A Twitch clip maker
for the whole VOD.

Three things get called a Twitch clip maker.

The phrase covers three different jobs, which is why the advice around it contradicts itself. Work out which one you are actually shopping for before you compare anything.

• Twitch's own clip button. While a broadcast is live, you or anyone watching can hit the clip control and grab a short window of what just happened. It also works on a past broadcast. It is free, it takes seconds, and at the time of writing it tops out at 60 seconds with a 5 second floor. What you get back is a clip page on Twitch, in the original 16:9, with no captions. It is a share link, not a finished vertical post, and it only exists if somebody thought to press the button.
• A VOD plus an editor. Download the past broadcast from your Creator Dashboard, or use the local recording OBS already wrote while you streamed, then cut it yourself. Total control, no limits, and hours of scrubbing per session. This is the route most people quit halfway through.
• Third-party software. Tools that take footage and hand back something postable: vertical crop, burned-in captions, sometimes a decision about which part is worth keeping. This is the category with the wide price range and the real differences, and it is what the rest of this page is about.

Notice that only the third category makes anything you can post to TikTok or YouTube Shorts without further work. The first two produce a clip or a file. Turning that into a vertical, captioned short is still ahead of you.

Clipping live is a different job from clipping the VOD.

Clipping in the moment is a reflex problem. Something happens, you or your chat press the button, and the clip exists. It costs nothing, it is instant, and the coverage is whatever people remembered to catch. On a quiet night with twelve viewers, that is close to nothing. On your own solo recordings with no chat at all, it is exactly nothing.

Processing the VOD afterwards is a search problem. The file already contains every moment of the session, including the ones nobody clipped because they were busy playing. The work is no longer capture, it is finding the ten seconds that matter inside three hours and cutting them properly. Those two jobs need different tools, and a tool that is good at one is rarely good at the other.

There is a clock on the second one. Twitch does not keep past broadcasts forever. Twitch Support has stated the storage window as 60 days for Prime, Turbo and Partner accounts, 14 days for Affiliates, and 7 days for everyone else, and "Store past broadcasts" has to be switched on in your stream settings before any of that applies. That came from a Twitch Support post rather than a help article we could load on 14 August 2026, and retention policy changes, so treat it as a prompt to check your own dashboard rather than a figure to plan around. The practical version is simple: if you plan to clip a stream later, get the file onto your own drive while it still exists.

If you want the step by step version of that, including where the download lives and what to trim before you process anything, we wrote it up separately: how to clip Twitch streams from a 3-hour VOD. This page is the tool question. That one is the workflow.

Six questions that separate these tools.

Feature lists in this category all look identical. These are the axes where the answers actually diverge, and where the cost shows up later if you did not ask.

• Does your file have to upload? Most tools in this space process on their servers. A 3-hour 1080p60 broadcast is somewhere around 6 to 9 GB, and on a normal home connection that transfer can take longer than the processing does. Some tools sidestep it by pulling a published Twitch VOD by link, which is genuinely convenient, but that only helps for footage already on Twitch. A local OBS recording you send yourself, every time. And either way the raw session, party voice and all, ends up on someone else's disk.
• Is there a per-minute or credit limit? This is where hosted pricing bites. Plans are usually metered in upload minutes or credits per month, and a single stream is 180 minutes of them. Check the allowance against how many sessions you actually push through, not against the headline price. A plan that looks cheap gets expensive fast when one VOD eats the month.
• Does it pick the moments, or just format them? The biggest split in the category. Some tools reframe and caption a clip you chose; others take a long file and decide what is worth cutting. If you already know your moments, the first is faster and cheaper. If your problem is a drive full of unwatched sessions, the second is the only one solving it, and it is often gated behind a higher tier.
• Does it output true vertical, and where does the crop land? A 9:16 crop from 16:9 throws away most of the frame. Gameplay HUDs live at the edges, so a crop can cut the thing that made the clip readable. Check the output on your own game, not on the vendor's demo reel.
• Captions, and can you fix them? Burned-in captions are how a short lands for the large share of people watching with sound off. Transcription gets game names and callouts wrong constantly, so the question is not whether captions exist but whether you can correct two words without starting over.
• How do you pay, and what happens if you stop? Recurring plans mean the tool stops when the card does. Software bought once keeps working. Neither is automatically better, but the difference over a year is real, and it should be a decision rather than a default.

What is actually out there, free ones included.

Vendor pricing checked on 14 August 2026 from a European IP address, so your currency and amount may differ. Eklipse publishes no pricing page, so its rate appears only at checkout after you register. Medal and Outplayed are free to install; Outplayed runs on Overwolf and its Premium tier price is not published. The Twitch clip length figures describe Twitch's own clip control as of 14 August 2026 and come from secondary sources rather than a Twitch help page we could load that day, so check the clip editor itself if it matters. Plans and platform limits change, so verify with the vendor before you buy.

The free options are real and worth taking seriously. Twitch's clip button costs nothing and is faster than anything on this list for a moment you saw happen. Medal and Outplayed are free to install and solve capture, which is a different problem from cutting a VOD but often the one people actually have. If your sessions are already clipped by chat and you just need them reformatted, you can get a long way without paying anyone. The whole category, capture tools included, is laid out in our roundup of the best clipping software for PC.

Among the paid cutters, the useful question is what your footage looks like. If it is a webcam and a voice, the general-purpose tools are ahead, which is the argument on our Opus Clip alternative page. If you would rather hand the session to a browser service than keep it on your own drive, and you can live with a price that only appears at checkout, that is the trade covered on the Eklipse alternative page. And if you want to frame every clip yourself instead of being handed a verdict, the StreamLadder alternative comparison is the one to read.

The whole VOD, ranked, on your own machine.

CutBench takes the file you already have. Not a link, not a stream, not a clip you picked: the whole downloaded VOD or the OBS recording sitting in your videos folder. It works through the entire thing, scores every candidate moment against every other one from the same session, and hands back a short ordered list of finished vertical clips with captions already burned in.

The signals it reads are the ones a gaming clip actually turns on. Speech transcription marks where you talked and roughly what you said, because the reaction after the kill is very often the real clip. Audio event detection separates a gunshot from a door, which a loudness meter cannot. Scene changes mark where the pace shifts. Trained HUD and video classifiers read on-screen state, tuned specifically for Rust and ARC Raiders, with a generic profile on everything else. There is no text recognition anywhere in it, so nothing reads your kill feed, and we would rather say that than let you assume otherwise.

All of it runs on your own NVIDIA GPU. Nothing uploads, there is no queue behind other people's files, no per-minute allowance, and no account to make before you can process a session. The models ship inside the build, so the first run works with no internet at all. A connection is only used if you choose to publish: YouTube Shorts is a direct scheduled upload, and TikTok goes to your drafts inbox for you to post from the TikTok app.

It is bought once on Steam at $34.99. The free demo runs the identical pipeline on your own footage and watermarks the exports, which means you can measure the ranking on your own VOD before spending anything. That watermark is the only difference between the two.

When we are the wrong tool.

The honest cost of running locally is hardware and patience. Windows 10 or 11, an NVIDIA GPU with 6 GB of VRAM and CUDA 11.8 or newer, meaning an RTX 2060, RTX 3050 8GB or RTX 4050 and up, 8 GB of RAM with 16 GB recommended, and 30 GB of free disk. A 3-hour session takes roughly 2 to 5 hours on an RTX 3060 class card, with your GPU busy for the duration. Most people start it when they stop streaming and read the list over coffee.

Twitch clip maker FAQ.