3.3 – Creating Video Highlights Lesson

Lesson Overview

Creating and exporting video highlights saves time and helps extract value from lengthy recordings. In this lesson, you will see how Pictory can help you isolate essential moments from your video, whether you need to share quick recaps, social media snippets, or just trim down long presentations for a better viewing experience.

You’ll learn both automated and manual ways to find and tag these highlights directly from a text-based transcript, allowing you to work much faster than with traditional video editing timelines. This is especially helpful when you want to update or republish existing content, provide condensed previews to different audiences, or simplify editing for on-camera and screen-recorded presentations.

Anyone working with training content, webinars, educational materials, or marketing videos can benefit from this feature. Rather than sifting through hours of footage, you can quickly download the most impactful moments to share or further edit—making your content more accessible and engaging for viewers.

Who This Is For

If you need an easier way to pull out important sections from your videos, this lesson will fit your workflow. It’s particularly useful for:

• Marketers and social media managers preparing short-form video content
• Educators sharing select class segments
• Content creators who want to repurpose longer videos
• Business professionals summarizing talks or meetings
• Product trainers or demo presenters
• Anyone working with on-camera or screen capture recordings
  

Where This Fits in a Workflow

Selecting and exporting highlights is best used after your primary video is recorded and needs publishing, sharing, or editing into shorter formats. For example, after recording a webinar, you may need a quick way to create short, shareable clips for your website or social media. Pictory’s highlight tools let you find the best parts fast, export them as standalone videos, and use them in new projects or campaigns.

You might also use highlights to brief a team with only the essential meeting info, or to share the most important tutorial steps from a longer instructional video. This feature adds flexibility at the editing and publishing stage, streamlining how you prepare content for different audiences.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Traditionally, creating highlights from videos meant scanning through playback and manually trimming clips—a slow, repetitive process. Pictory’s text-based highlight tools automate much of this. You can use auto-highlight to instantly select the top moments, or manually pick out precise quotes and sections by simply clicking in the transcript. When necessary, you can even merge multiple script sections to form a coherent highlight, then download them with just a few clicks.

For example, a webinar host can prepare a summary reel within minutes rather than hours, and a marketer can generate several social clips without juggling separate projects. These efficiencies reduce time spent on low-value editing tasks and keep output consistent, even when working with long videos or large file sets.

Practice Exercise

To reinforce this skill, try the following:

1. Select a video of your own that is less than one gigabyte and no longer than 49 minutes. If the file is too large, upload it to your YouTube account and grab the link.
2. Use Pictory’s “Edit Video Using Text” tool to upload or import your video.
3. Experiment first with the auto-highlight function to quickly create highlights, then try manually selecting and merging sections of the transcript to create custom highlights.
4. Download 2–3 highlight clips.

Reflection: Which method—automatic or manual selection—yielded the best results for your use case, and why?

Course Context Recap

This lesson is a hands-on part of your Pictory AI learning journey, building on your previous introduction to video editing with text. You now know how to create reusable highlights—an essential step before moving to more advanced editing, sharing, or customization topics later in the course. Continue exploring to learn how Pictory’s features can further increase the value and reach of your video content. If you missed earlier lessons, review them for foundational steps, and look ahead for upcoming tips to make your workflow even stronger.