Most clips run between fifteen and forty-five seconds. That range is not arbitrary: it is long enough to deliver a complete moment and short enough that a viewer watches to the end, which is the signal short-form platforms reward most.
A clip is not simply a trimmed video. The good ones are re-framed for a vertical screen, captioned for sound-off viewing, and opened on the peak of the moment rather than its build-up.
Clips are typically published to TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels. The same clip often performs very differently on each, because each platform surfaces content to a different mix of followers and strangers.