# Auto-Clips — Long Video to Vertical Shorts Point Auto-Clips at any long video and it finds the most engaging moments for you — ranked, titled, and scored — then cuts, reframes, captions, voices, and renders each one as a finished vertical short, straight into your library and on to your social accounts. **On this page** - [What Auto-Clips does](#what-auto-clips-does) - [Why you'd use it](#why-youd-use-it) - [Before you start](#before-you-start) - [The pipeline at a glance](#the-pipeline-at-a-glance) - [Step-by-step: your first batch of shorts](#step-by-step-your-first-batch-of-shorts) - [The options, in detail](#the-options-in-detail) - [Source size and length limits](#source-size-and-length-limits) - [What each stage costs in credits](#what-each-stage-costs-in-credits) - [Where your shorts land](#where-your-shorts-land) - [Tips](#tips) - [Troubleshooting](#troubleshooting) - [Related pages](#related-pages) --- ## What Auto-Clips does You give Auto-Clips one long video — a podcast episode, a webinar, a talk, a stream, a vlog, gameplay footage. The AI watches the whole thing and returns a ranked list of **highlight moments**: each one has a punchy title, a start and end time, a moment type (a hook, an insight, a funny beat, a payoff, and so on), and a 0–100 shareability score. You tick the moments you want, and one click turns each into a finished short: trimmed to exactly that moment, reframed to vertical **9:16** (or square, or widescreen), optionally overlaid with styled captions and a persona-matched voiceover, and rendered out as a real video file. Every short lands in your media library and appears in your Projects — each one is a normal, fully editable project you can open in the studio afterward. When the batch finishes, a final panel lets you schedule the finished shorts to your connected social accounts, staggered on a cadence you choose. ## Why you'd use it - **One hour of footage becomes a week of content.** Instead of scrubbing a timeline hunting for clips, you review a short list of ranked moments and pick. - **The AI watches, it doesn't just listen.** Moments are found by watching the actual footage — so a quiet emotional beat, a visual gag, or a clutch play gets found even when nobody says anything quotable. - **The output is finished, not a rough cut.** Captions, voiceover, vertical reframe, and the render all happen in one pass. What comes out is ready to post. - **Everything stays yours.** Shorts render into your own workspace library, and each one is an editable project — polish any of them in the studio like any other edit. ## Before you start 1. **Sign in.** Auto-Clips is part of your workspace; if you're signed out, the page asks you to sign in. 2. **Have a source video.** Either a video already in your CoreReflex library (uploaded or generated — the page shows your newest ones to pick from), or a **direct, public `https://` link to a video file**. A link to a video *page* (for example a YouTube watch page) will not work — it must point at the video file itself. 3. **Credits, if metering is on.** Every stage of the pipeline is AI work and draws credits when your instance has billing metering enabled. See [What each stage costs](#what-each-stage-costs-in-credits) below. If your balance is too low, the run stops before charging anything. 4. **For social publishing (optional):** connect your social accounts first, in the dashboard's **Publishing** section. CoreReflex publishes through a GoHighLevel connection — connect once and reach the platforms you've linked there (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Google Business, TikTok). Open Auto-Clips from the **Auto-Clips card on your dashboard** ("Open Auto-Clips →"), or go directly to `corereflex.com/auto-clips`. ## The pipeline at a glance ``` Pick a source → Prepare (long videos) → Detect highlights → Review & select → Captions / Voiceover / Story (optional) → Generate & render → Publish ``` Each stage runs in your browser tab with a live status line, so you always see what's happening and nothing runs without you clicking it. ## Step-by-step: your first batch of shorts ### Step 1 — Choose a source and set your options 1. Open **Auto-Clips** from the dashboard card. 2. **Pick your video.** The top of the page shows the newest videos in your library — click one and it's selected (the page confirms: *"Selected '…'. Now click Detect highlights."*). Or scroll past the "or" divider and **paste a public https link** to a video file in the URL field. 3. Set the options (all have sensible defaults): - **Clips** — how many highlight moments to look for (1–20, default 4). - **Min sec / Max sec** — the shortest and longest a clip may be (defaults 12 and 60 seconds — the sweet spot for shorts). - **Aspect** — the output shape: **9:16** vertical (default — TikTok, Reels, Shorts), **1:1** square, or **16:9** widescreen. - **Moments** — the kind of moments to hunt for: **General** (any footage) or **Gaming** (streams and gameplay). Details [below](#moment-presets-what-the-ai-looks-for). - **Captions** — **None**, **Auto (match moment)**, or one of the nine caption personas. Details [below](#the-nine-caption-personas). - **Voiceover** — **Off** or **On (match style)**: a narrator whose voice matches your caption persona speaks over each clip. - **Story mode** — **Off** or **On (one arc)**: instead of independent captions per clip, one continuous narrative is written across *all* your selected clips. Needs at least two clips. 