YouTube Clips: Capturing short pieces of long video

Getting someone to sit through a full concert or even an eight minute ballad is a lot to ask of the casual fan, but thanks to YouTube Clips, you now have to option to link up viewers with a five to sixty second video, instead showcasing brief highlights from within a longer video.

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

If you have a live show or even an extra long song on YouTube, you have to point to that long piece any time you post the link. Even worse, if you want to embed the video, you have to hope that someone is willing to watch the whole thing, which can be a problem if it’s really long. Now YouTube Clips will make it easy to just take a piece of a longer video and post only that sample.

The clips can be anywhere from 5 to 60 seconds in length and will have their own URL. Although this hasn’t shown up for every creator yet, those that have it can access it by clicking on a scissors icon to create their Clip. The Clip then remembers the last 15 seconds of the video that you watched, but you can easily edit it from there in a separate edit screen that shows up on the right side of the video (see the graphic above for an example).

YouTube is actually late to the game here since just about every streaming platform has had this feature for ages. It appears that the platform is about to get more serious about its livestreaming options, and this is a good start.

While YouTube Clips is aimed mostly at gamers, music creators will find this useful too. How about a short clip of just the hook of your latest song? Maybe a short piece from the livestream you just did, or from a concert that’s been posted for a while?

Clips isn’t the sort of earth-shattering feature that that everyone scrambles to get a piece of, but it is one of those that will be used all the time once it’s rolled out to everyone.

Here’s the info directly from YouTube, and you’ll also find a test video below. The video explains how it all works and allows you to play with the feature even if you don’t have it on your own channel yet.