Comparison
Open the folder. What is already in there decides this.
Opus Clip turns long recordings you already own into ranked vertical clips. With hours in the folder that is the cheapest creative you will ship. A clip cannot open on a line nobody said. Here is what supply decides, what a fresh take costs, and how Cutroom finishes one in four minutes.
- Cutroom's upload ceiling
- 3 min
- coverage ceiling by pace
- 40-52%
- free credits, seven days, no card
- 300
Hours of good speaking already recorded is the cheapest creative you will ever ship
The footage is paid for and the talking is done. Extraction turns a sunk cost into a publishing calendar.
Ranking is the part that matters. Nobody scrubs ninety minutes looking for four moments, and a machine sorting them beats a person doing it.
Auto reframe earns its place too. A landscape two-shot becomes something a phone can hold, with the speaker tracked rather than cropped.
It removes a recurring negotiation too. Nobody has to be persuaded to film again.
For a team where the expert is busy and expensive, that alone justifies the tool.
Here is the ceiling. A clip is bounded by what was already said, in the register it was said in.
A conversation opens mid-thought. A paid placement gives you three seconds and rewards opening on a claim.
Cutroom starts from a take filmed for that placement, up to three minutes of it.
Back comes a finished 9:16 MP4, captions burned in and coverage sitting on the words you marked.
An empty folder is not a tooling problem, it is a supply problem
Plenty of businesses have no archive at all. No podcast, no webinars, no conference talks, nothing from last year.
For them a clipper has nothing to work on, and the fix is forty seconds filmed deliberately.
There is a second case that looks like supply and is not. The archive exists and the clips underperform behind budget.
Writing the hook first and then saying it is the opposite order to mining. It is the order paid rewards.
So the check is two questions: is there anything in the folder, and did the clips from it actually work.
There is a third case worth checking. The archive exists, the clips work organically, and cost per result on paid has never moved.
That is the same diagnosis with better disguise, and the fix is still a take filmed for a cold viewer.
Mining and making, judged on what each one can produce
| Clipping an archive | Filming on purpose | |
|---|---|---|
| Needs existing footage | Yes, hours of it | No, forty seconds |
| Can open on a written hook | No, bounded by the recording | Yes |
| Clips per upload | Many | Many cuts of one take |
| Cost per additional version | Re-run the upload | 20 CR a minute |
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Mark the transcript and the cut rebuilds around your marks
Upload one take of up to three minutes. It returns transcribed, drafted into a full cut, and captioned as a 9:16 MP4.
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands over exactly those words. Swap it, or search millions of free ones.
Delete a line and the cut rebuilds around the gap. Change the pace and the whole piece re-cuts, coverage ceiling included.
Emphasise the word your claim turns on so it pops in the captions. Fix a mis-heard word and the text follows.
Write the opening headline yourself, or take the one it drafted, then export at 20 credits a finished minute.
No timeline, no keyframes, no layers. Eleven marks, all of them on the words you said.
Coverage is capped by pace: 40 percent on chill, 45 on normal, 52 on fast. The person stays the spine of the ad.
- Batch 100 credits covers transcript, director pass and b-roll search
- Six caption packs, five clip entrances, music level set under the read
- A second export from the same take does not re-charge the batch
- Somebody has to film, or own a photo the avatar module can drive
A fresh take in, a finished ad out: the specification
One talking-head take of up to three minutes goes in. One 9:16 MP4 comes out, captions burned in.
Three minutes is a hard ceiling. A ninety-minute recording cannot come in and cannot be trimmed inside the product.
There is no scoring model and no prediction of what will perform. Published virality numbers describe other people's placements.
There is no landscape-to-vertical reframing, so film vertical or handle it before upload.
There is one speaker per take, so an interview with two people on screen is outside this.
There is no timeline underneath, no scheduler, and nothing of yours is stamped on the file.
Read that against your folder before deciding. What it does not limit is the count, which is next.
Film the hooks the archive never contained, and the count moves
Winners are 5 to 8 percent of creatives, per Motion's analysis of 550,000+ Meta ads.
Six creatives a month draws under one winner, however they were produced. The count is the only lever either tool moves.
A second cut of a take already transcribed is 20 credits a minute and about four minutes.
One finished minute from a fresh take is about 120 credits. Seven days and 300 credits with no card covers two.
Keep clipping the archive for organic reach, where a conversational moment is the right register.
Film short takes for paid, where three seconds have to carry a written claim rather than a remembered aside.
Two hooks the archive never contained is a cheap way to find out which half was actually short.
Head to head, archive rows first
The top two rows go to Opus Clip, and hours of recordings should weigh them heavily. The rest is what mining cannot produce.
| Opus Clip | Cutroom | |
|---|---|---|
| Long recordings as input | Hours at a time | 3 minutes maximum |
| Ranking and reframing | Scored, sorted, tracked | You pick, you film vertical |
| Pace change re-cuts everything | The recording sets the pace | Chill, normal or fast |
| Music generated under the read | Bring your own track | Described style, 20 CR |
| A hook that was never spoken | Bounded by the recording | Write it, then say it |
| Coverage on a chosen phrase | Captions, not coverage | Highlight, clip lands |
| Cut rebuilds when a line goes | Trim the clip yourself | Delete, and it recompiles |
Questions people ask
- Can I trim a long recording down and use it here?
- Yes. Anything under three minutes is a valid take. Cut the strongest section elsewhere, bring it in, and it gets transcribed, drafted and captioned like any other upload.
- Why does Cutroom refuse long uploads instead of picking the best part?
- Because picking the best part is a different product with different economics. The batch here assumes a short take built to be an ad, and stretching that to ninety minutes would make every job slower and more expensive.
- Do extracted clips actually underperform as paid ads?
- Often, and the reason is structural rather than technical. A conversational moment opens mid-thought. A paid placement gives you about three seconds and rewards opening on a claim. Check your own numbers before assuming either way.
- Who should walk away?
- Anyone whose archive is deep and whose clips already perform behind budget. Keep mining while that holds. Come here for the hooks the recordings never contained.
The best line for an ad is usually one nobody has said yet. Cutroom turns that line into a finished 9:16 file, captions burned in and coverage on the claim.