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Where: the Agent section, or any client connected through MCP
Availability: Postiz Cloud, Standard plan and above, once the trial has converted. Self-hosted installs need clipping configured on the instance.
Clipping takes a long YouTube video, picks the parts that work on their own, and renders each one as a short vertical video with captions burned in. Every clip lands in the media library, and if you name channels, a draft post is created for every clip on every channel. Nothing is scheduled or published for you. The drafts wait on the calendar until you review them.

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Starting a clipping

There is no clipping screen. You ask for it in a chat:
  • In the AI agent, paste the YouTube link and say what you want, for example “clip this video into 5 shorts and draft them for my TikTok and Instagram”.
  • From Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or another MCP client, say the same thing. The client calls the clipping tools for you.
You can set three things:

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Blur or crop

A YouTube video is horizontal and a clip is vertical (1080 by 1920), so the picture has to be fitted.
  • Blur keeps the whole picture, centred over a blurred copy of itself. It never cuts anything out, which is why it is the default.
  • Crop fills the clip with the middle of the picture and cuts the sides away. There is no face tracking, so a speaker who is not in the centre is cut out of the clip. Ask for it only when the subject stays in the middle.

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What happens next

Clipping takes several minutes. The chat tells you it started, and you can ask how it is going at any point. Some MCP clients show a progress widget with the finished clips instead. Each clip is between 10 and 90 seconds, and two clips never overlap.

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What you get

  • A vertical MP4 per clip, in the media library, named after the clip’s title.
  • A thumbnail per clip.
  • A title and a post text per clip, written from what is said in the video.
  • When you named channels, one draft per clip per channel, placed on your next free time slots, with the post text as the content and the clip attached.
The drafts are ordinary drafts. Open one from the calendar to edit the text, fill in the channel’s settings and schedule it. A clipping can finish with some clips failed. The clips that rendered are kept, and the chat tells you which ones did not make it.

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Clipping minutes

On Postiz Cloud, clipping is metered in minutes of source video: a 42 minute video costs 42 minutes, however many clips come out of it. The allowance is part of your plan and resets monthly on the anniversary of your subscription. See Plans.
  • The minutes are charged once the real length of the video is known, before any clip is rendered.
  • A video longer than the minutes you have left is refused, and nothing is charged.
  • A clipping that fails without producing a single clip gives the minutes back.
On self-hosted Postiz: there are no clipping minutes. The only length limit is the 180 minute cap below.

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Limits

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When it fails

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Not in the Public API or CLI

Clipping is available through the agent and MCP only. The Public API and the CLI have no clipping endpoint or command. Once a clip is in the media library, its URL works as an attachment anywhere a media URL does, including Create Post.

Clipping tools

The MCP tools and their parameters.

Clipping example

The tool calls behind a clipping, step by step.