4. Click **Detect highlights**. What happens next, automatically: - The status line shows *"Preparing the source for analysis…"*. A long video is first condensed into a small analysis copy so the AI can watch all of it — this preserves the real timestamps, so the moments it finds map exactly back onto your original footage. (This step needs the render service on your instance; see [limits](#source-size-and-length-limits).) - If preparation isn't available on your instance, the page says so honestly and falls back to analyzing the source directly — which works for small clips — and reveals three extra fields (**Source width**, **Source height**, **Duration sec**) that you'll need to fill in before generating. - Then: *"Analyzing the video for the best moments…"*, and finally *"Found N highlights — review and generate."* ### Step 2 — Review and select highlights The **Review highlights** panel lists every moment found, best first. Each row shows: - a **checkbox** (all moments start selected — untick any you don't want), - the **title** the AI gave the moment (e.g. "The one mistake every founder makes"), - the **time range** in the source (e.g. `312.0s – 355.5s`), - a **type chip** (hook, insight, funny, payoff, clutch…), - the **score** — a 0–100 estimate of how attention-grabbing and shareable the moment is. Moments never overlap each other, and the list is deliberately diverse — the detector picks the best moment of each *type* first, then fills the remaining slots by score, so you don't get five near-identical clips. Untick anything you don't want, then click **Generate selected shorts**. ### Step 3 — Generate, watch them render Depending on your options, the status line walks through each stage as it happens: - *"Writing the story arc…"* — story mode writes one narrative across your selected clips. - *"Writing captions…"* — your chosen persona's captions are written for the footage. - *"Recording voiceover 1/4…"* — a persona-matched narrator records each clip's voiceover. - *"Cutting and rendering N shorts…"* — each moment is trimmed, reframed, and queued to render. The **Your shorts** panel shows one card per clip, updating every few seconds: - **Queued…** → **Rendering…** → **Ready** (an inline player appears, plus an **Open / download** link), or - **Failed**, with the reason shown on the card. You can leave the tab open and come back — the cards keep polling until every short finishes. ### Step 4 — Publish to your socials (optional) Once the batch finishes (and at least one short succeeded), the **Distribute to socials** panel appears: 1. Your connected accounts load as clickable pills — all selected by default. Click a pill to toggle it off or on. (If nothing is connected yet, the panel links you to the dashboard to connect.) 2. **Start (optional)** — when the first post should go out. Leave it empty to start now. 3. **Every N hours** — the cadence between posts (default 24). Each finished short is scheduled one step after the previous one, so a batch of five shorts with a 24-hour cadence becomes five days of daily content. Set it to 0 (with no start time) to publish everything immediately. 4. Click **Schedule finished shorts →**. The panel confirms how many were scheduled — and tells you plainly if any failed. Each short posts with its highlight title as the caption. Scheduled posts also appear in the dashboard's **Publishing** section, where you can track their status. ## The options, in detail ### Moment presets — what the AI looks for - **General** (default — right for talks, podcasts, vlogs, tutorials, any footage): *hook* (a scroll-stopping opener), *insight* (a valuable idea or "aha" explanation), *emotional* (an inspiring or heartfelt peak), *funny*, *surprising* (a twist or bold claim), *action* (high-energy, visually dynamic), and *payoff* (a satisfying result, punchline, or reveal). - **Gaming** (for streams and gameplay): *action* (combat and close calls), *funny* (fails and glitches), *clutch* (1vX wins and last-second saves), *wtf* (unexpected chaos), *epic fail*, *hype* (peak-excitement celebration), and *skill* (trick shots and impressive plays). ### The nine caption personas Captions are **AI-written** for your footage in the persona's voice — timed and spaced across each clip, never bunched at the start, never overlapping. Each caption may carry one fitting emoji. | Persona | The vibe | |---|---| | **Gaming** | Short, punchy creator captions — "HEADSHOT!", "wait for it…". ALL CAPS on the action beats. | | **GenZ** | Internet-native slang reactions — "no cap this is insane", "he's locked in rn". | | **Funny** | Meme-style, self-aware humor — "skill issue tbh", "well that escalated". | | **Dramatic** | Cinematic and impactful — lowercase for tension, CAPS for the climax. | | **Minimal** | Three words max, understated — "nice.", "well then." Less is more. | | **Story · News** | Professional broadcaster narration — fewer, longer captions building