Long videos & livestreams,
clipped into viral vertical shorts
Drop in a podcast, VOD or lecture — AI finds the highlights → 9:16 face-tracked reframe + dynamic word-level captions → ready for TikTok, Reels, Shorts, Douyin and Bilibili.
Free & open source · local-first, no footage uploads · no watermark · no credits · no length caps.
No Python, no Docker, no account — a real desktop app you double-click
How to turn a long video into shorts — in three steps
From an hours-long replay to clips you can actually post. Scroll to see what happens at each step.
Drop the whole replay in
Podcasts, VODs, lectures, vlogs — audio-only works too, or paste a public Bilibili / YouTube-style URL. The source lands locally and enters the same workflow.
Every candidate comes with receipts
After local word-level transcription, the AI nominates quotables, conflicts and peak moments. Virality score + four-dimension review + reasoning; timestamps are reverse-aligned from the transcript, accurate to the word. Untick anything you don't like.
"People think viral clips are luck. They're not — hooks, conflict, payoff. It's structure."
word-aligned · adjustable by hand
What comes out is ready to post
Face-tracked 9:16 reframe, dynamic word-level captions burned in, title cards, silence cuts, -14 LUFS loudness — each clip ships with a cover image and post copy.
Captions light up as you speak
↑ Dynamic word-level captions · live demo of the effect burned into every clip · SRT export included
Why HotClip
Credit metering, forced uploads, black-box scoring, an English-only pipeline — the usual traps, all removed.
AI highlights generator
Eight evidence channels (transcript, loudness, shot density, facial emotion, vision, live-chat heat, vocal tone, laughter/applause) nominate peak moments — trusted most when several fire at once — each with a virality score and four-dimension review. The score is a within-batch ranking, not astrology.
Footage never leaves your machine
Transcription, highlight detection, cutting and export all run locally. Unreleased material, client work, NDA footage — nothing is handed to a cloud server; with a local Ollama model the whole pipeline is 100% offline.
Dynamic captions, auto-burned
Word-level lighting and semantic line breaks; SRT export and bilingual captions one toggle away.
9:16 auto-reframe
Face tracking with per-shot modes, center-crop fallback; optional dual-format export.
Filler words & silences, gone
Silence jump-cuts and an um/uh pass; loudness normalized to -14 LUFS.
Speaker diarization
Who-said-what labels for interviews and multi-host shows (fully local), color-coded captions.
Native Chinese + English
Dedicated Chinese ASR engines covering dialects and code-switching; bilingual UI.
Every cut is auditable
Reasoning, removed fillers, applied styles — all logged to the clips.json receipt. Veto anything.
A real multi-project workspace
Switch, rename, close, delete and relink projects; offline or changed sources keep their edit state, and deleting a project never deletes media.
Every human edit can step back
Selection, copy, boundaries, manual clips and transcript fixes share persistent undo/redo, plus keyboard transport, seek and in/out controls.
Restart-safe work, durable queue
Sources, transcripts, candidates and manual cuts recover; folder watch and webhooks share a persistent queue with cancel and retry.
Health check before a long run
Checks FFmpeg, downloader, nine model roles, LLM routing, disk and cache; core model preparation supports cancel and resume.
Mute terms, keep the audit trail
An editable local list drives transcript-timed audio muting across jump cuts and multi-piece clips; captions keep the original text.
Published results teach the next cut
Stable content IDs and a prefilled metrics CSV correlate outcomes conservatively; awaiting/measured and unmatched/ambiguous states stay visible.
Multi-version exports become local A/B
Compare only one platform, a 72-hour publish window and 500+ views per version; states stay explicit and direction is never presented as causation.
Turn one recording into a series
Original clips sharing meaningful keywords become source-ordered episodes with manifests; variants stay out and hard links save disk.
Actually free
No credits, no watermark, no caps, no paywalled features — not even an account.
