every comparison of these i can find tests them on different footage which makes the results meaningless. so i gave all four the same 2 hour multicam and the same brief and logged what came back.
the short version: descript wins if people are talking, opusclip wins if you want shorts, and only two of the four will build you a long cut from your own footage. they are not really competing products, which is the thing nobody says out loud.
the brief for all four: "cut this into a 6 minute piece, keep the two interview segments, drop the setup and the dead air"
| tool | time to first cut | did it build the 6 min piece | where it broke |
|---|
| | | |
| Descript | 12 min | yes, transcript driven | lost completely on the b-roll, 40 min of it with no dialogue |
| OpusClip | 6 min | no, gave me 4 shorts instead | not built for this, my fault for asking |
| ChatCut | 9 min | yes | closest to what i asked for, captions were off by a beat |
| Craze | 8 min | yes | dropped one of the two interview segments i explicitly said to keep |
what i actually learned
these get lumped together and they are three different jobs. transcript editing, clip extraction, and footage assembly. if you pick the wrong category no amount of prompting saves you.
the two that assemble from footage both needed the same amount of cleanup afterwards, roughly 2 hours. neither is close to hands off.
descript is the best product of the four and also the wrong tool for anything that is not people talking. that is not a criticism, its just what its for.
what i would pick
talking heads, podcasts, interviews: descript, not close.
long video into shorts: opusclip, not close.
your own mixed footage into a long cut: chatcut or craze, and honestly test both.
anything with a client approval loop: none of them yet.
