Let me start by being clear. Tools are my fascination, and I have been looking for repurposing tools for the last decade. I love the topic/niche of repurposing, and when I came across both tools we are talking about today I was in adoration.

The first experience I had with Repurpose was me randomly stumbling upon the site way before I started even making clips. This was early early on in my show the Polymath PolyCast, and I barely got my foothold on making interview content.

I got on the site and messaged the chatbot, and immediately got in touch with the founder. We chatted for a bit, and shared our loving for content and repurposing!

While I had a pretty good and bad experience with Repurpose, I've still talked greatly about them for ages.

Eventually more tools came out to the market, some notable ones being Recast Studio, Chopcast/Tribetactics, and Content Fries come to mind. I wasn't aware at the time, but I THINK this is around when JoinCombo the gaming tool came out too.

Eventually, I would talk to the founders of all of them, and that was because I was trying to find the best tool for me. At the time for an hour long interview, the two main repurposing tools Recast and Chopcast would only find a dozen clips or so, and they would be landscape/horizontal.

Repurpose.io technically could make clips from timestamps, but that required you to put it in the video description, and find the clips yourself.

Later on I had an automation set up where I would take my Facebook videos, and send them over to YouTube.

This was because at the time the YT api wouldn't let you download videos yet, so if I wanted to make clips via repurpose at the time (which is what I was using). Thus I need to start the video process from Facebook first.

However at one point the automation started to mess up. I presume growing pains on server strain for the company. Not probably going to happen now, regardless that youtube api lets you download now for the last many years.

For over 20 videos they were sent to Youtube at very low resolutions/quality. I had to spend a couple days reuploading 30 gigabytes of interviews. Not counting how it might have tarnished my reputation with my guests either, especially considering how busy I was at the time so it took me a minute to notice this issue.

Note: This is your reminder to check your Zapier/Repurpose/Make/Nuelink automations.

There may never be an age of repurposing tools like that again

As I said before Repurpose.io is sort of the godfather of all of these other tools, as it came out well before anything else.

However what really dominated the market was another tool, which came out in 2023. At the height of the initial AI boom. This being OpusClip, which started out as a livestreaming tool, and over time the team realized the clipping feature was worth expanding on.

While other repurposing tools like Chopcast or Recast were trying to eventually bring chatGPT into their AI system. Opus came out swinging with ChatGPT being the forefront at the time for their clipping engine.

Now it has it's ClipAnything model which does a hell of a lot more, than just reading a transcript and using GPT.

This being said it was pretty revolutionary at the time, as the quickness for processing videos was a lot better than the previous repurposing tools on the market. Opus still had some server issues in their first year, which some users might recall. Although the team was always working day and night to fix any issues right way, which I think is commendable.

After OpusClip launched, there came a cascade of copycat tools on the market. Such as any successful venture I guess you could say. Notable ones at that time were Munch, Klap, Vizard, and a few others. Most of which died off because they couldn't keep up with the all-star cast of team members Opus managed to gather. For the most part they kept the simple chatGPT based clip finding mechanisms, and tried to add features that Opus didn't have yet. Such as social media posting functions, which it does have now I might add.

One comes to mind, that I don't really even want to mention, which is Vidyo. The reason I felt a bit apprehensive is that they blatantly copied Recast Studio's website once or twice, pretty much word for word, and would repeatedly copy OpusClip any chance they got. However I tried that tool, and it didn't hold a candle. They go by a different name now, but it isn't even worth mentioning.

That age of repurposing tool boom was fantastic for creators like me, as we were able to dip our hands into so many cookie jars. Seeing which one worked better at that moment!

An 80% Usability Rate

Mind you this is a number I came up with from my own delves into tools. Most of the tools today I mention are simply for video repurposing. Particularly talking videos like podcasts or youtube, but Opus now has their machine learning based model that works even with most games in my experience now too.

The first tool that can really do both! I know Eklipse GG tried to, but that interface was.... IS beyond awful to use.

I mentioned before that Recast and all of those, would usually find about a dozen clips. Maybe a little bit more if the video was over an hour. This isn't good enough, and for that much content, especially for a show with guests that are multi-experts. Meaning the topics vary greatly, and there are plenty of tangents to pull from. It just didn't make sense to me that you would only get 12-15 clips.

No matter what tool I used I tend to often get about 80% usage rate, so if I used Recast I would often get about 8-9 clips that would be decent. However there laid another issue I haven't mentioned, they were still in horizontal format.

I think these tools do better now with portrait, but they still struggle with splitscreen dual person views. Meaning I would have had to take the clips from something like Chopcast, and then put them into a gaming clip tool like Combo or Crossclip in order to reformat their positioning for tiktok consumption.

Note: I think I should have done this in retrospect, and if I ever go back in time I'll be sure to do it! haha

OpusClip was the first tool on the market to offer the SPLIT view, which was an absolute game-changer.

Again, other tools do it now, and the stampede of copycat tools were quick to take the feature too. Regardless, this was huge for me, and I started dumping all of my interviews into the tool.

Even at the beginning, which I joined in around May 2023, which was about a month after they launched. I would get around 20-30 clips, more often than not closer to 30/35, for my long form interviews. That is often TRIPLE what these other tools were finding, AND it reformatted the aspect ratio into a proper split view too. Something I still can't get over to this day, and I've probably ran over a thousand projects in Opus at this point.

Going back to that 80% rule, that meant I was getting significantly more clips per video to post. Granted I needed a way to post those clips, and so I started using Nuelink too. OpusClip scheduler is also a good choice too if you want it all in one.

Nowadays I would argue for my podcast content I get about 85% usability rate, and that may not seem like much. It probably took a lot of refinement in the backend to find more good clips. Rather than just increasing the total clip output like some other tools tried to do.

Where does it stand now?

While my personal preference is Nuelink Automations over Repurpose.io at this point, due to a more modern system. I think people might like either, and when it comes to clipping... there is no match.

I've drank the kool-aid of many tools, but OpusClip is a part of my almost daily tool-stack. Every video I make, whether it is solo, duo/interview, or even gaming VODs; They all go into OpusClip now, and I get a plethora of short form videos to post across Tiktok, Instagram Reels, Linkedin, FB Reels, YouTube Shorts, Pinterest, Blusky, etc.

It helps me post 9 or 10 times a day on these video platforms, and that is something I just couldn't have done before.

Over the last year I got over 365,000 views across my socials, which isn't even including YouTube which got over 100k views on two different channels each as well.

💡
Again I want to express my appreciation to Repurpose, OpusClip, and Nuelink for helping me on my journey as a creator!

This post isn't to trash on any tool, but rather to pay homage to Repurpose.io and to OpusClip. For not only helping me on my journey, but to have made this tech niche happen in the first place. If you're interested, these are my affiliate links below! <3

Repurpose.io

The easiest way to Repurpose your content on social media » Repurpose.io » Repurpose.io
Repurposing content for social media made easy. Automatically repurpose YouTube, TikTok, Lives, Podcasts, and Zoom calls. Try it for FREE.
Repurpose.io
Nuelink - Social media scheduling with automation super powers (and AI)
Nuelink is a social media scheduling and automation for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business and Pinterest…
Social media scheduling with automation super powers (and AI)

OpusClip

OpusClip: #1 AI video clipping tool to create viral shorts
OpusClip turns long videos into high-quality viral clips, and publishes them to all social platforms in one click. We help 10M+ creators create and grow faster.
Lewis Howes