A 40-minute podcast, a webinar, a talk filmed from the back of the room. Somewhere in it are three or four reels. Finding them is the slow part, and it's the part Claude is now useful for.
This guide uses Easy Reels in Claude, which gives Claude the tools to look inside a recording and render the cut. The manual version of the same job is in turning one long video into a week of reels.
Why long videos are the hard case
A short clip is easy to describe: "the whole thing, slowed down a little". A long one isn't. If you ask for "the part where she explains pricing", someone has to find where that part starts and ends.
Claude solves that by looking first. When you ask it to inspect a video, it gets two things back:
- Contact sheets. Frames pulled from across the video, each labelled with its time (
12:04.5), so it can see what's on screen and when. - A transcript with timestamps. What is said, line by line, with when it was said and, where available, who is speaking.
With both, "the part where she explains pricing" becomes "from 12:03 to 12:41", and that is something a renderer can cut.
Step by step
- Connect Easy Reels to Claude. On Ultra, add the connector once in Claude's settings. The setup steps take a minute.
- Send the recording. In Claude.ai or Claude Desktop, use the upload panel that opens in the chat. In Claude Code, point it at the file on your computer.
- Say what you want. The moment, the length, the shape (9:16 for Reels, TikTok and Shorts), and anything that has to be on screen.
- Let it inspect. For a long file Claude asks for the frames and the transcript before it cuts. That takes a little while on a long recording; this is the step that makes the cut right.
- Check the first render. It plays in the chat. Ask for changes in plain words: "start two seconds earlier", "end on her laugh", "bigger captions".
- Ask for the next one. The recording is already there, so the second and third reels are just another sentence.
Write the brief like an editor would read it
The more specific the moment, the closer the first render lands.
| Vague | Specific |
|---|---|
| "Make a reel from this" | "Make a 30-second 9:16 reel of the answer to the pricing question" |
| "The funny part" | "The story about the lost luggage, ending on the audience laughing" |
| "Add captions" | "Captions of what she says, white, bottom third, in our brand font" |
| "Make it look good" | "Warm grade, our logo top right, no music, keep her voice" |
Two things worth saying every time: how long the reel should be, and how it should open. The opening decides whether anyone watches the rest, which is the whole argument of what the first three seconds have to do.
Cut on the sentence, not near it
A reel that starts mid-word looks careless. When the transcript has word timings, Claude can ask for the exact start and end of each word in a stretch of the video. Then it starts the cut on the first word of a sentence and ends it on the last.
You don't have to ask for this. It helps to say "start on the question, end on the answer" so it knows the boundaries you care about.
Captions from the same transcript
The transcript Claude used to find the moment is also the script for the captions. It can place each line on screen for as long as it is spoken, in any of the app's fonts or your own on Ultra. For style choices (size, position, how many words at once), captions on reels covers what reads well on a phone.
Several reels from one recording
Once a recording is inspected, its frames and transcript are already in the conversation, so the next reel doesn't start from zero. A useful pattern:
- Ask for a list of the five strongest moments, with timestamps and one line each.
- Pick three.
- Ask for each as a reel, in the same style, one at a time.
Every reel lands in My Generations in Easy Reels, and on the Claude page in the app, ready to download and post. If you post the same cut to several platforms, cross-posting reels to TikTok and Shorts explains what to change between them.
Limits worth knowing
- Files up to 4 GB and an hour long can be sent.
- Transcripts cover up to 30 minutes of speech per file.
- A reel can be up to 3 minutes, which is longer than most platforms reward anyway.
- Uploads count toward your plan's storage (20 GB on Ultra).
Common questions
Can Claude watch a whole video?
It doesn't watch it in real time. It looks at frames spread across the video with their timestamps and reads the transcript, which is enough to find a moment and cut it precisely.
What if the recording has no speech?
Then the frames do the work. Describe what happens on screen ("the moment the cake comes out") and Claude finds it on the contact sheets.
Which languages does the transcript handle?
The language is detected automatically, and you can tell Claude which one it is when you know.
Do I need Claude Code?
No. Claude.ai and Claude Desktop work through the upload panel in the chat. Claude Code is handy when the recordings already sit in a folder on your computer.