Clip Maker: Your Long Videos Become Shorts — On Your Machine, For Free

Everyone with a long video has the same problem: the good ninety seconds are trapped inside the boring ninety minutes. The webinar with three quotable moments. The podcast episode with one perfect exchange. The conference talk where the demo — just the demo — would make a great Reel.

The tools that solve this live in the cloud, meter you by the minute, and start by making you upload the whole file. Ours doesn't. Clip Maker is a web app that looks like the cloud tools — pick a video, choose a style, watch clips appear — but the work happens on your computer, driven through the 5am CLI. Your source video never uploads. Rendering is your own FFmpeg. Which is why we can make it free.

5am studio        # then open 5am.app/clip-maker

Watch it work

Before the details, here's the walkthrough:

What it does

Pick a long video — from a folder on your computer, or straight from your 5AM library. Tell it what to capture ("the product demo moments"), how many clips you want, how long they can run, and which shape: portrait for Shorts and Reels, square, landscape, or the original frame.

Then it works: one transcription, one AI pass that picks the strongest self-contained moments — a hook, a complete thought, a payoff, never starting or ending mid-sentence — and a fast local render per clip, with burned-in subtitles in your choice of style and an AI-written title on each. The clips stream into the browser as they finish, playable instantly, because they're being served to you from your own disk.

Tick the keepers, and only those upload — into an album, and optionally as a Video Editor project laid out clip-by-clip for hand-polish.

Why local is the whole point

Do the math on the cloud version of this feature. A 90-minute 4K recording is tens of gigabytes. Uploading it takes longer than watching it. Then a rented server transcodes it, and someone has to pay for that server — which is why every clip tool prices by the processing minute.

Clip Maker's pipeline runs where the file already is:

• The video never leaves your machine. Transcription extracts a small mono audio track — about 20 MB per hour — and sends only that to Gemini, under your own API key. That's the entire upstream cost of a 90-minute source.
• Rendering is your FFmpeg. Cutting, cropping to 9:16, subtitle burn-in — local, fast, yours.
• The browser talks to your machine directly. 5am studio runs a companion server on 127.0.0.1 that only pages from 5am.app can reach, and only when the page is signed into the same account as the CLI. No open ports, nothing listening on your network.
• Only finished clips upload — a few hundred megabytes of keepers instead of tens of gigabytes of source.

Re-runs are nearly free, too: transcriptions are cached, so trying a different brief or clip count skips the paid call entirely and goes straight to selection.

You can read the edit — and change it

If you've read about our highlight-reel pipeline, you know the house philosophy: the AI's output should be an artifact you can read, not a dice roll you re-throw. Clip Maker puts that philosophy in the browser, twice over.

The transcript is editable. The AI transcribed your video; if it misheard a name, fix it in the Transcript tab. Clips whose subtitles changed get flagged and re-render with one click — and you can re-run clip selection over the corrected text without re-transcribing.

Every clip is a script. Behind each clip sits a tiny .vedl edit file — the same video-edit DSL the CLI uses for highlight reels:

source "talk.mp4"
cut 754.2 782.9   # the demo lands — the room reacts
text "The thirty-second demo" atsrc 754.2 for 2.5 pos=top size=56
fade in 0.3
fade out 0.3

Open the Script tab, nudge the cut two seconds earlier, change the title, save — the clip re-renders in place. Mistype something and you get the parse error with a line number, not a shrug. No second AI call, ever, for a change you can express by editing four lines.

Projects that survive

Every video you Continue with becomes a project on your machine — clips, transcript, scripts, all of it, stored under ~/.5am/studio/. Close the tab mid-render and come back: it resumes. Quit the companion and restart it: your projects reload. Open the Projects tab next week in a different browser: they're all there, ready to re-open, re-edit, or finally publish. Your work isn't trapped in a browser session, because it was never in the browser — it's files, on your computer, discoverable from the web UI whenever the companion is running.

The scriptable twin

Everything the web app does, the CLI does headless — same pipeline, same artifacts:

# Five 9:16 clips with bold subtitles → talk-clips/
5am media clips talk.mp4 --count 5 --style bold --brief "the funniest exchanges"

# Every clip ships with its editable script; tweak and re-render without AI
5am media edit render talk-clips/clip-02.vedl --output clip-02-fixed.mp4

manifest.json describes everything produced — titles, the AI's reasoning per clip, timings — in JSON, like every 5am command, so a cron job can clip your weekly stream while you sleep.

Practical details

• Browsers: Chrome, Edge, or Firefox. Safari refuses to let https pages talk to localhost — the connect screen explains this if it detects it.
• Requirements: the CLI, a free 5AM account, your Gemini API key, and an FFmpeg with libass for subtitle burn-in (brew install ffmpeg covers it). The Clip Maker page walks you through all four steps with copyable commands.
• Subtitles speak your language. Transcripts, subtitles, and titles are Unicode end-to-end — right-to-left scripts and CJK included, shaped through your system fonts.
• Library videos work too. Pick a video already in your 5AM library and the companion downloads the original once into a local cache, then proceeds exactly like a local file.
• Publish is the only paid-shaped step — and it's just your normal library storage. The clips are yours either way; they're on your disk.

Get started

curl -fsSL https://cli.5am.app/cli/latest/install.sh | sh
5am login                        # mint a token in Settings → CLI Access Tokens
5am keys set gemini <your-key>
5am studio

Then open Clip Maker and feed it the longest recording you have. Somewhere in it are ninety seconds that deserve daylight — and this time, finding them doesn't cost you an upload, a subscription, or an afternoon.

Open Clip Maker →