Add my own video clip

What a clip scene offers

Six layouts: the clip full screen with a caption, beside a headline and paragraph, beside three icon bullets, beside a quote, beside a count-up number, or centre stage under a title. The role is only offered when your brief actually includes a video upload, since there is nothing to play otherwise, and it is never used in the creator format at all, where the talking scenes are generated instead.

The controls, all in the inspector

Upload the file or paste a URL. Set the source length in seconds. Set a trim start and a trim end, both in half second steps, which is how you take the useful five seconds out of a thirty second clip. Choose fit: cover, which fills the box and crops, or contain, which fits the whole frame and letterboxes. And choose the audio policy: mute, keep, or keep and duck.

The audio setting that is not wired

Worth stating plainly. Keep and duck is offered in the dropdown, and the intention is that the clip's own audio would push the music down the way narration does. It is not implemented. Music only ducks under narration, so keep and duck currently behaves as keep. If your clip has important audio, plan for it to sit against the music at whatever level you set rather than pushing it aside.

How the clip changes the timing

A clip scene's duration is derived from the clip itself, so setting the source length and the trim points changes how long the scene runs rather than requiring you to set both. That makes trimming the natural way to time a clip scene, and it also means a long untrimmed clip can quietly make a short video much longer than the length setting intended.

How it works, in three steps

1. Step 1

   Upload the clip with the brief

   A video in the brief is what makes the clip role available at all. Without one, no clip scene is offered.

2. Step 2

   Trim to the seconds that matter

   Set the source length, then the trim start and end. Five useful seconds beats thirty seconds of which four are good.

3. Step 3

   Decide about the audio

   Mute is the default and usually right under a voiceover. Keep it only when the sound is the point, and expect the music to stay where it is.

The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the guide Make a promo video with AI voiceover.

Limits worth knowing

• Clips are capped at 200 MB, in MP4, WebM or MOV.
• Keep and duck is not implemented. Music only ducks under narration, so it behaves as keep.
• There is no timeline scrubber for trimming. Start and end are typed in seconds, in half second steps.
• Uploaded clips are never used in the creator format, which generates its talking scenes instead.

Questions people ask

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