A production assistant for every show
Supercharge growth with Substack’s new video clipper and more time-saving tools
Today we are introducing a new video clipper, which helps you create and share the best short segments of your videos, plus an overview of the various ways Substack’s production tools can save time and help you grow.
Substack is focused on using the internet’s powers to simplify and accelerate your work. While the first generation of sovereign creators had to duct-tape together a website, mailing list, and payment system, Substack brought everything in one place, enabling them to forget about the tech and focus on what they do best—creative work.
We’re now adding to this stack by building design, marketing, and accessibility features seamlessly into the creation workflow. Together, this suite of tools acts as a simple yet powerful production assistant for your independent show.
Create a shareable video clip
A great video clip is like a great headline. It grabs viewers’ attention and provides a preview of your subject and style before they commit to watching. For many show creators, sharing clips to discovery platforms like TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube Shorts is the secret ingredient to their subscriber growth. Moreover, sharing clips to Substack Notes introduces your show to a wide audience of viewers who see a direct path to becoming a subscriber.
We built a new video clipping tool to make it easier than ever to clip short segments of your videos and share them on Notes and other social channels.
To create clips, upload a video to a post draft and click on the sparkle icon. You can choose from several automatic clip options, or make your own by selecting “Create” and selecting from the transcript. Clips can be customized with captions and multiple orientations, and will end with a screen advertising your Substack logo and URL. For a full walkthrough, watch this video tutorial:
We recommend sharing clips both before and after publishing your post—before as a teaser to entice people to subscribe, and after to encourage people to watch the published video.
The best clips are often just a couple minutes long and focus on a single complete idea, especially one that’s striking, provocative, or insightful. (Check out
’s Twitter profile and ’s Substack profile for inspiration on what works best.)Learn more: How can I create a clip of a video on Substack?
Generate transcripts and captions for your show
Last year, we announced a new tool that creates automatic transcriptions of podcasts and videos. Now these transcriptions are integrated into video captions, improving convenience and accessibility for publishers and subscribers on Substack.
This feature gives creators more time to focus on crafting compelling content, rather than spending precious hours (and dollars) on transcription.
Ask for help with your Substack
Substack’s support team is one of the best benefits that you and your readers have access to on the platform. But it can take time to wait for a written response, and sometimes you want an answer immediately.
To scale our work, we trained a custom chatbot on the entire library of Substack help documents, blog posts, growth guides, subscriber database, and other resources—for example, try asking it “How to move a podcast to Substack.” Bestselling AI writer
and his commenters called the Substack support bot “remarkably fast” and “friendly.” Our support team is constantly reviewing answers and updating the bot with new knowledge, and it can even take actions, like processing subscriber refunds, on its own.You can access the Substack chatbot here or on your writer dashboard, by clicking the orange “Ask a question” button. And if the chatbot can’t answer a question, it can connect you with a human support agent.
Enhance your posts with images
In addition to stock images provided by Unsplash, you can generate images for your posts directly within the Substack editor.
Click the image icon in the editor menu, then click “Generate” from the dropdown. You can specify both a prompt and a style, then instantly insert the image into your post. These images are created with Stable Diffusion.
Listen to posts in the app
We integrated text-to-speech features into the Substack app, making it easy to listen to posts read aloud when you’re on the go.
Simply open a post in the iOS or Android app, then click the play button in the top right to play an automated voiceover. (This feature is automatically enabled for most posts.)
These features represent Substack’s ongoing efforts to make it as easy as possible to start and grow a thriving media business. Think of our product like a show-in-a-box. In minutes, you can upload an episode and have it instantly distributed to every podcast platform, hosted on a customizable website, shared to a discovery feed on Substack Notes, and ready to earn recurring subscription revenue from your community of fans. And you’ll own your work and mailing list, no matter what.
Try these tools and more on your publication:
Thank you for sharing this update! I create lots of video and audio content and have yet to bring them to Substack. This stack will inspire me to get GLOWING!
Awesome. Finally something new to play around with. :)
I am juiced to try out these new features. Awesome update folks!
This is exciting because I’m primarily a video content creator!
Same! Except I haven't made one yet 😔 and I've also been procrastinating on my newsletter 😞
Just start 😫
This is an exciting update! I've been using clips of my workshops uploaded to Substack for promo and have run into quite a few bugs. This looks like it will resolve those issues.
Question - is there a limit of how long clips can be?
5 minutes is the max length :)
This is amazing. I recently wrote a humor post about my frustrations with iMovie. This editing feature is awesome. Thx!
yw gtg ttyl lol aarp
Yesterday was the first time I recorded a podcast because Substack made it so easy. It’s something I thought of doing earlier but it looked too complicated. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
honestly this is really frickin cool. awesome stuff substack team!
Love the idea of the video clipper and will be trying it. But quoting someone who writes about AI praising the chatbot isn't persuasive. Your users will be the judge. Btw I'm already dealing with a paid subscriber who is unhappy that he can't reach a person when the Chatbot sends him in circles. Except me, of course, and that's not great.
