How to Make Podcast Clips for YouTube Shorts with AI Automatically (2026 Guide)

Making podcast clips manually takes time. You review the episode, pick highlights, cut, caption, and export for different platforms. It's a lot of effort for an outcome you can't predict. What if I told you can just click one button and AI does it in 30 seconds. But here's the part that blew my mind. It doesn't just create clips. It predicts which ones will go viral. Each clip gets a score from 70 to 99. The higher the score, the better the engagement potential. And it's scary accurate. By the end of this video, you'll automate the entire podcast to shorts workflow in minutes, not hours. And you'll see how to refine those clips through simple chat commands without touching the timeline. Here's the

problem with manual clip editing. You're flying blind. You spend hours cutting moments that feel good, but you have no idea they'll actually perform. And by the time you find out, you've already burned a weekend on content that gets 200 views. But now, I'll show you an all-in-one studio that records you and your guests in 4K locally. No internet lag, no quality drops, then uses AI to automatically find your best moments, score them for verality, and let you polish everything through simple chat

commands. First, let's talk about recording because your clips are only as good as your source footage. If you're recording over Zoom or relying on shaky internet, you're starting with compressed pixelated video. Riverside solves this by recording locally in 4K. Here's how it works. You start a session on the platform, invite your guest with a link, and both of you record directly on your own devices. No data is sent over the internet during recording. Everything is captured locally at full quality, up to 4K video and 48 kHz audio. When the session ends, Riverside uploads the high resolution files to the cloud. The result, studio quality footage, even if your internet drops mid-recording. And here's the kicker. Each participant is recorded on a separate track. That means you get individual video and audio files for you, your co-host, and every guest. In post-prouction, you can adjust levels, remove background noise from one person without affecting the others, and control exactly how each voice sounds in

the final mix. Once your recording is done, AI goes to work. Let's upload a test record as an example. Click over to the made for you tab, and you'll see something called magic clips. These are short form clips that Riverside automatically generated from your full recording. No manual cutting, no scanning through the timeline. The AI watched your entire session and identified the moments with the highest engagement potential. Here's what you're looking at. Each magic clip has a thumbnail, a duration, usually 30 to 90 seconds, and a viral score. That score ranges from 70 to 99. Anything above 85 is considered high performing. Anything at 95 or above is your top tier content, the stuff that has the best chance of breaking through the algorithm and going viral. How does the system calculate this score? It analyzes multiple factors, pacing, emotional peaks, conversational hooks, topic relevance, and visual composition. It's trained on millions of high-erforming clips across platforms like Tik Tok, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts. The AI knows what works. Riverside generates about two clips for every 5 minutes of content. So, if you record a 30 minute podcast, you're getting around 12 magic clips automatically. And they're not just random cuts. They're pre-edited with captions, aspect ratio adjustments, and smooth pacing. You could publish them as is. But here's where it gets even better. Click on any clip and you'll see a full preview with animated captions, your brand colors already applied, and platform ready formatting. If you set up your brand kit, which I'll show you in a minute, every magic clip inherits that style automatically. No need to add captions manually. No need to resize for Tik Tok. It's done. And if the AI picked a moment you don't love, no problem. You can adjust the in-n-out points, change the framing, or regenerate a new clip from a different section. But nine times out of 10, the AI nails it on the first try. So that's magic clips. AI finds your highlights, scores them for verality, pre-edits them with captions and branding, and hands you a grid of publish ready content in under a minute.

