If you are using Kapwing on a Free plan then all exports — including from the highlights generator — will contain a watermark. Once you upgrade to a Pro plan the watermark will be completely removed from your creations.

Highlights videos condense the best moments and crucial insights of events into bite-sized clips, which makes for quick understanding and digestion and lessens viewers time investment. However, brevity doesn't mean that highlights videos have to be dull or lack flair — on the contrary, these snippets are intended to captivate and entertain, generating interest into their full-length counterparts. Highlights videos are often used for sports and wedding previews and recaps, but can be created from a range of other long-form content like YouTube vlogs, webinars, and online courses.

Yes, AI-powered editing tools are now capable of finding highlights within longer-form videos and turning them into clips. Kapwing is able to automatically search a video for clips based on the length and topic specified, and then previews those clips so they can be edited directly in the video editor.

To create a highlight video for YouTube, simply copy and paste your video’s URL into the AI Video Highlights Tool, or upload the file directly if it isn’t on YouTube yet. Customize your highlights by providing topics for the AI to focus on and setting specific time parameters. Once the highlights are generated, preview them and choose the ones that best represent your content.

Refine your selected clips in the video editing studio by adjusting and customizing subtitles, adding graphics, animations, or overlays, and incorporating background music. When you're satisfied, save your edits, arrange your highlights using the drag-and-drop timeline, apply final transitions, and export your finished video.

There are a lot of reasons to turn long videos into short highlight clips, but here are three of the most important:

• Increased Engagement: Shorter videos are simply easier to consume, since they cater to online audiences' short attention spans. Highlight clips deliver key moments faster, are likely to be watched in full, and encourage sharing, especially on fast-paced platforms, like TikTok and Instagram.
• Broader Reach: Breaking down long videos into small, shareable highlights greatly increases your chances of reaching a broader audience. Since each highlight tailored to and shared on different channels, you can more easily target different audiences in platform-specific ways.
• Extended Video Lifespan: Turning long-form videos into bite-sized highlights lets you extract total value from your content. You can repurpose highlights for different purposes — as social media posts, promo materials, or teasers, then use these to drive traffic to the full-length video.

Simply put: yes! Videos with subtitles perform better. Subtitles boost your engagement and reach by making content accessible to far more viewers — especially those in noisy environments or with hearing impairments. Subtitles not only make your content more inclusive but attract more views, longer watch times, and increased shares.

Definitely. Unlike other online AI video clipping tools, Kapwing's highlight-making feature is just one part of a full video editing suite. If you’re not satisfied with your generated clips, edit them directly in-studio to trim video, add text overlays, or clean up the audio with the background noise remover.