Clip length planner
Type how long your clip is and paste the first thing said in it. The clip length planner returns the hook window you have before the scroll decision, whether your spoken hook fits inside it, every platform cap the clip clears, and the safe length for the platforms you publish to.
Given your clip's length and its spoken hook, produce the hook window, the platform caps it clears and a safe length, in under two seconds.
4.2s hook window · safe length 58s
Your hook is 18 words, about 7.2 seconds spoken — longer than the window. Cut it to about 10 words.
| platform | cap | your clip |
|---|---|---|
| Bluesky | 1:00 | fits |
| Snapchat Spotlight | 1:00 | fits |
| Facebook Reels | 1:30 | fits |
| X | 2:20 | fits |
| Instagram Reels | 3:00 | fits |
| YouTube Shorts | 3:00 | fits |
| Threads | 5:00 | fits |
| TikTok | 10:00 | fits |
| 10:00 | fits |
Caps checked 2026-09-04. Platforms move them.
You have the length the clip has to be. Which 52 seconds of a 42-minute recording those are is the actual work, and no cap tells you that.
Next artifact: the ranked clips themselves.
Never reads the whole recording and returns the short clips ranked, each one already cut on the measured onsets and framed for vertical, so choosing is picking from a list instead of scrubbing.
See how clips get rankedYour clip length and hook text stay in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored, and there is nothing to delete.
Length is a constraint, not a target
The clip length planner exists because two different questions get answered with one number. The first is what a platform will accept, which is a hard limit and is the same for everybody. The second is how long the clip should be, which depends entirely on whether the material earns the time — and no cap has an opinion about that.
The hook window is where the two meet. Whatever the runtime, the decision to keep watching is made in the first few seconds, and a spoken hook that takes longer than the window to deliver has already lost the audience it was written for. At roughly 150 words a minute, a six-second window is fifteen words.
How to plan clip length by hand
- Write the hook down and time it. Say it out loud with a stopwatch. Written hooks are consistently longer spoken than they look on the page.
- List where it is going. Not where it could go — where it is actually going this week. The binding cap is the shortest one on that list, and it is usually a platform you were not thinking about.
- Subtract the furniture. Outro card, end frame, a beat of silence at the top. Two seconds, minimum, before you compare against a cap.
- Cut to the material, then check. Trim to where the point ends, then check the caps. Cutting to a cap first produces a clip that stops rather than ends.
Where the manual way breaks
Planning clip length by hand breaks at volume. One clip against nine caps is a minute of arithmetic; eight clips from one recording, each going to a different subset of platforms, is 72 checks a week — and the check has to happen after the edit, when changing the answer means going back into the timeline.
The harder problem is upstream. Deciding which 52 seconds of a 42-minute recording become a clip is the actual work, and the Editing Tax dataset puts finding and cutting eight of them at 90 minutes per recording — more than any other single line, and more than twice the audio pass. A length planner does nothing about that, and no length planner can.
Never reads the whole recording and returns the short clips ranked, each already cut on the measured onsets and framed for vertical against the platform safe zones and the crop each format keeps, so choosing becomes picking from a list instead of scrubbing for one.
Read the transcript
Clip length planner Type how long your clip is and paste the first thing said in it. The clip length planner returns the hook window you have before the scroll decision, whether your spoken hook fits inside it, every platform cap the clip clears, and the safe length for the platforms you publish to.
Frequently asked questions
What is the hook window?
The time you have before the scroll decision is made. The clip length planner scales it with the clip: eight per cent of the runtime, floored at 1.5 seconds and capped at six, because a 20-second clip is judged faster than a five-minute one and a flat three-second rule is wrong at both ends.
Why is the safe length shorter than the lowest cap?
By two seconds, deliberately. A clip that sits exactly on a cap fails the moment anyone adds an outro card, a fade or a frame of handle — and the failure happens at upload, after the render. Two seconds of margin costs nothing and removes a whole class of publish failure.
Are the platform caps current?
They carry a checked date on the page and they move — platforms change these more often than they announce it. Treat a clip within 10% of a cap as needing a check against the platform itself, which is the same rule this site applies to competitor pricing.