Automation
Video clipping
Turn a long YouTube video into captioned vertical clips and draft posts
Where: the Agent section, any client connected through MCP, and the Public API
Availability: Feature availability and limits depend on this Nitty Music Social deployment. converted. Self-hosted installs need clipping configured on the instance.
Clipping takes a long YouTube video, picks the parts that work on their own, and renders each one as a short vertical video with captions burned in. Every clip lands in the media library, and if you name channels, a draft post is created for every clip on every channel.
Nothing is scheduled or published for you. The drafts wait on the calendar until you review them.
Starting a clipping
There is no clipping screen. You ask for it in a chat (or start it from code):
- In the AI agent, paste the YouTube link and say what you want, for example “clip this video into 5 shorts and draft them for my TikTok and Instagram”.
- From Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or another MCP client, say the same thing. The client calls the clipping tools for you.
You can set three things:
| Option | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Channels | None | The channels to create draft posts for, 20 at most. Without any, the clips only go to the media library |
| Number of clips | 5 | The most clips to make, from 1 to 10. A video with fewer good moments gives fewer clips |
| Fit | Blur | How the horizontal picture fills the vertical clip, see below |
Blur or crop
A YouTube video is horizontal and a clip is vertical (1080 by 1920), so the picture has to be fitted.
- Blur keeps the whole picture, centred over a blurred copy of itself. It never cuts anything out, which is why it is the default.
- Crop fills the clip with the middle of the picture and cuts the sides away. There is no face tracking, so a speaker who is not in the centre is cut out of the clip. Ask for it only when the subject stays in the middle.
What happens next
Clipping takes several minutes. The chat tells you it started, and you can ask how it is going at any point. Some MCP clients show a progress widget with the finished clips instead.
| Step | What Nitty Music Social is doing |
|---|---|
| Analysing | Reading the video’s details and captions, and checking its length against your minutes |
| Transcribing | Transcribing the audio, only when the video has no usable captions |
| Picking | Choosing the clips and writing a title and a post text for each |
| Rendering | Cutting each clip, fitting it to vertical and burning in the captions |
| Completed | The clips are in the media library and the drafts are on the calendar |
Each clip is between 10 and 90 seconds, and two clips never overlap.
What you get
- A vertical MP4 per clip, in the media library, named after the clip’s title.
- A thumbnail per clip.
- A title and a post text per clip, written from what is said in the video.
- When you named channels, one draft per clip per channel, placed on your next free time slots, with the post text as the content and the clip attached.
The drafts are ordinary drafts. Open one from the calendar to edit the text, fill in the channel’s settings and schedule it.
A clipping can finish with some clips failed. The clips that rendered are kept, and the chat tells you which ones did not make it.
Clipping minutes
On hosted upstream service, clipping is metered in minutes of source video: a 42 minute video costs 42 minutes, however many clips come out of it. The allowance is part of your plan and resets monthly on the anniversary of your subscription.
- The minutes are charged once the real length of the video is known, before any clip is rendered.
- A video longer than the minutes you have left is refused, and nothing is charged.
- A clipping that fails without producing a single clip gives the minutes back.
On self-hosted Nitty Music Social: there are no clipping minutes. The only length limit is the 180 minute cap below.
Limits
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Source | YouTube links only. Live streams, private, removed, age restricted and region restricted videos cannot be clipped |
| Longest video | 180 minutes, and no longer than the clipping minutes you have left |
| Clips per video | 10 |
| Clip length | 10 to 90 seconds |
| Channels per clipping | 20 |
| At the same time | One clipping per organisation |
| Per day | 20 clippings per organisation |
When it fails
| Message | What it means |
|---|---|
| Only YouTube videos can be clipped | The link is not a youtube.com or youtu.be address |
| Clipping is not available in trial mode | Clipping starts once the trial converts |
| No clipping minutes are left on this account for this month | Wait for the monthly reset or upgrade |
| This video is N minutes long, more than the clipping minutes left | Pick a shorter video, or upgrade |
| A clipping is already running, wait for it to finish | One clipping runs at a time |
| Too many clippings were started today, try again tomorrow | The daily cap of 20 was reached |
| This video is private, removed, or restricted by age or region | Nitty Music Social cannot read the video |
| No speech was found in this video | Clips are picked from what is said, so a video without speech cannot be clipped |
| No part of this video works as a short clip | Nothing in the video stands on its own for 10 to 90 seconds |
From the Public API
The same clipping can be started from code. The Public API has an endpoint to start a clipping, one to read its status and clips, and one to list them. The options, the clipping minutes and the limits are the ones on this page.
The URL of a finished clip works as an attachment anywhere a media URL does, including Create Post.