How to clip a livestream for shorts

The problem with stream VODs

A three-hour stream might hold ten great moments and two hours and fifty minutes of downtime. Scrubbing the whole VOD to find the gold is the chore that stops most streamers from clipping at all. Clip-channel editors exist for exactly this reason — but you don't have to pay one.

Find the highlights automatically

Instead of watching back the whole stream, point an AI clipper at the VOD and let it surface the spikes — the funny reactions, the clutch plays, the hot takes, the moments where energy jumps. It reads the transcript and the pacing, ranks the candidates, and cuts them for you.

Nova takes a stream VOD URL and finds the moments most likely to perform as shorts, then reframes them to vertical with the action kept in frame and burns in captions. A three-hour stream becomes a stack of postable clips without a manual scrub.

Reframe and caption for vertical

Stream footage is widescreen and often has a facecam in the corner and gameplay filling the rest. Going vertical means deciding what stays in frame. Good clipping tracks the action — or stacks facecam over gameplay — so the clip reads on a phone. Captions then carry the dialogue for muted viewers.

• Keep the facecam visible for reaction-driven moments.
• Track the on-screen action for gameplay highlights.
• Burn in captions so the banter lands without sound.

Turn one stream into a week of posts

Clip every stream the day after, queue the clips across the week, and your short-form presence runs itself while you focus on streaming. The clips drive new viewers back to your channel — which is the whole point. Paste a VOD link into Nova and see the highlights it would cut before you commit.