Neil Patel walks through an AI system that turns long-form YouTube videos into short clips. The pipeline transcribes episodes with Whisper, uses Claude to find the best 3-5 segments, cuts them with FFmpeg, and uploads them automatically. It produced 15 clips from three 60-minute videos in 30 minutes, costing about $0.50 to $1 per episode.
I had it make an SOP for me and there's like, this is a, it's like a 17-page SOP. So you can literally dump this into whatever, you know, AI tool that you're using.
Are we going to break down what the SOP is for everyone listening?
Look here, let's have Gemini summarize this document. See, this would be a good moment, Neil, where it's like, hey, this would be a good lead magnet, but like, I don't want to spend the time to make a lead magnet.
So Gemini did a good job of titling it. It said this is an SOP for end-to-end, I think, YouTube publishing using AI clipping or something like that.
Yeah. So this pipeline has been validated by MVP results, which produced 15 standalone clips for 3 60-minute leveling up episodes in about 30 minutes wall clock time. The strategy is based on the success of Hormozy Highlights channel, which achieved 8.2 million views and 58,000 subscribers in 6 months by publishing approximately 6 videos a day. A lot more than that now. So the process— first step is to download. So downloads the YouTube URL to an MP4 file. Okay, cost per episode free. I like how it has the cost here too, Neil. Number 2, it transcribes. So it uses Whisper, which I don't know what that is by the way. Transcribes the MP4 file to a JSON with word-level timestamps. This is free local CPU. Okay, segment, then use the Claude API. This is the secret Sauce. This costs 50 cents to a dollar per episode, which is actually pretty expensive. I hope it doesn't cost that. And then analyze the transcript to identify the 3 to 5 best segments for clips, applying criteria like a clear hook, complete thought, and an ideal length of 3 to 15 minutes. So this is like more like a mid-form clip. And then it cuts it up using FFmpeg— that's free— and then uploads YouTube Data API— that's also free. So I do think with this Claude API one, these costs are going to come down over time too, or you can use like an open-source model if
