How to clip a YouTube video depends on one thing: whether the video is yours. Anyone can share a short piece of a public video with YouTube's own Clip button. If the upload is yours, YouTube Studio can trim it and cut Shorts from it. And if the full recording is still sitting on your PC, you have a better source than the upload, and a different problem.
Under most public videos there is a Clip control next to Share. Press it, drag the handles to the piece you want, and YouTube gives you a link that plays just that window. It costs nothing, needs no download, and it is the right answer when what you want is to send someone thirty seconds of a video you were watching.
If the video is on your channel, YouTube Studio has an editor that trims the beginning, the end, or a section out of the middle, and saves the result over the original without re-uploading. It also has a path to create a Short from an existing long video: pick a window of up to a minute, choose the vertical framing, and publish it as a Short linked back to the source. Both are free and both run on YouTube's side, so your hardware does not matter.
Search for a YouTube clip maker and the results are browser tools that take a YouTube link, pull the video, and cut it into short vertical clips, usually with captions and often with a model choosing the moments. Opus Clip, Vizard and several others work this way. For a talking video that is already on YouTube, they are genuinely convenient: nothing to install, any machine, minutes rather than hours.
If you uploaded a session and now want clips from it, you have a better source than the upload: the file you recorded in the first place. It is the original quality, it needs no download, and nothing has to be pulled back from YouTube. The problem is the same one as before, finding the twenty seconds inside three hours, but at least the file is yours and on your drive.
That is the job CutBench does. Point it at the whole recording and it works through the entire file, ranks the candidate moments against each other, and returns a short list of vertical clips with captions burned in for you to approve. It runs on your own PC, uploads nothing, and is bought once. It records nothing and it does not touch YouTube until you choose to schedule a finished Short. The honest costs: Windows 10 or 11, an NVIDIA GPU with 6 GB of VRAM for the supported path, and a 3-hour session takes roughly 2 to 5 hours on an RTX 3060 class card, so it is an overnight job rather than a lunch-break one.
The free demo runs the same pass on your own footage with a watermark on the exports. If you still record with a hotkey buffer and want to set that up properly first, the hotkeys and folders for every PC capture tool are on how to clip on PC.
Use YouTube's own Clip control under the video, next to Share. Drag the handles to the window you want and share the link it gives you. You get a link that plays that piece, not a file, and the button is missing when the creator has turned clipping off or the video type does not support it.
Open the video in YouTube Studio and use the editor to trim the start, the end or a middle section; the edit saves over the original without changing the URL. To make a Short from it, use Studio's option to create a Short from an existing video, pick a window of up to a minute, and choose the vertical framing.
YouTube's Clip button produces a link, not a download. For your own videos, YouTube Studio lets you download the original upload from the video's menu, and you can cut that file locally. For videos you do not own, downloading is generally against YouTube's terms and outside what this page covers.
For a talking video that is already on YouTube, the browser tools such as Opus Clip are convenient. For gameplay, most of them miss quiet moments because they were tuned on speech. If the original recording is on your PC, CutBench ranks the whole file locally and returns vertical captioned clips; the free demo runs the same pass with a watermark.
The original file. The upload is YouTube's re-encode of it and has lost some quality. If you still have the recording, cut from that, and you also avoid downloading anything back from YouTube.
If the session is still on your drive, hand it to the free demo and see which moments it ranks first, before you spend an evening scrubbing the upload.