How to turn a long podcast into short clips with an API
Cutting an episode into clips is rarely slow because of the cutting. It is slow because of the deciding: which moment carries on its own, what the hook is, whether it suits a Short or a Reel. This is how to get that decision back as data you can review in a minute, then cut only what you kept.
The manual FFmpeg way
FFmpeg cuts a clip once you already know the timestamps. Finding them is the part it cannot help with, which is why most of the hour goes into scrubbing rather than encoding.
ffmpeg -i episode.mp4 -ss 00:14:32 -to 00:15:20 -c copy clip.mp4
Do it with one API call
- 1
Send the episode to find-highlights
Pass the recording as the input named "main". Inputs up to 2 GB are accepted, so a full video episode is fine as is.
- 2
Review the candidates
result.analysis.clips returns start, end, title, hook, reason, and two separate scores: content for what happens, viewer for how it feels to watch. Reading a short list with one sentence each takes about two minutes.
- 3
Cut the ones you keep
Send each start and end to trim-video, then format-video-for-platform for a Short, a Reel or a TikTok. The per-platform choice is a second pass on what survived, not a separate hunt.
curl https://kinopipe.com/api/v1/tools/find-highlights \
-H "Authorization: Bearer kp_live_..." \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"inputs": [
{ "id": "main", "url": "https://example.com/episode.mp4" }
]
}'FAQ
How does it choose a moment?
The speech is transcribed on the worker with word timestamps, then a language model proposes self-contained moments and scores each one twice: once for what happens, once for how it feels to watch. Boundaries snap to what was actually said, so a clip does not start mid-word.
Can I cut the clips in the same call?
No. An analysis is the only operation in its job, so it returns the candidates and you cut the ones you keep with trim-video afterwards. That is deliberate: you review before you spend credits rendering.
Does it work on audio-only podcasts?
Yes. The ranking comes from the transcript, so an audio file returns the same clip candidates. Pair it with the audiogram tool if you want something to publish as video.