How to turn a long video into Shorts, Reels and TikToks on a Mac for free

Cutting a podcast, interview or stream into short clips by hand means watching the whole thing again, marking the good parts, cropping each one tall and typing captions. This guide does it with Viral Clipper, a free Mac app that finds the moments for you and runs its AI on your own Mac, so the recording never leaves it and there is no meter running.

What you need

• A Mac with an M-series chip running macOS 15 Sequoia or later.
• 32 GB of memory to run everything on the Mac. With less, the app can find clips using your own OpenRouter API key instead; that sends the transcript text, never the audio or video.
• About 30 GB of free disk space.
• The recording as a file on your Mac, video or audio. The app does not download from links.

1. Install Viral Clipper

Download Viral Clipper, open the disk image and drag the app to Applications. On first launch it shows where the AI will run and downloads its models, about 20 GB. This happens once. If the download is interrupted it picks up where it left off, and quitting in the middle is safe.

2. Open your recording

Drag the file onto the window, or choose Open Recording… (⌘O). You can pick several files or a whole folder; several files become one session, and clips are compared across all of them. That suits a multi-part stream or a season of episodes.

3. Let the clips arrive

The app transcribes the recording, works out who is speaking, then reads the transcript for moments that stand on their own. Clips appear in the list as each one is ready, each with a title and a quote, and the list is ranked strongest first. You can start watching the early ones while the rest are still being found.

How long it takes depends on the recording and the Mac. On an M4 Max, a 55-minute interview was transcribed in 3 minutes and all of its clips were found 22 minutes after it was dropped in. You can leave and come back: progress stays in the Library.

4. Watch each clip and fix its edges

Click a clip to play it beside its transcript. Watch every clip before you post it. The app is a beta, and some clips start a line too late or end a little early.

• From the transcript: click a line, then choose Start clip here or End clip here. The words inside the clip are highlighted.
• From the timeline: drag either edge of the clip.
• To the tenth of a second: open Precise Timing… and nudge an edge earlier or later.

Every change is saved as you make it and can be undone. Clips you do not want can be removed from the list.

5. Choose the shape and captions

Open Clip settings and pick a format for where the clip is going:

• TikTok / Reels / Shorts: vertical 1080×1920. The crop follows the people in the shot, and splits the frame top and bottom when two people share it.
• X: a square crop framed the same way.
• YouTube: the original shape, with captions in a separate subtitle file.

Captions are word-timed and drawn onto the video. Pick one of seven styles and see it live on the clip. If the transcript got a name or a word wrong, fix it under Fix words and the caption changes with it. An audio-only recording becomes a captioned vertical video.

6. Export

Preview Export renders the exact file so you can check it first. Then choose Export Clip… for one clip, or Export All Clips… to put every clip in one folder, each with its own trim, captions and format. There is no watermark, and the files are yours to keep.

If you would rather finish in an editor, Send to Editor… makes a timeline for Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro.

7. Post

Viral Clipper does not post for you and never signs in to your accounts. After an export, Post to… opens YouTube, TikTok, Instagram or X in your browser, shows the file in Finder ready to drag in, and copies the clip’s title. Share… sends it by AirDrop, Messages, Mail or Photos, which is the quick way to get a clip onto your phone.

Getting better clips

• Give it clear speech. The clips are chosen from the transcript, so conversations, interviews, talks and commentary work best. A recording where little is said gives it little to choose from.
• Give it the whole recording. The best moment is often late or off topic, and the app reads everything.
• Check the first seconds. A clip that opens mid-thought loses people. Moving the start back one transcript line usually fixes it.
• Keep the ones you would stop for. The ranking is a starting order, not a verdict. Post the clips you would watch yourself.

How this compares with a web clip maker

Web services such as OpusClip do the same job on their servers. You upload the recording and a plan sets how much you can process each month. They work in any browser and can post for you; a Mac app is free to run as much as you like and keeps the recording private. See Viral Clipper and OpusClip side by side for the details.