# How to cut clips from Twitch VODs

> There are three ways to cut a clip from a Twitch VOD. Which one you use depends on how long the clip is and where it will be posted.

Canonical URL: https://vivu.ai/guide/how-to-cut-clips-from-twitch-vods

There are three ways to cut a clip from a Twitch VOD. Which one you use depends on how long the clip is and where it will be posted. For a moment under a minute that stays on Twitch, use the clip button while you watch the past broadcast. For a longer section you want to keep on your channel, open the VOD in Video Producer and save that range as a highlight. If the clip is going to TikTok, Shorts or a YouTube compilation, download the VOD and cut it in a video editor. That is the only route that gives you a full-quality file you can reframe and caption. All three assume you already know roughly where the moment is, and on a long stream finding it is usually the slow part.

## Clip straight from the VOD

Play the past broadcast, click the clip icon in the player and drag the selection over the moment. A Twitch clip can be up to 60 seconds long. It lives on Twitch with its own shareable link. This is the quickest route, and it's the same one your viewers use. It has three limits. Clips are short. You're scrubbing in a browser player that isn't very precise. And the result is a Twitch-hosted clip in the stream's original landscape frame. You can download your own clips from the clips manager in the Creator Dashboard, but the framing stays the same as the stream's.

## Save a highlight in Video Producer

In the Creator Dashboard, go to Content, then Video Producer. Find the past broadcast and choose Highlight. You get a timeline where you set a start point and an end point, add a title and publish. Highlights can run much longer than clips, and they don't expire. That matters because Twitch deletes past broadcasts after a window that depends on your account type. If a stream had a good stretch you haven't got to yet, highlighting it is the cheapest way to make sure it's still there next month. The trade-off is the same as with clips: the highlight stays a Twitch video in landscape.

## Download the VOD and cut it yourself

In Video Producer, open the menu on the past broadcast and choose Download. "Store past broadcasts" has to be turned on in your stream settings before you go live, or there will be nothing to download. Once you have the file, any editor can make the cut. If you only need to pull a section out without changing it, a lossless trimming tool is quicker than a full editor because it copies the video without re-encoding it. If the clip is going vertical, you need the editor anyway for the crop, the facecam layout and the captions.

Most people who post social clips end up on this route. The cost is disk space and time, because a multi-hour VOD is a big file and you're scrubbing through it on your own machine.

## How to clip highlights from a Twitch VOD when you don't remember where they were

The cut itself takes seconds. Finding the moment in a four-hour recording can take most of an evening. Here are a few ways to narrow it down, roughly in order of effort.

Mark it while it happens. Twitch stream markers (the /marker command, or a button on a control deck) put a note on the VOD timeline, and the note shows up in the highlight editor. Markers cost nothing. They solve the most common version of this problem, which is remembering that a moment was good but not when it happened. [Putting the marker on a single button](https://vivu.ai/guide/how-do-i-set-up-twitch-clip-markers-in-stream) is the setup that holds up on a busy stream.

Use what chat already told you. Spikes in chat activity tend to line up with moments viewers reacted to. [Chat-spike detection](https://vivu.ai/guide/how-to-detect-chat-spikes-in-twitch-vods-for) gives you a short list of timestamps to check first. It misses moments that were good for quieter reasons, like a story you told while chat was slow.

Search the recording by what happened. This means uploading the VOD to a tool that indexes the video once and then lets you describe a moment, such as "the part where I explain the build order" or "when the cat walks across the desk". [Vivu](https://vivu.ai/platform) is one of these tools. Once the downloaded VOD is uploaded to a project and indexed, your description comes back as a handful of segments you can open, each with a one-line reason for the match. Some results will only be loosely related, so you still watch them and decide, and the one you keep exports as the original clip for you to trim and crop yourself.

Automatic clipping tools are a separate category. They choose the moments for you and output finished vertical clips. They're worth a look if you care more about volume than about picking the moments yourself. [What AI clippers actually decide](https://vivu.ai/guide/ai-that-cuts-video) covers where they stop.

## When you don't need a tool for this

If you stream a couple of times a week and use markers out of habit, Twitch's own clip and highlight tools plus one editor are enough. The same goes if most of your clips are reactions that chat already flagged. Search only earns its place when your backlog outgrows your memory: months of VODs, a moment you half remember, or a viewer asking for "that time you..." when you can't place it.

To work out which side you're on, notice where your time goes. If it goes into the cut, better editing habits will fix it. If it goes into scrubbing for the moment, the fix comes earlier, in markers or search, and it hardly matters which clip tool you use.

## FAQ

### Can I clip someone else's Twitch VOD?

Yes, as long as the channel allows clipping. The clip stays on Twitch and is credited to that channel. Downloading someone else's VOD to re-edit it is a different matter. Video Producer only offers downloads for your own channel, and reposting another streamer's footage on TikTok or YouTube needs their permission.

### Why can't I find my VOD to clip?

The past broadcast has probably expired, or it was never saved. Twitch only keeps past broadcasts when "Store past broadcasts" is on, and even then only for a limited time. Highlights and downloaded files are the two ways to keep a section after that, so highlight or download anything worth keeping soon after the stream.

### How long can a Twitch clip be?

A Twitch clip can be up to 60 seconds. For anything longer, make a highlight from the past broadcast in Video Producer, or download the VOD and cut it in an editor.

### Do I lose quality when I download a VOD and cut it?

The downloaded file has the same quality you streamed at. A lossless trimmer keeps that quality because it doesn't re-encode. An editor re-encodes on export, which loses a little, but that rarely shows in a vertical clip watched on a phone.