The Battle of AI Video Snippet Tools - Opus Clips vs Vidyo
AI is steadily infiltrating every corner of our lives, promising more efficient ways of doing things. With the immense popularity of TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts, the need for snappy, quick video snippets that can showcase your podcast quickly has become almost a necessity for discoverability.
We know from our episode on Gen Z listening behaviour, that they rely heavily on social media to find out about new episodes or shows (as do other generations). if you’re not showing up on these platforms, you’re going to have a more challenging time being found.
In my quest to find tools that can assist the DIY podcaster, I've put a couple of popular AI video snippet creation tools to the test. But do they really live up to the hype?
The Contenders: Opus Clips and Vidyo
Both Opus Clips and Vidyo are tools designed to offer video snippet recommendations based on a full video you feed them. Their idea? Analysing your content and giving you the 'best bits' to share on social media platforms. Basically, you upload your full length video, you wait while the AI “robots” process the video and finally receive an email with snippet choices based on an AI-scored system.
Vidyo: First Impressions
Vidyo initially presented three snippet options. Some were funny, like mistaking a Lego figurine for a guest! While it allowed for customisation like changing fonts and colours, the snippets weren’t particularly strong. The whole process was fiddly, making the end product less than satisfactory.
Opus Clips: A Step Ahead?
At first glance, Opus Clips looked promising. With a sleek UX design, it provided seven snippet options, which felt like an improvement. However, the limited customisability (like being restricted to fixed caption locations and not being able to use custom fonts) was a letdown. More problematic was the apparent audio lag in exported snippets.
The Challenges: A Human Touch Missing
Both tools lack the human touch. As someone from a podcast and video production agency, we constantly look for the heart, the emotion, and the gold in content. AI tools, in their current form, can't discern the intended audience's nuances or the episode's emotional depth, leading to generic results.
The “Everyone Else Is Doing It” Problem
I've noticed snippets everywhere that have the same look and feel due to the uniform templates and fonts that people are pulling from these same few video snippet creation tools. This dilutes a brand's uniqueness and makes everything blend into the social media noise. How do you stand out from the crowd if you’re using the same templates that everyone else is using?
A Place for AI Snippets?
Despite the drawbacks, there's a place for these tools. If you're bootstrapping or time-constrained, using AI video snippets is better than having nothing. They offer a quick way to share your video content, even if it lacks that perfect polish.
My Hot Take
As it stands, AI video snippet tools have room for improvement. With Vidyo earning a grade of "C" and Opus Clips a "D" in my review, there’s a clear indication that while AI is making strides, the human touch remains irreplaceable. Still, for those on a tight budget or time constraints, they can be a valuable tool in your kit.
For a proper review of me using these tools check out my deep dive on YouTube where I compare these tools in action.
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Remember, technology is always evolving. So while these tools might not be perfect today, who knows what the future holds?
Transcript:
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[00:00:00] Brianna:
[00:00:01] Today I'm going to be looking at a little bit of a review of some AI video snippet creation tools that we have been playing with just to see what there is out there in the market. We will always be testing things where we feel like perhaps it could add value to our clients, maybe it could speed some processes up.
[00:00:20] Maybe it's really good for DIYers. And in fact, a lot of the stuff I try is for the DIY person. Someone that can't afford our services and they're bootstrapping it and kind of doing it themselves. I'm trying to find ways for them to make it easier for them to actually get the job done and to produce a show, because I know that it is difficult to do all the things, to wear all the hats.
[00:00:44] And so I'm trialing things to see what is useful and valuable for people and what is going to actually take more work. so I did a review, bit of a deep dive review on YouTube of two particular video snippet tools. And these are the ones that seem to be the most prominent at the moment.
[00:01:03] One of them is Opus Clips and the other one is Vidyo. So Vidyo and Opus Clips do basically the same thing. You feed it a video, you upload a video. They say that that's the best thing to do instead of like using a YouTube video, you actually upload the whole video. Uh, and then from there it processes, it takes quite a long time.
[00:01:25] You get an email when it's done. And from that point, it then. It feeds you a number of different snippet choices for you to choose from and what the AI thinks are good snippet choices. It gives you a score out of a hundred and it tells you like, Hey, this would be a good one. Maybe you should choose this one.
[00:01:45] And you're able to change the captions on them. You're able to, uh, you know, fiddle with some things. You're able to put emojis in there. And all that sort of stuff. So I had a really good play with these tools and kind of pitted them against each other [00:02:00] just to see whether they were useful, really, at this stage.
[00:02:04] I was on the free plan of both of these things. and Opus Clips, you can only be free at this point. They are kind of working towards a version where you pay for it. In fact, You can start paying for it now and you get priority access when the traffic is high.
