Clipreel
Turn hours of footage into a thirty-second montage. You set the length and the clip length; it picks the moments and cuts them in the pauses.
The parts that matter.
You set two numbers
How long the finished video should be, and how long each cut lasts. Thirty seconds of five-second clips is six clips. It works out the rest.
Cuts land in the pauses
It finds every gap in the speech and places the cuts there, so clips start and end between words instead of through them. Measured on a 54-minute interview, that moved the audio level at the cuts from -37.7 dB to -57.8 dB.
See every shot before you render
A still from each clip it chose, framed exactly as the final video will frame it. Play any of them with sound.
Re-roll the ones you don't like
One click swaps a shot for a different moment from the same file, or nudge its start half a second either way. The rest of the montage is untouched.
Vertical, square or widescreen
Presets for Reels, TikTok and Shorts. Mixed footage – portrait next to landscape, 30fps next to 60, silent clips next to loud – is normalised into one consistent video.
Reproducible cuts
Give it a seed and the same settings always produce the identical edit. Draft at low quality, then re-render the version you liked at high.
From download to done.
Add your videos. Any mix of sizes, frame rates and orientations.
Set the finished length and the clip length.
Open the Shots tab, play anything you're unsure about, re-roll what doesn't work.
Choose a shape – keep your footage's own, or go vertical for social.
Render.
Getting it running
Download it, unzip it, run Clipreel.exe. There is no installer.
The first time you open it, Clipreel checks for FFmpeg — the video engine it runs on — and offers to install it for you if it isn’t already there. That takes a minute and happens once. It is not bundled into the download on purpose: the self-contained Windows builds are around 217 MB each and Clipreel uses three of them, which would have turned a 10 MB download into a quarter of a gigabyte.
Windows will warn that the publisher is unknown, because the download is not code-signed yet. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
Why it exists
There is a specific job that video editors are bad at: you have an hour of footage and you want thirty seconds of it, now. Opening a timeline to find six good moments by hand is twenty minutes of work for a clip that takes thirty seconds to watch.
Clipreel does the finding. It is not an editor and does not try to be one — there is no timeline and no scrubbing, because the reason to reach for it is that you did not want to open an editor.
The part that took the longest
Random selection has an honest weakness: it cannot tell a good moment from a blurred pan, and it cannot hear that it just cut somebody off mid-sentence.
The first working version measured perfectly correct — every clip exactly the requested length, audio in sync to the millisecond — and still sounded wrong, because a ten-second window opened at an arbitrary point in a conversation begins mid-word and ends mid-word. Six of those in a row sound like footage is missing.
So it now scans each file for pauses in the speech and puts the cuts in them. The clips vary in length by a few tenths of a second as a result, which is the trade, and the tool tells you the range before you render. Footage with no speech in it is left alone.
What it does not do
No transitions — hard cuts only. Cropping is always from the centre, so a landscape clip forced into a vertical frame will cut off a subject standing to one side; the review grid shows you that before you render rather than after. And it cannot reorder shots, only replace or move them.
Want something like this?
Tell me what you have in mind, even if you are not sure how it would work. The first conversation is free.
Start a project7401 Williamson Street, Dearborn, Michigan 48126, US · contact@univrsll.com
Built and maintained by one person.