Describe your favorite movie in one sentence. Summarize your last meeting in five words. Come up with three words that highlight the focus of the last webinar you attended.
If these sound like difficult tasks, we understand. Isolating the key message from a video is tough, regardless of what type of content you’re dealing with—movies, meetings, webinars, and more.
Whether you’re perfecting a presentation and need a video summary, creating educational videos for a course, or analyzing content for research, the right strategy could save you hours of review, providing a sense of relief from time-consuming tasks.
In this guide, we’ll explain how to summarize a video, both manually and using AI tools like Vimeo’s video summarization features. You’ll learn how to distill hours of footage into summaries to share key details and save everyone time.
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What is a video summary? Manual vs. AI summarization
A video summary is a short clip that represents the most essential points in a longer video without watching the entire video. Video summaries could potentially improve collaboration speed and save time spent reviewing, whether you need them for professional or personal reasons.
Let’s take a closer look at summarizing videos manually compared to with AI assistance, including the pros and cons of both:
Manual summarization
The best method to create a video summary manually depends on how detailed you need to be. You can either jot down a quick overview while watching or take thorough notes as you follow along. However, manually creating video summaries requires editing videos into digestible sections, which presents some challenges:
- Manual transcription requires capturing details quickly, which often involves replaying the video multiple times to ensure you didn’t miss anything.
- Rushing to summarize may lead to inaccuracies.
- Crafting a clear and cohesive narrative might require extra rounds of planning and editing.
How to summarize video manually
Here's how to manually condense long content into a video summary:
1. Watch and listen carefully
Start by watching the video and paying attention to the structure. If the video includes subtitles or a transcript, use these as a guide to identify essential points faster.
If you can, watch the video at 0.5 or 0.75 speed so you don’t need to go back and review sections.
2. Take notes on key points
As you go, jot down the main ideas, timestamps, and standout quotes or visuals. This can help you organize the content into manageable sections, so you know what to edit.
3. Organize your notes into a written summary
Review your notes and group related ideas together. This step creates coherence in your summary. Focus on themes, recurring topics, or turning points in the video.
Use your organized notes to write a concise summary. Highlight the most important details and avoid unnecessary fluff. The goal is to create written summaries that capture the essence and note the critical elements of the video in a few paragraphs.
4. Edit your video into a summary
With your written blurb and key ideas in front of you, you can start cropping clips from the original video to edit into the summary. Depending on the content you’re working with, you may be able to just take a portion of the video. However, you might need to combine key moments from different sections to create a cohesive summary.
5. Polish and edit
Review your summary for clarity and accuracy. Even the best notes could miss a detail that you need to highlight. Once all the information is clear, edit the video to ensure it flows well and effectively communicates the longer content’s main ideas.
AI video summarization
With the help of AI summarizers, you can forget about staring at your video editing software for hours on end. Designed to increase your productivity, tools like these generate briefs that condense lengthy videos into concise highlights. They often offer secure video sharing, making it easy to capture and distribute vital information without missing a beat.
Vimeo AI automates tasks like transcription, highlighting key takeaways, and condensing content without compromising important details, such as speaker insights, critical data points, or key moments in the video. You can:
- Save time: AI video summarization tools generate video summaries and highlights, eliminating the need to sift through hours of footage manually. These summaries are ideal for quickly condensing long videos into shareable takeaways.
- Generate and edit transcripts: Vimeo’s transcription software creates text versions of your videos, enabling quick edits and searchable captions. Transcripts can be adjusted in-app without re-uploading your content.
- Boost accessibility and global reach: With tools like AI video translations, you can convert your video transcripts into dozens of languages. This not only enhances accessibility but also helps you tap into global audiences.
These features are available as part of Vimeo’s Premium and Enterprise plans, providing an all-in-one platform for hosting, managing, and enhancing video content. It ensures that summarizing videos becomes faster and integrates seamlessly into your workflow.
Who benefits from video summarization?
AI-generated video summarization is key for both hobbyists and professionals across various industries, including:
- Content creators: Summarization tools let content creators repurpose videos into shorter clips for social media or promotional content, enabling them to iterate on trending ideas and optimize their time.
- Researchers: AI processes tons of information very quickly, meaning researchers can review lengthy interviews, lectures, or case studies to find what they need more efficiently.
- Artists: Video summaries can help creatives extract insights or references from extended video projects, whether it’s for promotional materials or grant applications.
- Marketers: In some industries, marketers want to summarize webinars, campaign footage, or testimonials and turn them into digestible formats for presentations or ads.
- Everyday users: Missed meetings, educational content, or online courses—anyone can summarize long-form content to avoid spending hours watching the full videos.
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How to summarize videos with an AI video summarizer
AI video summarizers are revolutionizing how we process long video content, and Vimeo’s AI tools are leading the way. Check out Vimeo’s CEO's comprehensive notes on AI technology for an in-depth perspective.
Here are four ways to use Vimeo’s AI summarization tools:
1. Generate recaps and moments
Start by hosting your video on a secure video hosting platform. Whether it’s a webinar, training session, or creative project, this ensures your content is ready for AI processing and safely stored for later use.
After uploading a video to Vimeo, go to your video settings page. Use the AI sparkle button in the video settings to select Generate Highlights. Using the video recap feature generates a highlight video—usually a few minutes long—that covers the main takeaways. If you’d like short clips, moments can show scenes of about 10 seconds. These summaries are automatically saved to your "My Videos" folder and can be shared immediately or edited further.
2. Leverage auto-generated transcripts
Alternatively, Vimeo AI can automatically generate a full transcript of your video, allowing you to edit the content in a text-based format. You can easily remove filler words, unwanted phrases, or entire sections directly in the transcript. Vimeo AI will then make the changes in the final video—no manual cutting needed. You can even use the text-based video editor from the Vimeo Android app or the Vimeo iOS app.
3. Ask AI for insights
Vimeo’s Ask AI takes audience engagement to the next level by letting viewers interact directly with video content. With this feature, viewers can ask questions about what they’re watching and get instant, AI-generated answers. Whether it’s a tutorial, presentation, or product demo, Ask AI saves time by jumping straight to the part of the video where they’ll find the answer. Available on select Enterprise plans.
4. Generate a text video summary
Vimeo AI offers you the option of generating a simple text summary of your video. You can also use it as your video’s description if you’re looking to publish or embed your content and reap some benefits of good video SEO!
First, select the video in your Library. Click the Vimeo AI sparkles button in the video settings page. Then, select Generate Video Details. Save the generated details or email them to yourself. This is available on select Advanced, Premium, and Enterprise accounts.
No matter which method you chose, just refine and share! Customize your AI-generated recaps or moments using Vimeo’s editor. Tweak titles and descriptions or combine clips to align with your goals, then share with your audience.
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FAQs
How can I summarize YouTube videos?
You can use Vimeo’s AI features to transcribe and summarize YouTube videos. Just upload a YouTube video to Vimeo, and the platform will automatically generate a transcript and highlight reel, depending on your Vimeo plan.
How do AI tools help summarize videos?
AI tools like Vimeo’s video summarization feature automate the entire process of condensing video content into shorter clips. These tools generate video transcripts, identify critical moments, and create shareable summaries or highlight reels, reducing manual work while ensuring you capture all the right moments.
Use Vimeo to summarize your video content
Do your eyesight a favor and stop spending hours manually editing long-form content into clips. With Vimeo’s AI tools, you can extract and refine videos in minutes, whether they’re lengthy webinars, training videos, or creative content.
Explore our AI tools and see how they simplify your video management tasks. Get started today.
