elastic API — uncapped use would starve every other user of it, including chat. A moment search bills a flat two-minute equivalent against that allowance whatever the length of the video, because a search spends a handful of calls rather than scaling with the source.

Cutting a long video into shorts

  1. Open Analyze. Go to /video and pick Analyze from the rail. Below Starter you will see the plan pitch rather than the workspace.
  2. Bring the video in. Upload a file, paste a link from one of the twelve supported platforms, or pick something already in your asset library. The per-file cap is your plan's, not the route's — 225 MB on Starter, about 1.8 GB on Creator.
  3. Set the segment length, or leave it on auto. Segments run from 0.2 to 600 seconds. Short segments give a finer index and cost more, because cost scales with frames analysed. Auto picks a length from the source and shows you the estimate before you commit.
  4. Read the quote, then run the pass. The workspace shows the frame count, the credit cost and the minutes it will charge before it starts. This is the moment to shorten the source if the number is wrong.
  5. Ask for the moments you want. Type what you are looking for in plain language — "every time he names a number", "the shots with no cut in them". Matches come back as playable segment cards with their timecodes. Each ask costs ✦1 and is saved with the record.
  6. Tick the segments and export. Tap the segments you want, in the order the timeline has them, and export. The cuts are taken straight from the source and joined with ffmpeg — no model call, no credits, up to 40 segments in one export.

Open Analyze — Opens the Analyze workspace. Nothing is analysed and nothing is charged until you press the run button.

What the index actually contains

The finished record is not a summary. It is a set of addressable objects, and they are what make the export step cheap:

That last point is the practical one. The expensive pass happens once per video. Everything afterwards — more searches, more exports, a different short from the same source next week — reads the cached index. Repeat queries on an already-analysed video skip the analysis entirely.

Segment length is the dial that costs money

One setting decides both how good the index is and how much it costs, and it is the segment length. Segments can run anywhere from 0.2 to 600 seconds — it is a free-form number, not a ladder of presets — and the cost of the pass tracks the number of frames analysed, which tracks how finely you have cut the source.

What the segment length trades away
Segment lengthIndex granularityCostGood for
Short (a few seconds)Fine — a caption every few secondsHighestFast-cut footage, finding brief moments
AutoChosen from the sourceBalancedThe default, and the right first try
Long (a minute or more)Coarse — one caption per spanLowestTalks and interviews, where the transcript carries the meaning

The rule of thumb: if what you are looking for is spoken, go long and let the transcript do the work. If what you are looking for is visual and brief, go short and pay for it. Getting this wrong in the cheap direction is recoverable — you can re-run the pass — but re-running means paying for the pass twice, so it is worth thinking about for the thirty seconds it deserves.

Turning the picks into an actual short

The export cuts the segments you ticked out of the source and joins them in timeline order. What comes out is your source's aspect ratio, at your source's resolution — the export is a straight cut, not a reframe, which is precisely why it costs nothing.

That means a 16:9 source produces a 16:9 short. Reframing it to 9:16 is a separate job: crop it in whatever editor you use, or on Ultra, in the in-app Timeline editor, which does crop and reframe among much else. Do not plan on the Timeline from a lower plan — it is an Ultra-only section and is not shown below that tier at all.

A useful sequence for anyone doing this repeatedly: analyse once, ask three or four different questions of the same index at ✦1 apiece, export several candidate shorts from those answers for free, and only then decide which one is worth reframing and captioning. The economics of this feature reward asking a lot of questions of one expensive index rather than analysing a lot of videos.

Can I do this on the free plan?

No. Analyze shows a plan pitch below Starter, and it is billed entirely in gold credits, which a free account has none of. The green wallet cannot pay for any part of it.

How much does analysing an hour of video cost?

At default sampling, roughly ✦4 a minute, so about ✦250 for an hour — two thirds of a Creator month's ✦380 grant spent on a single video. Longer sources are the case for buying credits, or for trimming before you analyse.

Does exporting a short cost credits?

No. The export is a straight ffmpeg cut and join from the source video — no model call and no charge. The cap is 40 segments per export request.

What happens if the run fails halfway?

The minutes are still spent, because the vision calls were made. Credits are deducted for the pass that ran. This is why the workspace quotes the cost before starting and why a short test source is worth the two minutes.

Can I hand the clips somewhere else?

Yes. Picked segments can go out as one short, be staged as LoRA training clips, or seed a storyboard. The Timeline editor also accepts them, but Timeline is an Ultra-only section.