Your first clip

This walks you from a brand-new account to a finished clip you can download, all in your browser. You don't need any editing experience.

BitterClip is free to start. Create your account and you're in a working space right away. We'll email you a verification link when you sign up — click it to start uploading and transcribing recordings.

2. Create a project

A project is a home for one show or series. Your recordings, episodes, and clips all live inside it, so everything from the same show stays together. Make one and give it a name you'll recognize later: your podcast title, your channel name, whatever fits.

screenshot: the New project button and the name field

3. Upload a recording

Open your project and click to upload, or drag your file onto the upload area. This is the raw file you're starting from: an interview, an episode, a talk you gave. BitterClip takes any file your device sees as audio or video. How large it can be depends on your plan.

screenshot: dragging a file onto the upload area

4. Let BitterClip transcribe it

Once the upload finishes, BitterClip transcribes it into words timed to the audio. This runs in the background and can take a while on a long recording, so feel free to leave and come back. It keeps processing. When it's done, the recording becomes its own episode automatically, and the episode is the thing you'll actually work in.

Open the episode and you'll see the full transcript. Read through it, then select the words you want to keep. Selecting the words is how you pick your clip.

You don't type in timestamps. You (or your AI assistant) pick the strongest moment by choosing the words to keep, right in the transcript. Every word in the transcript is already lined up to the audio, so BitterClip knows exactly when each one was spoken.

The cut runs from the first word you kept to the last, with a little breathing room added before and after so the clip doesn't feel clipped off. It lands in the natural gaps between words, so a clip never starts or ends mid-word. To get the edge exactly right, your assistant can look closely at the actual sound at a cut point and choose to end the clip just before the next breath. You get a clean clip that starts and ends on a full thought.

Because the cut comes from the words, every clip stays tied to its recording, its speaker, and the exact moment it came from. You can always trace a clip back to the spot in the recording where it was said.

6. Fine-tune the start and end

Your clip shows up in the transcript editor with a start and an end already set. Read it over. To trim or extend it, change which words you've got selected, the same thing you did in step 5. Add a word at the front for a little lead-in, or drop one at the end to tighten the ending. The cut follows your selection.

screenshot: refining a selection in the transcript editor

7. Export the captioned clip

When the clip looks right, hit Export. You'll get a chance to pick the shape of the video first. Exports keep your source's shape by default (a widescreen recording stays widescreen), and you can choose vertical or square when you export. Pick vertical if you're headed for Shorts, Reels, or TikTok.

BitterClip then renders an MP4 with the captions burned right into the picture, so they look the same everywhere you post it. (If you ever turn captions off, the video comes out without them.) Rendering runs in the background, so give it a moment to finish.

That's your first clip. You'll find it in your project's Outputs tab, linked back to the recording it came from, and it's ready to download or share.

Once your assistant is connected, you can just ask in plain words. Try:

"Pull up my latest interview and find the strongest moment."

BitterClip opens that episode for you right in the chat, with a strong clip already picked out and the cut ready to review. From there you can keep talking to it: "make it a bit shorter," "start it on her question," "find me one more." It adjusts until the clip is right.

See Use BitterClip from your AI assistant to set that up.