But this is where Riverside goes from pretty good to okay. This is actually magic. Co-creator is a chatbased editor. You don't touch the timeline or scroll through the footage unnecessarily. You just tell the AI what you want and it does it. Let me show you. I've got a magic clip open in the editor. It's 58 seconds. Scored 95 solid content, but there are a few pauses I want to remove. Normally, I'd scan the waveform, find the dead air, cut it out manually. Instead, I'm going to open co-creator and type remove pauses. Watch. The AI scans the clip, finds one unnecessary pause, and removes it. Done. The video is now slightly shorter, tighter pacing, no awkward silence. That took 3 seconds. If you don't want to type commands, there's also an AI tools panel with one-click actions. You can remove filler words, review suggested cuts for fluff, enhance audio with magic audio, and use smart mute to silence anyone who isn't speaking. On the video side, you can apply smart layouts, fix eye contact, or even remix a clip into an animation. Now, let's say I want to apply my brand kit. I type apply brand kit. Instantly, my colors and caption style are applied. The captions are now in my brand font, positioned where I want them with my accent color. This works because the editor has a built-in brand system. In the editor, you can define the look once. logo, color palette, text styles, captions, and even intro and outro, either by choosing a ready-made theme or starting from scratch. Then you hit apply brand, and those elements are applied to your edit for a consistent look across clips and exports. If you don't want the full kit, you can apply individual brand elements. Next, thumbnails. I type generate thumbnails. Five options appear in the chat. Each one pulls a frame from the clip, adds a text overlay, and optimizes it for clickability. From more detailed designs to clean, minimal ones. If I don't like any of them, I can ask for more variations. In this case, I need a vertical thumbnail format. Done. All versions are adapted automatically. Here's another example. If you need to adapt a horizontal video for social media, I type make it vertical for Tik Tok. The aspect ratio switches from 16 to 9 to6. The frame and adjust to keep the creator centered and any captions are repositioned automatically. If I want to switch back to widescreen, I just type make it 16 to9 for YouTube. You can also ask co-creator to adjust the tone. Make this edit more energetic. It enhances the audio and removes filler words to make the delivery feel more dynamic. Make this more calm. It removes pauses and applies smart mute to reduce background noise. and then offers to add background music or apply captions for accessibility. The point is this, you're editing through conversation. If you can describe what you want, co-creator can do it. No need to learn Premiere Pro. No need to hunt through menus. Just talk to the AI like you talk to a video editor sitting next to you. Magic clips are

great for short form content. But what if you need longer cuts? That's where magic segments and magic episodes come in. Magic segments are AI generated clips that run three to 10 minutes. They're designed for YouTube, LinkedIn, and platforms where you need more depth than a 60-second reel. Riverside identifies the most engaging multi-minute sections of your podcast, full conversations, deep dives, storytelling moments, and packages them as standalone segments. Magic episodes go even further. These are fulllength autoedits of your entire recording. AI removes filler words, cuts dead air, balances audio levels, and applies your brand kit to the whole episode. It's not just a raw export. It's a polished publish ready edit of your full podcast. All three formats, clips, segments, episodes live in the made for you tab. You get a grid view of every asset the service generated. Click on any thumbnail to preview, adjust, or export. Everything is organized by type and score so you can prioritize your highest performing content first. And here's the workflow. You record once and Riverside gives you 10 plus pieces of content automatically. Short form clips for Tik Tok and Instagram. Midform segments for YouTube. Full episodes for Spotify and Apple Podcasts. One recording session. Multiple formats. Zero manual editing. When you're done

everything happens from one place. You can share a preview link to give others access for viewing and any updates you make show up instantly. No reexports, no back and forth files. If you need someone else to work on the project, you can also invite an editor to collaborate on the edit. Export is just as straightforward. You get three options: video, audio, or timeline. For video, you can export MP4 up to 4K with quick toggles for removing the watermark, normalizing audio levels, and cleaning background noise right at export. If you only need audio, you can export a clean WAV or MP3 for podcast feeds. And if the project needs to go into another editor, you can export the timeline directly for Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, or Pro Tools with markers and structure preserved. The handoff is clean. The point is that everything stays in one workflow from recording and AI editing to sharing and exporting without jumping between tools or rebuilding the project at the end. Here's the time difference.

Before Riverside creators record, import files into an editor, manually scan for highlights, cut clips, add captions one by one, export multiple aspect ratios, and upload several hours with Riverside. They record, open made for you, review the clips, select the highest scores, make quick tweaks with co-creator if needed, and export just a few minutes. This workflow creates 10 plus clips per podcast. Each one is optimized for different platform. Each one is scored for verality so you know which to prioritize. And because you're starting with 4K local recordings, your content looks better than anything your competitors are putting out. Go try Riverside for yourself. They are sponsoring this video, but I'm only sharing this because it actually works and saves me a ton of time. Use code AI master to get a full month for free. The link is right in the description below and pinned comment. No credit card needed so you can just jump in and test the magic clips code and 4K recording. Stop guessing what's going to go viral and let the AI show you. If you want to see more AI workflows like this, tools that actually save you time instead of adding complexity, subscribe and turn on notifications. I test everything so you don't have to. And see you in the next one.