AI content repurposing: turn long videos into vertical cuts for any feed

AI content repurposing turns a scheduling problem back into a creative one. The long video already exists, the good moments are already in it, and what stands between you and a week of vertical posts is the hours of scrubbing and trimming nobody wants to do. Connect Picsart to Claude, add one skill, and you can edit videos with AI down to a ten or fifteen second cut from a single sentence of instruction.

It works on whatever you already have. A product spot that needs energy, a podcast moment that earns attention in the first three seconds, a tutorial you want to tease rather than give away. Same workflow, three different briefs.

What you need to edit videos with AI

Three pieces, and two of them are one-time.

• Claude, as the place you type the instruction.
• Picsart MCP, the connector that puts Picsart’s creative tools inside Claude. Copy the URL from the top of the page, then in Claude open Settings, Connectors, and Add custom connector in the top right. Paste it, label it Picsart, and confirm. A browser tab opens to verify your Picsart account, and once you sign in the connection is live.
• The Motion Studio skill, which is the part that does the cutting.

With the connector in place, any creative prompt you write in Claude runs on Picsart underneath. Setup is genuinely a copy and paste job, and the install instructions sit at the top of the MCP page.

What that connection buys you is broader than trimming. Editing, generating, extending, retaking and batch work across a set of assets all become things you ask for in plain English, in the same window. Cutting video down is one job among them, and it happens to be the one that eats the most hours.

Installing the Motion Studio skill

Skills are targeted creative actions, each built for one exact use case. There is a whole library of them on the Picsart MCP page, sorted into tabs by the kind of work you do, and you install only the ones you need. Motion Studio is the one that takes a video and edits it down to whatever length you ask for.

Scroll to the skills section and open the Prosumer tab. Find Motion Studio, expand the dropdown, and download it on the right. You get a zip file. Back in Claude, go to Settings, Skills, Add, and upload the zip.

The install is per skill rather than all at once, which is the point. Each one carries its own instructions and its own trigger words, so your agent picks up exactly the jobs you gave it and stays quiet about the rest. Browse the full set and layer in whichever ones match the work you actually do.

Once installed it fires on words like reel, short and TikTok. You never have to name the skill or open anything. Write “cut a 12-second reel” and it engages on its own.

One more thing before the first prompt: from the Claude home screen, select the source folder your footage lives in. That is how Claude and Picsart know what to pull from.

AI video clipping across three source types

The instruction changes with the material. Here is what that looks like across three genuinely different starting points.

A 60-second product ad, cut to 10 seconds

A minute-long spot is right for YouTube pre-roll or connected TV. On a vertical feed it is far too long an ask. The job is to keep the energy and land the brand.

Cut down a 10-second vertical TikTok reel using the product video. Make it impactful. No captions. Show the logo at the end.

Five things are packed into that sentence: the source file, the format, the exact runtime, a styling direction, and how it should close. That is all the instruction needs to carry.

A 4-minute podcast, cut to 12 seconds with captions

Podcast clips have a different problem. The value is in what somebody said, and most people will watch it with the sound off.

Cut down a 12-second reel of this podcast clip showing important talking points, with small captions at the bottom.

Two changes from the first prompt do the work. Asking for the important talking points hands the selection judgment over rather than specifying timestamps you would have to find yourself. Asking for small captions at the bottom makes the clip legible on mute, which is how most of the feed is watched.

A long tutorial, cut to a 15-second teaser

A tutorial should not give itself away in the teaser. The structure matters more than the runtime here: say what it is, then show just enough.

Cut the tutorial video to a 15-second TikTok-ready reel. Emphasis on the topic of the video at the beginning, then follow it with a few preview cuts showing some steps. Add small captions at the bottom.

This prompt asks for a shape rather than a highlight. Topic first, then a sequence of quick previews. The result pulls someone in without spending the thing you want them to watch.

How long the cut should run

Ten to fifteen seconds is the working range, and where you land inside it depends on what the clip has to do.

Ten seconds suits footage that shows rather than says. A product cut has no argument to make. It needs energy, a clear look at the thing, and a brand at the end, and that fits comfortably in ten.

Twelve gives a spoken moment room to make sense. A podcast line has to be understood, not just seen. It also has to earn attention in about three seconds, which is why the opening line matters more than anything after it.

Fifteen is for structure. A teaser carrying a topic statement plus a few preview cuts needs the extra beats. Ask for that shape in ten seconds and something gets dropped.

What a working prompt actually contains

Read the three back to back and the same skeleton shows up each time. Five parts, in any order:

Runtime is the one to be precise about. “Short” is a judgment call; twelve seconds is an instruction. The rest can stay loose, because a direction like “make it impactful” gives the edit room to be interesting in ways a shot list would not.

While a job runs, Claude may ask permission for individual actions. Allow once, or allow always if you would rather stop being asked.

Keep prompting to build a clip library

The output is not a single shot at it. Re-run the same source with a different runtime, a different opening, captions on instead of off, and keep the ones that work.

That repetition is where content repurposing stops being a chore. One source video can carry a week of posts once you stop treating the first cut as the answer, and each re-prompt costs a sentence rather than an afternoon. A morning of it produces a library of vertical clips without a producer, an editor or a designer waiting on you.

The connector covers more than trimming, too. With Picsart reachable from the chat, the same plain-English approach handles generating, extending, retaking and batch work on the clips you keep.

Get started with Picsart MCP

One connector, one skill, one sentence per cut. Install Picsart MCP and point it at footage you already have.