Get Started
Back to Templates

Extract YouTube video clips with Claude and Apify from natural language prompts

Created by

Created by: Matty Reed || mattyreed1

Matty Reed

Last update

Last update a day ago

Categories

Share

Who is this for?

Content creators, marketers, and video editors who want to automatically extract highlight clips from YouTube videos using natural language descriptions—no manual timestamp hunting required.

What problem does it solve?

Manually scrubbing through long videos to find specific moments is time-consuming and tedious. This workflow automates the entire process: describe what clips you want in plain English, and AI analyzes the transcript to find and extract them automatically.

How it works

# Node Purpose
1 YouTube Clip Request Form Web form to submit YouTube URL, clip description, count, and max duration.
2 Workflow Configuration Centralizes Apify credentials and user inputs.
3 Get Video Transcript from Apify Fetches the full video transcript via Apify Actor.
4 Find Clips from Transcript AI Agent (Claude) analyzes transcript and identifies clip timestamps based on your description.
5 Prepare Clip Requests Formats the AI-identified clips for the clipping service.
6 Create Clips via Apify Sends clip requests to Apify Actor to extract video segments.
7a Save Clip Links to Google Sheets Logs clip URLs to a spreadsheet for easy access.
7b Download Clip Files (optional) Downloads clips locally to your specified directory.

Setup steps

  1. Apify Configuration

    • Sign up at Apify and get your API token
    • Deploy or find Actors for: YouTube transcript extraction, video clipping
    • Copy Actor URLs to the Workflow Configuration node

  2. Credentials

    • Add your Apify API Token to Workflow Configuration
    • Connect Google Sheets OAuth2 credential
    • Connect Anthropic API credential (for Claude)

  3. Google Sheets Setup

    • Create a sheet with columns: Url, Mp4 360p, Mp4 720, Mp4 1080, Mp3
    • Update the Document ID and Sheet Name in "Save Clip Links" node

  4. Optional: Local Downloads

    • Set localSavePath in Workflow Configuration
    • Ensure directory exists and n8n has write permissions

  5. Test

    • Open the form Test URL
    • Submit a YouTube URL with a clip description (e.g., "funny moments" or "key insights")
    • Verify clips appear in Google Sheets

Resources

Extending the flow

  • Slack/Discord notification – Add a node to ping you when clips are ready.
  • Batch processing – Modify to accept multiple YouTube URLs at once.
  • Custom AI prompts – Tweak the Agent system prompt for different clip styles (tutorials, highlights, quotes).

Describe what you want, let AI find it, get clips—zero manual scrubbing.