excitement. | | **Story · Roast** | Sarcastic, playful commentary — mocking, never mean. | | **Story · Creepypasta** | Horror-style tension — ominous, slow reveals, ellipses… | | **Story · Dramatic** | Epic movie-trailer narration — "One shot. One chance." | **Auto (match moment)** lets CoreReflex pick a fitting persona for you instead of choosing one yourself. Captions in Auto-Clips are invented by the AI to *enhance* the footage — the right choice for gameplay, b-roll, and visual moments. If you want **verbatim speech captions** (an exact transcript of what's said), open the finished short in the studio — every short is an editable project — and use the caption tool there: see [Captions & subtitles](editing-and-mastering.md#captions--subtitles). ### Voiceover — a narrator matched to your persona Turn **Voiceover** to **On (match style)** and each clip gets a spoken narration whose voice matches the caption persona — an energetic hype voice for Gaming, a deep movie-trailer narrator for Dramatic, a near-whisper for Creepypasta, a confident broadcaster for Story · News, and so on. The voiceover speaks the clip's caption text (or, with no captions, the clip's title and hook). While the voiceover plays, the clip's original audio is automatically **ducked** — turned down to roughly a third of its volume — so the narration sits clearly on top without silencing the moment underneath. And if the narration runs slightly longer than the clip, the clip extends to fit it (playing a little more source footage) rather than cutting the voice off mid-sentence — it will never extend past the end of your source video. ### Story mode — one narrative across every clip With **Story mode** on, your selected clips stop being independent moments and become chapters of one story: the first clip sets it up, the middle escalates, the last one concludes — each part continuing from the one before. The narrative is written in a story persona (Story · News by default, or whichever Story persona you picked as your caption style), appears as on-screen captions spread across each clip, and — with Voiceover on — is spoken by the matching narrator. Story mode needs **at least two selected highlights**. It's the mode for compilation-style shorts: a match retold like a broadcast, a stream retold as a roast, an event retold as a trailer. ## Source size and length limits An honest account of what fits today: - **Small clips** (roughly up to 20 MB of video) can be analyzed directly, even without the preparation step. - **Longer sources** are handled by the automatic **prepare** step, which condenses the video into a compact, time-accurate analysis copy. Preparation accepts sources up to about **500 MB** and requires the render service to be deployed on your instance — if it isn't, the page says so plainly and small clips still work directly. - **Very long footage** — beyond roughly an hour — can produce an analysis copy that is still too large to analyze. If that's your case today, cut the source into parts and run each part through Auto-Clips. Support for hour-plus sources is planned. - **Batch size:** the detector finds up to **20** moments per run; a single generate cuts and renders up to **10** shorts (your instance's operator can adjust this cap). If you select more than the cap, the extra selections are not rendered — run a second batch for the rest. - **Clip length:** each short can be 3 seconds to 3 minutes; the defaults (12–60 seconds) match what short-form platforms reward. ## What each stage costs in credits When billing metering is enabled on your instance, each stage draws credits from your workspace balance — always **before** the work runs, so nothing is ever partially charged. If your balance is too low, the stage stops with a clear message and no charge. (With metering off, these run without drawing credits.) See [Plans & Billing](plans-and-billing.md) for how credits work. | Stage | When it's charged | Credits | |---|---|---| | Prepare (long-video analysis copy) | Once per source | 3 | | Detect highlights | Once per detection run | 3 | | Captions | Once per batch (written on the source, then shared across clips) | 3 | | Story arc | Once per batch | 3 | | Voiceover | Per clip | 5 | | Render a short | Per clip | 10 | | Publish to socials | Per short scheduled | 2 | **Worked example** — a long video into 4 captioned, voiced shorts, published: 3 (prepare) + 3 (detect) + 3 (captions) + 4 × 5 (voiceovers) + 4 × 10 (renders) + 4 × 2 (publishing) = **77 credits**. Skipping the extras is cheaper: 4 plain shorts with no captions, voice, or publishing is 3 + 3 + 40 = **46 credits**. ## Where your shorts land Every finished short lands in two places automatically: - **Your media library** — the finished video file, alongside everything else you've uploaded or generated. It also appears in the Auto-Clips source picker itself, so a short can even become a source. - **Your Projects** — each short is saved as its own project, named `Auto-clip · `, in the dashboard's **Projects** view. Click **Open** on any of them to load it in the studio: the trimmed clip, the vertical reframe, the caption track, and the voiceover track are all there as ordinary editable layers. Tweak a caption, re-grade the color, swap the music — anything the studio can do — and render again. Nothing about an Auto-Clips short is special or locked; it's exactly as editable as a project you built by hand. ## Tips - **Match the Moments preset to the footage.