Comparison
A clipper can only return a line you already said
Clippers mine a recording you already made. Opus Clip ranks the moments in it and reframes them for vertical. Every one of those moments was said before you knew what the ad needed to say. Here is where mining runs out, what a filmed take costs, and how Cutroom cuts one into an ad.
- Cutroom's upload ceiling, by design
- 3 min
- one batch, one take, one draft cut
- 100 CR
- of creatives carry the spend
- 5-8%
Opus Clip mines what you already said. Cutroom builds what you need to say.
Where a back catalogue exists, mining it is close to free money. The footage is paid for and the speaking is done.
Ranking is the real feature. Nobody watches ninety minutes to find the four moments worth posting.
Auto reframe matters too. A landscape two-shot becomes something a phone can hold.
For a podcast archive or a webinar programme, that is a good buy. It is also the whole of what a clipper can reach.
Every clip it returns was spoken before the ad existed. The hook you need next quarter is not in the archive, because nobody asked you that question yet.
Cutroom starts at the other end. Write the hook. Film forty seconds saying it. A finished 9:16 ad comes back, captions burned in and footage on the words that needed showing.
One batch is 100 credits and covers the transcript, the director pass and the b-roll search. Export is 20 credits per finished minute. A one-minute ad from a fresh take is about 120 credits.
The line that sells your product was never said on a podcast
A clipper is bounded by the recording. It ranks moments, reframes them and captions them. It cannot produce a sentence you never said.
A conversational recording is built for someone who chose to listen. The best moment in it still opens mid-thought.
An ad has to open on a claim that stops a stranger. Those two openings almost never coincide. That is why extracted clips underperform as paid creative.
There is a second bound. A clip inherits its own framing, its own energy and its own audio conditions. You get what the room gave you.
A third bound is the one that costs money. A clip cannot answer an objection that appeared after the recording was made, and objections change every quarter.
Filming forty seconds on purpose costs a phone and one take. The hook gets written first and said second, which is the order an ad needs.
Then Cutroom cuts it. Captions burned in, footage on the claim, pace set, a file you can upload.
The two routes, side by side
Mining needs an archive. Making needs forty seconds. Only one of them can produce a hook that was never spoken.
Ninety-minute recording
Mining route: needs an archive
Ranked moments
Reframed and captioned
Or: write the hook first
Making route
Film forty seconds
Phone, one take
Marked cut, 9:16 MP4
100 CR batch, 20 CR a minute
This is the whole editor
Highlight a phrase and a clip lands on those exact words. No timeline, no keyframes, no layers.
Highlight a phrase, and the footage arrives on those words rather than near them
Cutroom transcribes your take and drafts the cut. Back comes a finished vertical MP4 with captions burned in and b-roll placed.
Direction happens on the transcript. Highlight a phrase and a clip covers exactly that phrase. Swap it, or search millions of free ones.
Delete a line and the cut rebuilds around the gap. Change the pace and everything re-cuts, coverage ceiling included.
Emphasise the word the claim turns on so it lands hard in the captions. Fix a mis-heard word and the text follows.
Trim the opening or the ending. Choose how each clip enters: cut, whip, punch, glitch or sweep.
There is no timeline underneath and no keyframes to set. That is why the whole edit fits in four minutes.
- Eleven actions in the editor, all of them on the words
- Six caption packs, switchable in a click including colour, weight, size and position
- One take in, one finished vertical file out, no project to manage
- Export at 20 credits per finished minute from a take already batched
The specification: three minutes in, 9:16 out, no archive mining
The three-minute ceiling is firm. Nothing here accepts a ninety-minute recording and picks the good parts.
There is no ranking model predicting which idea will perform. You decide, and the feed decides after that. No published score knows your account.
The output is one 9:16 MP4 per export. That is the shape TikTok, Reels, Shorts and Meta Stories all run.
Nothing of yours gets stamped on the file. No logo, no closing frame.
Somebody has to film. The avatar module takes a photo and a voice-over at 320 and 70 credits a minute.
Those are the facts a buyer plans around. They are what buys an edit that finishes itself in four minutes.
Mine the archive for reach. Film the claim that has to sell.
The decision is about supply. Where hours of good speaking already exist, extraction is cheap creative and worth running.
The ad that has to open on a claim nobody has heard is a different job. No clipper reaches it. Forty seconds of filming does.
Motion's analysis of 550,000+ Meta ads puts winners at 5 to 8 percent of creatives, which is one in thirteen to one in twenty.
Six a month draws about half a winner. The route that gets you to thirty is the route worth paying for.
A second cut of an existing take costs 20 credits a minute and roughly four minutes of attention. That is what makes thirty realistic.
The trial runs seven days on 300 credits with no card, which covers two full one-minute ads from fresh takes.
A useful test: write the hook you wish your ad opened on, then search your archive transcript for it. Usually it is not in there.
Opus Clip and Cutroom, row by row
Row one goes to the clipper and an archive owner should weigh it heavily. The rest is the difference between mining and making.
| Opus Clip | Cutroom | |
|---|---|---|
| Turn 90 minutes into clips | The core job | 3 minutes maximum in |
| A hook never spoken before | Bounded by the recording | Write it, then say it |
| Footage on a chosen phrase | Captions, not coverage | Highlight, clip lands |
| Rebuild when a line is cut | Trim the clip yourself | Delete, and it recompiles |
| Answer this quarter's objection | Only what the archive holds | Film it Tuesday, run it Wednesday |
| Pace change re-cuts the whole ad | Clip boundaries are fixed | Coverage ceiling moves too |
| Music sitting under the read | Bring your own track | Generated, 20 CR |
Questions people ask
- Can I put a podcast episode into Cutroom?
- No. Upload is capped at three minutes of source. If the raw material is a long recording, use a clipper to extract, then treat any exported clip under three minutes as a normal take here if you want it captioned and covered.
- Does Cutroom score my creative or predict performance?
- No, and be careful with tools that claim to. Published virality scores describe somebody else's placement mix. The only honest signal is your own account, which is an argument for shipping more attempts rather than fewer.
- What is actually different about editing on a transcript?
- The unit of decision changes. You point at a phrase instead of at a second on a clock. Highlight it and a clip lands there. Delete a line and the cut rebuilds. The timing math belongs to the compiler and never to you.
- Is it right for every ad?
- It is built for ads that start with somebody saying something on purpose. If all your creative comes out of an existing archive, mine it with a clipper and bring the purpose-filmed takes here.
An archive answers what you already said. Cutroom turns what you need to say into a finished ad, footage on the claim and captions burned in.