[00:02:22] So like lots of people are using it, right? And then if you're on the paid plan, kind of like ChatGPT, if you're on the paid plan then you get through the traffic, sort of. So that's essentially what that means. The Opus Clips option for the paid, you will be able to get a bunch of other things when they launch them, and they say they're coming in December, but currently at recording of this episode, these things aren't available.
[00:02:45] And so, I went in blind on both of these things, and I timed how long it took me to...
[00:02:51] So if you factor in obviously the processing time where you feed it in and then you wait, I mean the waiting time depending on the length of the video could be up to 40 minutes. So I didn't include that time because I could do other things while I was doing it. All I was looking at was how long these Tools actually took to use.
[00:03:12] The first one that I tried was Vidyo. And Vidyo gave me three video snippet options to choose from. And in fact, they were all pretty rubbish. Like the snippet choices I mean, I get what it was trying to do, but the actual snippets. ones that I would use. One of them was from the very beginning of the episode.
[00:03:33] One of them was from the middle and it was okay. and then one of them was actually a snippet that it thought that there was a guest in the episode, which was actually my little Lego person that is on my stand. And that was hilarious.
[00:03:46] That made me laugh so hard. And so from that, yeah, it only gave me three options. One of which I thought was, useful enough to trial. once I kind of knew what I was doing, it took me about six minutes ish to [00:04:00] create the snippet, changing font, because I could upload my own font, changing the colors, and then putting the captions in the place that I wanted to put them, but it was fiddly, and the snippet wasn't that good.
[00:04:14] so it wasn't something that I felt was particularly powerful or engaging as a snippet. And then also trying to pick a different part of the episode to create a snippet out of was almost impossible. It was a really big pain in the ass. And so for me, once I bounced that down, had a look at it and I did a few different snippets.
[00:04:34] On it, I wouldn't use them. And that was the big thing for me. And I guess, you know, I've got a high bar, right? Because we're a podcast and video production agency, there would not be a time where we would use these tools producing snippets from AI software for our client episodes that's just actually me.
[00:04:54] It takes way more time than us doing it ourselves, because as we're editing the episodes, we're really listening to the episodes. We're really listening to what's the good grab here. Where's the emotion? Where's the really good nugget of gold that someone really is going to want to listen to? What's the target audience for this podcast?
[00:05:15] Who are we trying to reach? And that's something that the video snippet tools, both of them didn't do. The target audience wasn't well defined and you couldn't put keywords in and things like that into the video snippet tools either. You couldn't be like, cool, you know, focusing on these types of audience, we want to get grabs that are more emotional or blah, blah, blah.
[00:05:36] Like you couldn't feed it anything like that. It was just, here's a link upload. Give me what you think is best. And so... What it's trained on to deliver isn't what a human at this point is going to find the most impactful most of the time. So Vidyo, . I gave it the score of about, I believe it was a C.[00:06:00]
[00:06:00] You know, if I was grading it, like in school, I gave it a C because it wasn't bad, you could definitely use the snippets. like, if you were in a pinch and you really just wanted to use something and get something out there, you could make it look good enough that you could have captions that were in your font, in your colors, and your face would be there, right?
[00:06:19] So that one was like, okay, cool. It does like the bare minimum for me. Then the other one I tried was Opus Clips, and It looks much prettier. The software looks much prettier. They've got a really good like UX design and that sort of thing and it gave me, I think, seven different snippet choices instead of the three.
[00:06:38] Like that part looked good. When I opened it up and I saw that there was a bunch of different snippet choices there, I was like, okay, cool. Like this is a step above. But then as I dived into it and I started kind of editing these snippets, you couldn't change where your snippet captions were.
[00:06:57] Like it had predefined areas that you could put it, you couldn't just put it wherever you want. So that was a big no, no for me, because what if the face is in the wrong place? what if there's something else on the screen that you want to move around? There's like an auto subtitle area where you can kind of just say auto and it will change it based on what it sees in the video to where the caption needs to come up.
[00:07:18] You couldn't use your own font. So you just had these standard fonts. And the problem I have is that I'm seeing this everywhere on social media at the moment. Everyone is using Opus Clips. Once I got into the back end of Opus Clips and started playing with it, I was like, Oh, this is the one that everyone is using probably because it's free or it's cheap and it does give you like some good snippet choices.
[00:07:49] Instagram and things now, they all look the same. Because they're using the same fonts. And a lot of the time they're not even changing the color to their [00:08:00] branded colors. So it just looks like copy paste. It's just the same. And that will start to diminish the return and the branding for you by having that kind of thing happening, right?
[00:08:14] And there's also the option to put emojis in, like it will add emojis in for you. And again, that makes it look cheap. So when I was reviewing them and I was putting these things together myself, it was fun to have a play with and go, initially you go, this is so quick.