I agree a lot
honestly this is really frickin cool. awesome stuff substack team!
I just got here, and you're making me want to leave already. I'll never knowingly use AI to produce my work. I want to interact with people, and I'm in the process of leaving Facebook because they pushed this collaging plagiarizer in my face.
I hope this isn't a sign of things to come on this platform.
The good news is, we don’t have to use these features! They can be that weird shaped wrench in the bottom of the toolbox. I have uses the video transcription, but I had to do a ton of editing on it to make it coherent. (It was when they first rolled out video so they may have improved it.) I’ve used the AI chatbot and had to ask for a human (which they got). But no matter how tempting I will never ever use the image generation. I’d rather stick with my own crappy drawings thanks.
Thank you so much for adding these features. I never experienced a platform adding features at this pace. Kudos to the Substack team!
Will be using for my podcast and to make my newsletter/blog become more interactive! Thanks!
It would be great to be able to access a setting option for lower resolution of videos for smoother playback when necessary.
Video clip is a fabulous idea! Thank you Substack and Jasmine for such a clear walk-through.
I'm so sad these kinds of tools didn't exist when I was regularly making videos! Such cool stuff.
Love to see how this will help accessibility! I haven't jumped into the video realm just yet - and I don't know if I will - but it helps to know that making videos accessible to everyone with captions and transcripts is an easy task
Come on Substack!!!! I love this!!!!!!! Seeing how we are a independent music TV network, this helps out a ton as of right now we use Opus to create all of our short form content. This is a great addition. Now I just need to find the share button after creating the clips to share with the community.
Once you create a clip and export it, a white "Share" button should show up at the top left of the clip—you can then share directly to Notes, or download to share elsewhere
Hello Jasmine, can one not generate clips from videos that have already been posted? Or is it only for videos since the implementation of this feature?
Thanks for the updates! Automated video captioning is great for accessibility. Is it possible to add a feature for comic artists and others to transcribe text from still images, that can be picked up by screen readers? I know there's the "alt text" function but from what I understand that is more for describing what an image looks like, not transcribing the text inside an image.
We don't have that feature right now, but thanks for the suggestion!
Very exciting! Question - it took 90 minutes to upload an hour long video - do we think that was a glitch or just standard?
Hi Claire! Uploading speed can be affected by many things, including things like internet speed, file size, video quality, etc. Having said that, I can take a look at the post and try to figure out what happened, I'll DM you :)
Oh great! I’ll give it another try with Friday’s replay! Keen to use it.
Mine always take a long time too. In fact, I’ve gone on to do other things, forgotten about it and come back the next morning to find I still have my editor open with the video ready to be inserted (mine aren’t video posts, I insert them into my regular posts). But that might be more to do with the fact I am in the middle of book edits.
I have no idea why I never checked out the stock images feature. This feature sure makes it easier than searching, downloading, and then uploading from Pixabay. Happy to have read this newsletter 😎
The stock image filter is great. It has a minor bug of not telling the user where specifically the photo was taken. But it makes life so much easier for me
This sounds like a useful tool to play around with. Checking some of our older long-form video webinars, there doesn't seem to be an option to generate automated clips. Will videos need to be uploaded again in order to have that feature, or is there something we can do in settings to make it work?
Hi! If the option is not available, it is most likely because there's no transcript available either. You can click on the Transcript tab to generate it. Once completed it will automatically trigger the clips generation too :)
Thanks! But in one of these old video posts, it says "No media / Transcription will automatically generate when media has been uploaded." The button to "Show transcript and captions" is grayed out. The webinar in question was uploaded in December 2022, if that makes a difference.
Ah, unfortunately yes. In those situations, re-uploading the video should be the way to go.
Got it, thanks.
Exciting news!!!!!
Olá, time Substack. A ferramenta de transcrição em áudio para os posts está disponível apenas em inglês ou também em outros idiomas? Obrigada.
também em outros idiomas, incluindo português!
Ótimo! Como faço pra ativar, por favor?
para ser claro e não me engano.. você está falando de transcrição de áudio/podcasts ou de transcrição para áudio para um post escrito?
Me refiro a post escrito.
ahhh desculpa então! isso é apenas pra posts em inglês por enquanto mas é algo em que queremos trabalhar no futuro!
Seria ótimo! Agora com as ferramentas de IA, espero que ajude. Obrigada.
When in Spanish?
YAY! Keep expanding Substack so I can finally cancel the New York Times. But maybe I’ll keep it just so I can stay on top of what is being produced by the mean-girl staff, and the
propagandists.
Great stuff!
Now, if only I had videos...
cool, I like it, and will add to my https://quantjourney.substack.com/ - where I post and missed video.
This is amazing, love the new features
Great tips here.
Will you ever launch AI readers who can become robo-fans of our newsletters?
Great work guys!
made use of this substack feature but now clips suggestions not giving orientation option or captions ...what up?
