Download and install

Grab the latest build for your platform (Windows or macOS) from thereleases page and run the installer. Windows may show a SmartScreen prompt on a fresh signing certificate; choose More info → Run anyway. On macOS, open it from Applications the first time.

System requirements

64-bit Windows 10 or 11, or macOS 12 (Monterey) or newer.
8 GB RAM minimum; 16 GB is comfortable for multi-hour recordings.
A few GB of free disk for the app, its speech models and your exports.
A GPU speeds transcription up but is not required.

Make your first clip

Drag a recording onto the window. Nothing uploads. The file is read from disk.
Wait for the transcript. Your first clip is ready in seconds; a long recording takes a few minutes to work all the way through.
Pick a marked moment, or search the transcript for a phrase you remember saying.
Choose a caption treatment: block, word-by-word or karaoke, plus font, colour and placement.
Export. 9:16 and 16:9 come out of the same pass, captions burned in, no watermark.

Activate your license

The installer includes a five-clip trial with no card required, and trial exports are not watermarked. After that, a license key unlocks unlimited exports. Keys are delivered by email after checkout and activated online; after activation the app clips offline on your machine. Weekly and annual licenses refresh a signed paid-through date when the app can get online and include a short grace window. A lifetime license does not normally expire. A license covers two seats, typically a desktop and a laptop. Moving machines? Deactivate the old one in the app, or email us and we will reset it.

Keep it up to date

ClutchClip checks for signed updates and installs them in place. Every plan, including lifetime, receives updates. If you would rather update by hand, turn the check off and install from thereleases page whenever you like.

Fix a problem

Transcription is slow

Long recordings are CPU-bound. Close other heavy applications, and prefer a machine on mains power; laptops throttle hard on battery. Splitting a very long VOD into two files also helps.

Captions drift out of sync

This is almost always a variable-frame-rate source, common with screen recorders. Re-encode to a constant frame rate before importing and the drift disappears.

Export fails near the end

Usually disk space: exports are written in full before being finalised. Check free space on the output drive, then retry.

The app cannot activate

Activation needs a connection. If you are behind a strict corporate proxy, activate on another network. Clipping remains fully offline; weekly and annual plans should occasionally be allowed online so the app can refresh their signed paid-through date.

Release notes

Full release notes, checksums and installers live on theGitHub releases page, which is the canonical changelog. The current shipping version is v2.1.0 (Windows and macOS, signed auto-update).

Still stuck?

Email hello@clutchclip.org with your OS, the app version and what you were doing. Attaching the log file the app can export makes it much faster to fix.