The short answer
If you clip a talk or a podcast once in a while and a watermark is not a problem, the Opus Clip free plan does the job with no setup. If you post every week, you have two choices. You can pay 15 US dollars per month for the Starter plan to lose the watermark, or you can use a free route that takes an afternoon to set up and still needs you to pick the crop. Either way, a person still has to watch the results. Neither route gave us a set of clips we would post without a look.
| Opus Clip, free trial | Free DIY route | |
|---|---|---|
| Clips made | 27 | 10 |
| Clips we would post as they are | 11 | 8 |
| Clips that need a small fix | 4 | 2 |
| Time from upload to clips | About 10 minutes | 14 minutes of machine time |
| Total minutes of clips, all of which a person must watch to judge them | 23.2 | 9.6 |
| Framing | Follows the speaker's face | Fixed center crop |
| Watermark | Yes, on the trial and the free plan | No |
| Cost for this video | 22 of the trial's 90 credits | Nothing, on a computer you already have |
The test
The source is NASA Astronaut Don Pettit Talks with the Everyday Astronaut, a live call from the space station recorded on 2024-12-17: 22 minutes 42 seconds, 720p, from the NASA Image and Video Library. We picked it because it's a real, unscripted conversation with questions, answers, radio checks and a goodbye, which is the hard case for a clip tool. The video is NASA's. We use it only as a test file, we don't republish it or the clips, and NASA does not endorse Opus Clip, the free route or this post.
We judged every clip from both routes with one rule. A clip is usable when it stands alone, starts at the start of a sentence, ends at the end of a thought, answers one question, and is not a greeting, a radio check or a thank-you. A clip that covers an answer another clip already holds counts as a repeat.
Opus Clip on the free trial
We uploaded the file to Opus Clip and kept every setting at its default: clip model, genre and clip length (0 to 3 minutes) on Auto. The upload screen said the run would use 22 credits, one per minute of video. We sent it at 06:22 UTC, and the clip previews carry a render time of 06:32 UTC.
It made 27 clips, from 15 seconds to 1 minute 47 seconds, each with a title, burned-in captions and a score from 60 to 99. Our call on the 27:
- 11 usable. The best one, scored 99, opens on the question of how the cameras survive the vacuum of space and ends cleanly on the plan to fly them to the Moon.
- 4 repeats. Each covers an answer a higher-scored clip already holds.
- 4 need a fix. One ends just before the filter comes off the window, one starts on the host's thank-you, one ends on "did we have an LOS?", and one starts in the middle of a thought.
- 8 not usable. A greeting, voice checks with Houston, a signal loss, a goodbye and 2 questions with no answer.
The score is worth reading. None of the 15 clips scored 80 or more had a greeting or radio check in them, and all 8 we would not post scored 77 or less. If you only look at the clips scored 80 and up, you watch 15 clips instead of 27 and miss 2 usable ones. The score came with our trial; the plans page lists the Virality Score on Starter and up, not on the free plan.
Framing is where the free route can't match it. Opus Clip kept the speaker's face in the 9:16 frame as he moved, and the export was 1080 by 1920. On the trial the export carries an OpusClip watermark in the top corner, and the plans page says the free plan does too.
The free route
We ran 3 free tools on the same file, on 2 CPU threads with no graphics card:
- Transcript. faster-whisper with the small English model wrote a transcript with a time for every word in 9 minutes 18 seconds.
- Picks. One call to a small chat model, Claude Haiku, read the transcript and picked the 10 best moments in 64 seconds, using the same rule we judged with. On a paid plan or in a free chat window this costs nothing extra. A pay-per-call API would bill about 0.09 US dollars for it.
- Cuts. ffmpeg cut each pick, cropped the center of the frame to 9:16 and burned in captions, 3 words at a time: 10 clips in 3 minutes 47 seconds.
The model picked the same moments Opus Clip ranked highest: 9 of its 10 picks cover a moment Opus Clip also clipped. But it was careless about where each one starts and ends. As the model gave them, only 2 of the 10 clips were clean. The other 8 started or ended in the middle of a sentence.
One more step fixed most of that. A 38-line script moves each start and end to the nearest sentence edge, using the word times from the transcript, and stops a clip from ending on a question. It runs in under a second. After it, 8 of the 10 clips were usable. One still ends before the filter comes off the window, because a sentence edge isn't a picture edge, and one runs 113 seconds and opens on the host's leftover remark.
The cost is the framing. A fixed center crop works while the speaker sits in the middle, but on this video he leans to the side and half his face leaves the frame for a moment. The clips are 720 by 1280, from a 720p source.
The steps, the commands and the scripts are in our how-to, turn a long talk into captioned 9:16 clips for free.
Which one to use
- Opus Clip free plan: you clip less than an hour of video a month and the watermark is fine. The plans page gives the free plan 60 credits a month and says its clips expire after 3 days, so download what you keep. It lists no Virality Score on the free plan, so you judge every clip yourself.
- Opus Clip Starter, 15 US dollars per month: you want clips with no watermark, the Virality Score and the face tracking, and you clip up to 150 minutes of video a month. Pro is 29 US dollars per month, or 174 US dollars a year, for 300 minutes.
- The free route: you're fine with the command line, your speaker sits still or you'll set the crop yourself, and you want no watermark and no credits. Plan an afternoon for the first setup.
On this test the paid tool did not pick better moments than one cheap model call. What it adds is the framing, the finished look and no setup.
What this test does not show
- One video. A talk with 2 people on camera, or fast cuts, may change both counts.
- The usable calls are ours. We wrote the rule down before we judged, and we judged both routes with it, but another person may count 1 or 2 clips differently.
- We did not test the Opus Clip paid editor, B-roll or the scheduler, only the default clips.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Opus Clip free plan add a watermark?
Yes. Our trial export had an OpusClip watermark, and the plans page lists a watermark on the free plan. The Starter plan, 15 US dollars per month, removes it.
How many credits does Opus Clip use for a video?
One credit per minute of source video on our run. The 22-minute 42-second video used 22 credits.
Can a free tool pick clips as well as Opus Clip?
On our test, one call to a small chat model picked 9 of the same 10 moments. The free route was weaker on framing and needed an extra step to cut on whole sentences.
Sources
- NASA Image and Video Library: the source video, 2024-12-17.
- NASA images and media usage guidelines: NASA content used in a factual manner may be used without permission, NASA is named as the source, and an advertisement must not imply NASA endorses a product.
- Opus Clip plans: plans, credits, the watermark and clip expiry, read 2026-10-18.
- faster-whisper: the transcript step.
- ffmpeg: the cut, crop and caption step.
- Our own runs on 2026-10-18: 27 Opus Clip clips and 10 free-route clips, each judged with the rule above.