Clip a video¶

Create a new video from a section of an existing, completed video — a trim or highlight.

There are two endpoints:

• clip — a standard clip: the selected range is fully re-encoded into a new, independent video.
• fastclip — much faster and far smaller: reuses the source video's already-encoded segments and only re-encodes the frames around the cut points (see How fastclip works).

Choosing the range¶

Specify the cut with start_time and end_time, in seconds:

{ "metadata": { "title": "My highlight" }, "start_time": 10, "end_time": 50 }

metadata optionally carries the clip's title and public flag. Encode-time settings — watermark, encoding tier, audio normalization — are inherited from the source video: the clip's media derives from the source's already-encoded renditions, so they can't be chosen per clip.

How clips are produced¶

Where clip re-encodes the whole selected range, fastclip works per segment. The source is stored as short (~6s) independently-decodable segments, so for your cut fastclip:

• reuses every whole segment the cut spans — copied as-is by byte-range, not re-encoded; and
• re-encodes only the two boundary segments — the one the cut starts inside and the one it ends inside — and even then only the partial frames around the cut point.

So the amount of re-encoding is tiny and roughly constant regardless of clip length (a 5-minute fastclip re-encodes about as much as a 30-second one), while the cut stays frame-accurate.

This is per-segment, not all-or-nothing: only when a cut is too short or misaligned to enclose a single whole segment (e.g. under ~6s) is there nothing to reuse — then fastclip re-encodes the whole (small) range, the same result as clip.