God loves youu sooo muchhh
Jasmine--I've got a lot of anxiety around deploying these new features--so much so, that I mostly stick these "How To" emails in a "read later' file--which I've finally decided that "now" is "later" enough. Anyway--point is that this is SO WELL DONE-- I no longer have fear around using these tools. Thank you so much for your guidance! Diana
Question: experimenting with this. Made a clip from a 30 second mp4 video. Using Firefox in Windows 11. Exported clip and downloaded. Will not open in any video apps - says codex not supported. (fyi when I exported a video with no sound, it worked. But not the test with audio.) Tips?
Great tips! Thanks.
Love this update and it came at the perfect time! Just started sharing yoga classes on Substack and the video clipper was so helpful in sharing that as part of launch!
That's creative of you. So excited to try it out. As a 18 yo running a newsletter, it's so fun to explore new things and spice things up a little.
Substack is becoming the Internet on the internet.
I’m not against it
Hi,
Thank you for this. Have added a video but am not seeing any options in the draft post?!
Found it. I was going uploading video through the top bar, rather than the side bar. Will be experimenting. Thanks for adding this!!!!
Oh wow! This is incredible! I thought it was going to be pretty basic, but this is much more sophisticated than anticipated. Thank you :)
this is great, love being able to do all my video editing in 1 place
but I noticed that after a video post is published, you can still create clips for download but you can't directly share them to notes (you have to export and then upload as a new note) - would love a more seamless clip video -> distribute note workflow
Really useful tools for video creators. Although I'd love to see more advances for newsletter posts, Substack's videos are getting some incredible tools for veterans and newbies alike!
Thank you will try it out
The video clipping function is very good, but it would be perfect if I could use it to embed clips into a Substack post. Currently I have to export it and re-import it, rather than letting it render completely in the cloud and just leave it there as an element for an article. Is this a possible update to the feature?
I have been trying to get this feature on my posts since I started here last year. No one has been able to answer my question. Why are my posts not allowed to be read out loud in the app?
You said, "We integrated text-to-speech features into the Substack app, making it easy to listen to posts read aloud when you’re on the go. Simply open a post in the iOS or Android app, then click the play button in the top right to play an automated voiceover. (This feature is automatically enabled for most posts.)
When Will be quick human support?
This sounds great, but as someone who's deaf, I just want to point out that automatic captions aren't great. If they can be edited to improve meaning, it would make my life a lot better. Thank you.
Hi Helen! They can be edited in the Transcript tab in the post editor.
Would wish we saw quicker developments from the team here - I love using substack, our whole business is built around substack, but on Pods the main platforms (e.g. Restream) have already launched automated edits, summaries, time stamping, key insights and captions + easy editing of formatting the video. So this is too little, too late :)
Thank you for sharing information about the new features. I am a newbie here on Substack and find it very interesting. It may take a while to get used to all the features here.
I came from Medium and people are raving about Substack there and I thought let's see what's all this about.
Indeed it's very interesting with so many features.
Jasmine, can you please elaborate on “click the play button in the top right to play an automated voiceover. (This feature is automatically enabled for most posts.)”? I would LOVE to have the automated voiceover for my posts. I tried adding my info to the beta list but haven’t heard anything. How do we get it enabled? Thanks!
Jasmine, can you please elaborate on “click the play button in the top right to play an automated voiceover. (This feature is automatically enabled for most posts.)”? I would LOVE to have the automated voiceover for my posts. I tried adding my info to the beta list but haven’t heard anything. How do we get it enabled? Thanks!
Jasmine, can you please elaborate on “click the play button in the top right to play an automated voiceover. (This feature is automatically enabled for most posts.)”? I would LOVE to have the automated voiceover for my posts. I tried adding my info to the beta list but haven’t heard anything. How do we get it enabled? Thanks!
Jasmine, can you please elaborate on “click the play button in the top right to play an automated voiceover. (This feature is automatically enabled for most posts.)”? I would LOVE to have the automated voiceover for my posts. I tried adding my info to the beta list but haven’t heard anything. How do we get it enabled? Thanks!
Thank you, Jasmine!
Anyone else not able to use the share icon after creating clips on videos that are already posted? I can only export.
Hi! You need to export the clip first in order to Share or Download. But we take your point, we'll discuss how to make it more obvious!
Ok thanks for the reply. I had to go back and watch the video and Jasmine does indicate that you need to export it first. In the video when I saw the share icon present, it may it appear as if it was there automatically.
No problem! Glad you are trying it out :)
I sure am! I love all of the integrations that are happening...now video conferencing or live streaming...that's what I am waiting on next!!
Stay tuned :)
Hadn't heard of Stable Diffusion. Looking forward to checking it out :)
I’d rather have transparency into why you shadow ban my account while promoting anonymous accounts using politicians names…
Will you ever launch AI readers who can become robo-fans of our newsletters?
I don't understand why you would want AI to steal our content and then publish it for free, if that's what you meant. Aren't we all here to make a profit from having a paid newsletter? Or maybe there's something I'm not understanding about what you mean by an AI reader...