This is the actual highlight-picking screen
Sample footage: a live-selling stream replay. The AI reads the whole transcript and returns a candidate list — each with a virality score, teaser line, four-dimension review and word-accurate cut points; weak picks are auto-flagged. Tick, veto, export.
Download and try it
No 7-day trial, because there's no paid tier
No minute quotas, because nothing is metered
No credit card, because there isn't even an account
OpusClip's free tier meters 60 minutes — a fraction of one stream. HotClip doesn't count minutes.
Built for streamers, podcasters & talking heads
Streamers & clippers
Stream highlights AIClip your own VODs into highlight shorts right after the stream; the folder watcher turns finished recordings into clips while you sleep, and live-chat heat feeds straight into detection — Bilibili and Douyin chat logs both work, with gifts and superchats weighted extra.
Podcasters
Podcast to shortsAudio-only episodes still become video — an audiogram waveform plus quote captions turns your podcast into vertical clips; transcription is cached so re-cutting is instant.
Educators & marketers
Repurpose long-formLectures, webinars and demos become snackable clips with covers, titles and metadata — ready for a content pipeline, with a banned-words lint before publish.
Talking-head creators
Filler-word removalSilences, ums and stutters removed automatically; click-to-fix transcripts and a custom-vocabulary glossary keep names right, episode after episode.
How it compares
| HotClip | OpusClip / Klap / Vizard | CapCut smart clipping | FunClip etc. (open source) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free & open source | $15–29+/mo, credits per source minute, expire monthly | Core features paywalled | Free |
| Your footage | Stays local | Mandatory cloud upload | Mostly cloud | Local |
| Watermark / caps | None | Free tier: watermark, caps, projects expire in 3 days | Some restricted | None |
| Account | No sign-up | Account required, projects deleted on unsubscribe | Login required | None |
| Setup | Double-click installer | Web app | Easy | CLI / Docker |
| Cut quality | Word-aligned, reasoning attached | Black-box scoring | Black box | Sentence-level, unranked |
Deep dive: HotClip vs OpusClip — a free, local, open-source alternative
FAQ
What is the best free Opus Clip alternative without watermark?
HotClip — free, open source (AGPL-3.0), local, no watermark, no credits, no length caps. Optional cloud LLMs bill your own key; a local Ollama model makes it fully free and offline.
Is there an AI clipper that runs locally without uploading my video?
Yes — transcription, captions, cutting and export all run on your machine. Only highlight detection calls a cloud LLM by default (your key, transcript text only); point it at local Ollama for a 100% offline pipeline.
How is it different from OpusClip / Klap / Vizard?
Your footage never leaves your machine. Those tools upload to the cloud and meter credits per source minute (expiring monthly; watermarked free tiers). HotClip is free, local, watermark-free — and every cut comes with auditable reasoning.
How do I add dynamic word-level captions?
They're automatic: local word-level transcription drives word-by-word highlighted captions burned into every clip. SRT export and bilingual captions are one toggle away.
Can it remove filler words and silences?
Yes — silence jump-cuts plus an um/uh filler pass, with caption timing remapped automatically. Every edit is logged to clips.json so you can audit what the AI did.
Can live-chat data help pick highlights?
Yes — HotClip auto-discovers the chat log next to a recording (BililiveRecorder .xml and Douyin-recorder .jsonl both work) and feeds chat density plus superchats, gifts, follows and like bursts into detection, with per-sender spam caps and surge bonuses. No chat file? Loudness, shot-cut, facial-emotion and laughter signals take over.
Do I need a GPU?
No — the local ASR models are int8-quantized and run fine on CPU.
Does it work for Chinese video?
Yes, exceptionally well — dedicated Chinese ASR engines (SenseVoice / Paraformer / FireRedASR2) cover dialects, Cantonese and code-switching.
Can I clip other people's streams?
HotClip is for your own content or clips you're authorized to make (e.g. streamer clipping programs). Unauthorized re-uploading is not supported and not welcome.
Give your next replay to HotClip
Windows / macOS / Linux · free & open source · no sign-up · double-click to run