What are Zoom Clips: Simple asynchronous video clips

Written messages and emails aren’t always the best way to convey exactly what you want to say to your team members. However, scheduling a video meeting with your team can be complex – especially if your calendars don’t match. This is where Zoom Clips comes into play.

Launched by Zoom in 2023 and rolling out globally at the end of the year, Zoom Clips offers teams a new way to use video for asynchronous collaboration. It’s a great tool for reducing video meetings and ensuring you can continue to communicate effectively with your team.

Clips lets you create quick video messages and share them with colleagues across time zones. What’s more, you can even save your clips and access them later. Even more exciting (and potentially worrying) is that Zoom is adding new AI features to Clips in 2025.

Soon you’ll be able to create clips that allow a custom AI-powered avatar to intervene on your behalf and deliver a message. Here’s everything you need to know about Zoom Clips.

What are Zoom Clips?

Zoom Clips is a simple tool that allows users to record, edit, and share short videos with their team. You can record your face, voice, and screen, then edit your video to add additional information you want to share.

The Basic Clips feature is available to everyone, but there are limitations. For example, you can only record five clips, each up to two minutes long. Choosing the Zoom Clips Plus add-on for your free Zoom Workplace plan will remove these limitations. However, there is an additional $6.99 per month for each user.

Alternatively, if you use one of the paid Zoom Workplace plans, Zoom Clips Plus is included at no additional cost. Features include:

Recording: You can easily record videos from your Zoom web portal, computer menu, taskbar, or Zoom app. You can also record screen and camera feeds (with sound) at the same time. You also have access to noise reduction and virtual backgrounds.
Editing: Once you’ve recorded your clip, you can edit its name, apply tags for easy searching, add a thumbnail, and cut and trim different sections of the clip.
Sharing: Users can set permissions for who can view a clip, generate shareable links, view video analytics, and receive comments on clips.
Engagement: Your team can leave comments and reactions on a clip, and you can manage, share, rename, download, and delete clips in your content library. You can also search for clips by their tags or titles.

What are Zoom Clips with AI Avatars?

If you’ve been keeping up with Zoom’s journey into AI lately, you may have heard about the new AI Clips Avatar feature announced at Zoomtopia in 2024. This new feature, launching in 2025, will provide users with the ability to create an AI avatar of themselves.

You’ll need to record an initial video of yourself using Zoom to create an avatar that looks and sounds like you. From there, you can write the messages you want your avatar to say in a Zoom clip, and the avatar will do all the communication for you.

It’s an interesting new feature for anyone who doesn’t like spending a lot of time in front of the camera. However, there are some risks to consider here too. Zoom has already mentioned that it is considering the potential risk of “deep fakes” created using AI.

The company said it uses advanced authentication, watermarking technology and strict usage policies to minimize this threat. Still, it’s worth making sure you’re aware of the dangers of allowing AI to digitally “clone” your voice and appearance.

The AI Avatar feature will be released for Zoom Clips as part of a new “AI Companion Add-on” kit that Zoom will launch in early 2025. The add-on also promises access to some other advanced Zoom Companion features if you want to build on the current bot’s capabilities.

Even if you don’t have this add-on, you can create clips with preset avatars and voices designed by Zoom.

How to Use Zoom Clips: The Basics

Now you know the answer to the question “What are Zoom clips?” you may be wondering how to use it. We’ve created a comprehensive guide to get you started here, but here are the basics you need to know.

First, you need the correct license for Zoom to access Zoom Clips Plus and remove the limitations of the basic free plan. You also need the latest Zoom desktop or mobile app version to access the feature.

Once you have the correct license, you can activate it for your account by logging into the Zoom web portal and clicking Settings Then Clips in the navigation menu. Just toggle the option to activate it. You can also make settings here such as:

Allow other users to access and download your clips.
Ask users for a password to access the clips you share.
Get notifications when the first person views your clip, when you receive a reply to a clip, or when someone leaves you a comment.

After you enable Zoom Clips for your account, you can create a clip using the Zoom desktop app or web portal. There doesn’t seem to be an option for mobile users yet.

Using Zoom clips: Customize your settings

Before you start recording, you can adjust various settings for your clip. When you start Clips In Zoom’s web or desktop portal, you can choose to share your screen or video, or just one of these options. When you share your screen, you can select the screen you want to record in the basic settings and click on it Optimize for a video clip.

Alternatively, you can select a specific part of your screen to record in the advanced settings. When you share your video, you can adjust your audio and video settings and choose a specific resolution for your final recording.

You can also create and use a title for your clip Advanced Settings to select a virtual background. Or you can click Avatars to create an avatar to replace you in the video. You can also choose different layouts, background images, and more. Additionally, there is an “Immersive Mode” option that allows you to integrate your video into the content you present.

In the Repair and effects In the Settings section, you can adjust your video for low light conditions, access noise reduction, stereo sound, and video mirroring, or simply improve your appearance.

Create and edit zoom clips

Once you’ve configured all your settings, you can access Zoom Clips via the Zoom web portal or desktop app and start recording. Then log in to your account:

Click Clips in the navigation menu in the web portal or in the top menu bar of the Zoom desktop app. You may need to use the “…” symbol to find clips.
Click Create Clip and you’ll have the option to adjust the clips settings before recording if you haven’t already.
Click start recording, and a countdown timer will appear, giving you time to prepare.
While recording, you can mute or unmute your audio, start or stop your camera, pause your clip, or delete it.
Click Finish on the floating settings bar to stop recording.

Editing Zoom clips

Once you have your clip, you can access it via Clips Tab in the Zoom desktop app or web portal. Click on All clips and you’ll see all your clips in a list or grid. You can also search clips by entering a keyword or phrase. Or you can sort the options using filters like “last created,” “last viewed,” “last modified,” or “alphabetical.”

Zoom also gives you the ability to search clips by tags, owner, creation time, and whether they are tagged or not.

Once you find the clip you want, you can click Edit Click the tab at the top right of the page to make changes to it. You can change the thumbnail, title, description, or add tags to your clip. You can also use the scissors icon to trim the clip, change the speed, adjust the volume, or expand the clip to full screen.

Another handy feature is the option Add a call to action button. You can also customize this button with text, links, button and text colors, button shapes, and more.

Share your clips

Once your Zoom clip is ready to share, you can access it from the All Clips menu, star or unstar it, download the clip, or click link Icon to receive a link to share with your team.

You can also delete your clips and quickly access comments from other team members using the All Clips menu. Simply click and select the clip you want to watch comments, and you can reply immediately, share a link to this comment, or edit/delete the comment.

If you want to know more about how your clips are performing, select the clip in question, then select the statistics Tab. You can track things like the number of page views in a given time period, total plays, completion rate, total reactions, and total comments.

Start with asynchronous video

At this point, you may be wondering why you should even bother with Zoom Clips. Isn’t two-way video better for collaboration? Well, yes, in some cases. However, it’s not always easy to find a time when everyone can collaborate in a meeting.

Asynchronous video clips give you an easy way to share rich messages and content with your team without having to worry about adjusting time zones. It’s great if you want to record a quick product demo, send a “thank you” message to a team member, or share a status update.

Of course, there are many other tools that allow you to do this, such as Loom, but if you already have a Zoom account, it makes sense to take advantage of Clips.

Additionally, Zoom is one of the few solutions that offers you the ability to use AI avatars in your clips. Soon you’ll even be able to use an avatar that looks and sounds like you. Just be careful when using this new feature. You don’t want the wrong people getting access to your AI image – especially now that deepfakes are becoming more common.