** *Gaming* on gameplay footage finds clutches and fails that *General* would file under generic "action." *General* on a podcast finds insights and hooks the gaming preset isn't looking for. - **Detect more than you need.** Ask for 8 moments and keep the best 4 — reviewing is cheap; the expensive stages (voiceover, render) only run on what you tick. - **Trust the diversity, check the score.** The list is deliberately varied by type; the score tells you which ones the AI believes in most. A 90-score *hook* is usually your opener for the week. - **Story mode + Voiceover is the compilation combo.** Three or four clips, one arc, one narrator — it turns a highlight reel into an episode. - **Use library sources when you can.** They're already in your workspace with working links. If you paste an external URL, it must be a direct link to the video file, publicly reachable over https. - **Keep 12–60 seconds unless you have a reason.** Platforms reward complete-but-tight; the detector is tuned to find self-contained beats in that window. - **Polish the winner in the studio.** When one short takes off, open its project and cut a variant — new caption persona, different opening frame — without re-detecting anything. ## Troubleshooting - **"Enter a public https video URL."** The URL field needs a direct, public link to a video file starting with `https://`. Page links (YouTube, Drive share pages) won't work — pick from your library instead, or use a direct file link. - **"Preparation unavailable — analyzing the source directly (small clips only)."** The long-video preparation service isn't available on your instance right now. Small clips still analyze directly; to generate you'll be asked for the **Source width**, **Source height**, and **Duration sec** of your video (a video file's properties show these). - **"Long-video preparation is being provisioned and is not available yet."** Same cause, stated by the server: your instance's render service isn't deployed yet. You are not charged when this happens. - **"No standout moments found — try a different source."** The AI didn't find self-contained moments in your bounds. Try the other Moments preset, widen **Min sec / Max sec**, or raise **Clips**. - **"That source asset is not in your workspace."** The link you pasted points at a CoreReflex asset belonging to a different workspace. Pick the video from your own library. - **"Enter the source width & height to generate."** Preparation was skipped, so CoreReflex doesn't know your video's dimensions. Fill in the manual fields that appeared under the options. - **A short is stuck on "Queued…".** The render service hasn't picked the job up yet — it's queued, not lost. Leave the tab open, or check the project's render status later under **Projects** in the dashboard. - **A short shows "Failed."** The card shows the reason. Re-run generate with just that highlight ticked; if it keeps failing, open the short's project from **Projects** and render from the studio to see more detail. - **"Captions skipped — …" or "Story skipped — …".** That layer hit an error and the run continued without it (your shorts still render). The message says why; the usual fixes are retrying, or checking your credit balance. - **A clip came back without its voiceover.** A single clip's voiceover can fail without stopping the batch — that clip simply renders without narration. Re-generate that highlight to try again. - **"Too many … requests — try again shortly."** You've hit a rate limit. Wait a minute and continue. - **"No social relay connected" in Step 4.** Connect your social publishing account in the dashboard's **Publishing** section first, then return — the accounts load automatically once shorts finish. - **You were sent to the sign-in page mid-run.** Your session expired. Sign back in and re-run; detection results aren't kept across sessions, but your source video and any finished shorts are safe in your library. - **The run stopped with a credits message.** Metering is on and your balance was too low for the next stage — nothing was charged for it. Top up or upgrade under **Settings → Plan** ([Plans & Billing](plans-and-billing.md)) and retry. ## Related pages - [Editing & Mastering](editing-and-mastering.md) — the studio where every finished short can be opened and polished; includes [Captions & subtitles](editing-and-mastering.md#captions--subtitles) (verbatim speech captions) and the [Shorts Studio](editing-and-mastering.md#shorts-studio) (reframe a *finished film* into a short — the manual sibling of Auto-Clips). - [Directing Films](directing-films.md) — generate a film from a brief; its output videos are valid Auto-Clips sources. - [Voiceover & Music](voiceover-and-music.md) — the narration and scoring tools behind the voiceover personas. - [Plans & Billing](plans-and-billing.md) — how credits, metering, and tiers work. - [Getting Started](getting-started.md) — sign-in, accounts, and your first project.