[00:08:31] That's awesome. It's pulled these snippets out, but it actually isn't that good. Like when you actually drill down into it and what the purpose of a video snippet is. It's not individual enough, it's not customized enough, it's not for you enough, it's just here's like software that's been created, and it's like a template.
[00:08:57] And yeah, you can choose from a bunch of different templates. But most of the time people do want the simplest template and it all just starts to mesh in together. And unless you can put some B roll in there, you can put some GIFs, you can put some sound effects or music and other things that create and grab attention, then there is zero way
[00:09:20] that I would use these tools as they currently stand. The video snippet creation tools for us, AI ones are not cutting it at this point. It doesn't mean they won't, but for us, it actually creates more work because as I said, when we edit an episode for a client, we sit there, we're meticulous. We go through the ums, the ahs, the awkwardness, any pauses, we look for content development, we look for storytelling, we look for the engaging parts.
[00:09:55] And then from those engaging parts, where there's a solid question and a good response, if [00:10:00] it's a guest episode, then we pull that snippet out. And so that is where the value is for me in this video snippet creation. And the engagement that you get for something that's had more thought and more time and energy and customization versus something that you do that gives you only a few options isn't going to be as high.
[00:10:27] Now I want to caveat this to say that if you are a DIY podcaster and you have limited time, limited resources, limited staff. This is better than nothing. So a video snippet, having something that you can put out to promote your podcast episode, even if it's not quite branded and it's not quite right, it's not quite there yet, and it's not what you want it to be.
[00:10:54] Having something that is yours that helps promote you, is better than having nothing at all. And so, that is my overall feeling on this. If you're doing it yourself, if you're DIYing it, if you have limited funds and all the things, then give these AI video snippet tools a try. I would suggest going and watching my YouTube video, which I'll link, just so that you can see the comparison of these two, because these are the really popular ones.
[00:11:25] I also tried four others, which I didn't even mention, because they were literal rubbish. They were very bad. These ones are the best two that I came across. And we create video snippets every day, all day, so... We really look for things to be good, you know. So Opus clips, I actually gave a D because when I exported out the snippet, the first one, the audio lag was so bad that it didn't even match up with the timing of the video. [00:12:00] So, that was a big no no. I couldn't get it to not do that. No matter how I exported it, it still had a video lag, an audio lag. Whereas in the actual video itself, that was not the case. So, that made me have to give it a D. Because the time that I was taking even to try and figure out what was going on with it, it meant that it failed.
[00:12:23] The second snippet I did from Opus Clips was okay, but the fact that that first one had such a problem, meant, crap, that's gonna waste time. Even though it's giving me seven options, this is a pain in the arse. Whereas Vidyo, I could use my own font. It gave me three snippets. But the fact that I could customize, it didn't matter so much that there was less snippets because at least it gave me something that I could use and there was no lag.
[00:12:55] So I hope that was helpful, especially for you if you're sort of going, I know I want to get something out there. This is something that you can do if you're videoing your episodes anyway. If you've got some video that you can play with, there are other tools, like if you're recording straight into Riverside, you can grab snippets from Riverside.
[00:13:14] All of these things are clunky to me at the moment. They all take a little bit too much time to make it look good and customized. But as I say, they are better than nothing. Riverside just announced at time of recording that they are improving their subtitles, their captions, and things like that. I find their editing tools really painful and slow, but again, could be something that's going to be better with time. If you're listening to this and deciding like, Oh my gosh, maybe Bambi Media should do this, then you can totally reach out to us and we can talk about
[00:13:52] You can actually just go to our website, bambimedia. com slash [00:14:00] services, and you can see what packages we have that include the video snippets. We do do audiogram snippets as well, but in saying that audiogram snippets do not provide a lot of traction, unless they are pretty schmick. So we do do the best that we can to make them designed really nicely and well, and get the best engagement possible.
[00:14:22] But people have become quite desensitized to audiograms. That's why videos are better because it's different every time. Whereas the audiograms, you can only do so much to keep it interesting. So yeah, you can check out our services if you're interested in what we do with the packages that we do. But if you're really just starting out and you're wanting to dip your toes in, or if you've got a VA and you want some video snippets pulled, then maybe give one of these video snippet creation tools a try.
[00:14:52] Know that it will take some learning to do, and it will. to take time to do, but as I said, if you're doing it yourself, then it could be worth just doing something so that at least something is getting out there into the world for your socials to help promote and provide awareness of your podcast.
[00:15:13] If you're not currently following the pump up your pod podcast on podcast platforms, please hit the little plus button over on Apple podcasts and Spotify there's a follow button there. I deliver content for you every week, and also we have a YouTube channel, as I said, where we go deep dive into a bunch of different things, and I do reviews on there.
[00:15:33] I'm building up that channel at the moment, having a heap of fun with something completely new and different, and I would love your support on that as well. Okay. Have a great day.
