HeyGen brings scored AI clipping to its public API
By Steven Van ·
One call turns long footage into up to ten confidence-scored social clips, with automatic, instruction-guided, or timestamp selection.
HeyGen moved its AI Clipping feature into its public API. The framing in the announcement is the whole use case in two sentences: you filmed an hour of footage, and maybe 30 seconds of it is worth posting. Now one API call turns that long video into scored, social-ready clips, which makes automated clipping something you can wire into a product or content pipeline rather than a button you click in an editor.
Three ways to cut the same video
The API supports three selection modes, per HeyGen's developer docs. Fully automatic mode lets the model find the highlights on its own. Instruction-guided mode takes up to 2,000 characters of plain-language editorial direction, "pull every moment where the guest talks about pricing," and cuts to match. Timestamp mode skips the model entirely: you pass exact start and end windows, up to ten of them, and get precise cuts back. That range matters because it covers both discovery (what's good in here?) and production (cut exactly this).
What comes back
You POST a video by public URL or an uploaded asset ID to /v3/clips, then poll the job or receive a webhook. Each job returns up to 10 MP4 clips, five by default, and each model-selected clip carries a confidence score from 0 to 1 rating how strong a highlight it is, plus duration, timestamp boundaries, and a short label. Output supports 9:16, 1:1, and 16:9 aspect ratios, so the same call can feed Shorts, feed posts, and YouTube, and captions can be burned in automatically with WebVTT under the hood. Download URLs are pre-signed and short-lived, so pipelines should fetch results promptly.
Where this fits
Clipping tools that turn long footage into shorts are a crowded category, but most live inside their own editors. Exposing the capability as a scored, promptable API primitive aims at a different customer: SaaS products, agencies, and creators running automated pipelines who want clipping as a step, not a destination. It also slots into HeyGen's own API surface next to avatar video generation, translation, and the background music and sound effects endpoints its docs suggest pairing with, one vendor for generate, localize, and now repurpose. For HeyGen product users, this follows Auto Clips, which brought the same long-to-short capability into the app back in June.
Getting started
The docs at developers.heygen.com/ai-clipping cover the four endpoints (create, status, list, delete) with request examples. If you already have long-form content accumulating, an interview series, webinars, a podcast with video, this is a weekend-project-sized integration that turns the archive into a shorts pipeline.
Sources: HeyGen on X, HeyGen Developer Docs.