How long should a clip be?

The advice you will hear is a number: thirty seconds, or under sixty, or as short as possible. Every one of those is a guess dressed as a rule, and following it is how you end up cutting the resolution off the end of a good story.

Length is downstream of the moment

A clip should be exactly as long as the thing it contains. Some ideas resolve in twelve seconds. Some need ninety. Deciding the duration first and then hunting for something to fill it is how you get clips that either stop before the point lands or pad an eight-second idea out to thirty.

If you find yourself trimming a clip to hit a target and the trim removes the answer to the question the clip opened with, the target is wrong, not the clip.

What the platforms actually reward

Feeds optimise for how much of a video people watch and whether they stay. A short clip watched to the end beats a long one abandoned halfway, which is the grain of truth behind the shorter-is-better advice. But a ninety-second clip that holds attention throughout beats both, and the platforms will happily show it.

Nobody leaves because a clip was long. They leave because it stopped being interesting.

Practical ranges

• Under 15 seconds: a single line, a reaction, one surprising claim with no setup needed. Hard to do well and easy to make feel like a fragment.
• 20 to 45 seconds: the workhorse. Long enough for a question and an answer, short enough that a viewer commits without thinking about it.
• 60 to 90 seconds: a story, an argument with a turn in it, or an explanation. Works when the opening earns the time.
• Over two minutes: rarely, and only when the thing genuinely cannot be shorter. Consider whether it belongs in the feed at all.

Where the constraint is real

Platform caps do exist and they change, so check the current limit before you cut something that will not upload. Beyond that, treat the limit as a ceiling rather than a target.

How to set it in practice

Set a target length as a hint about the kind of clip you want, not as a rule to be enforced. In Keptbits the target is seconds per clip, and the boundaries still snap to real sentence endings — so asking for thirty gets you something around thirty that ends where a thought ends, rather than something exactly thirty that ends mid-word.