Let's first start off by mentioning I had made 3000+ short form videos from scratch on TikTok way before Opus even came out. However for a podcaster like myself marketing my shows was really important, at the time it was only the PolyCast, but in order to make clips I'd have had to use 2-3 tools even get close what I needed from clips.

In my experience most clipping tools have about an 80% usage rate on clips, either because they have duplicates or just picked bad clips. With Opus getting more and more refined personally I feel it had gotten up to 85%, which is better than anything else on the market.

Prior to Opus coming out I would have had to use Recast or Chopcast repurposing tools, which they didn't have reframing, so it would have been a FILL view... or more likely I'd have had to do a horizontal clip. Then use the gaming tool CrossClip in order to select out the two viewframes of the speakers. Let alone adding captions would have been another tool. Not to mention they only found like a dozen clips, so you'd only have about 6-8 usable ones.

When OpusClip launched it did all of that and more, and it would find 25-35 clips. Meaning you'd end up with 18-23 good clips. Numbers aren't exact I'm just painting the picture.

My point in all of this was that it was like the holy grail for me, and I quickly became their biggest power user at the time. Throwing all of my videos in, just to see what it would come up with, and finally after years getting to repurpose my interviews.

Why do I still use it today?

Honestly as I said before nothing really comes close to it. I would say around 65 Opus clones popped up out of the woodwork. Especially in 2023 or 2024, but almost all of them used a much crappier configured AI scanning. Opus has a really strong team, and even has the ClipAnything model now too (which essentially watches the video). I tried out dozens of clones, and either they wouldn't find as many clips. Wouldn't as many GOOD clips. Even didn't fully have all the reframing or visual options either.

Vidyo and Klap were two popular ones outside of Opus, but they are both terrible companies. I remember the former blatantly stealing from Recast (their full website and copy on the page), and eventually Opus with a bunch of features. Don't get me started on Klap, who's team would constantly spam out cold outreach email. I've gotten dozens of spam emails from them, after I told them to leave me alone. I even blocked six domains from them.

Alternatively, there are platforms like Riverside, Streamyard, or Restream, that copied the clips feature. I've tested those features, and even tested Riverside's magic clips MULTIPLE TIMES. They're half baked, and don't even find good clips.

Keep in mind I'm really not picky about clips. I said before I tend to use 80-85% of clips, and that is definitely more of a shotgun / generalist approach. Rather than picking half a dozen super optimized specialist clips. For me to say that these other tools wouldn't find good clips, that is saying something.

One caveat is that I know for a number of creators Opus can be expensive. I became a partner early on, but I did pay for usage prior. What I can say is that they tend to do free credits giveaways during livestreams or new feature announcements. Also when they release a new tool like Opus Producer* or Opus Agent, then during the beta the credits are usually free so that you can use it and provide feedback (so check out their discord or emails to find the betas).

How do I use Opus?

Pretty much every video I make now I throw into OpusClip, even my solo talking head or my gaming ones. Now it started for podcasts, and that is where lot of people think the AI is best at. However I tend to find a number of clips from my solo videos, 60-70% usable IMO, and with gaming its usually 45-65% usable. Not really the most worthwhile for gaming, and I've told them that. Although if you have a bunch of streams, there aren't very many tools that can actually go through all of them to find clips consistently.

Additionally, I've been quite a fan of what Opus Producer has been able to do, in the various times I have used it. As someone who hates editing, I tend to not do any visual enhancement to my videos, and Producer can give me overlays or motion graphics.

It is limited to five mins, so usually it has to be a short video, or I can record my video in chunks to do it.

Recently, OpusClip 4.0 came out, and that brought in a lot of changes. Not just in the UI, but new branding options or styles. Changed some of the lingo to using "recipes" instead of these workflows. Makes it much simpler to use, and find what you need. I think the UI needs a little trimming here and there, and I am giving my feedback to the team. Please do the same if you get a pop up asking for your opinion, the team really cares about the users.

What did I do with ALL OF THOSE CLIPS?

Now while OpusClip has a pretty strong social media scheduler built into the tool. I personally needed more automation workflows, that I get using Nuelink, which is the best social media management tool on the market. Combine that with the best Clipping tool on the market and you get the start of a phenomenal content tech stack.

When I first joined up with Opus I had about 120 interviews, that quickly turned into something like 1000-2000 clips. I can't remember the exact number as I was also clipping my solo videos too. Since at the time I was like how do I post all of these, and the feature wasn't built yet. I tried out other SMM tools, like Publer or Recurpost, and the former kept breaking on me every time I'd schedule.

At the time I was also already loving Nuelink for all of the automations you can do, but they added bulk post scheduling (not the silly CSV method, but true bulk upload). Thus I'd take my clips 25 at time, and just schedule them to my collections on Nuelink.

Giving me finer control over where the clips go, as I have multiple brands and channels. Shoutout to OpusClip and Nuelink though for being great partners to me as a creator.

Since 2023 when I started using Opus I have probably made at least 5000 clips using the tool.