Extract YouTube video clips with Claude and Apify from natural language prompts

Description

Who is this for?
Content creators, marketers, and video editors who want to automatically extract highlight clips from YouTube videos using natural language descriptions—no manual timestamp hunting required.

What problem does it solve?
Manually scrubbing through long videos to find specific moments is time-consuming and tedious. This workflow automates the entire process: describe what clips you want in plain English, and AI analyzes the transcript to find and extract them automatically.

How it works

| # | Node | Purpose |
|---|------|---------|
| 1 | YouTube Clip Request Form | Web form to submit YouTube URL, clip description, count, and max duration. |
| 2 | Workflow Configuration | Centralizes Apify credentials and user inputs. |
| 3 | Get Video Transcript from Apify | Fetches the full video transcript via Apify Actor. |
| 4 | Find Clips from Transcript | AI Agent (Claude) analyzes transcript and identifies clip timestamps based on your description. |
| 5 | Prepare Clip Requests | Formats the AI-identified clips for the clipping service. |
| 6 | Create Clips via Apify | Sends clip requests to Apify Actor to extract video segments. |
| 7a | Save Clip Links to Google Sheets | Logs clip URLs to a spreadsheet for easy access. |
| 7b | Download Clip Files (optional) | Downloads clips locally to your specified directory. |

Setup steps

Apify Configuration
Sign up at Apify and get your API token
Deploy or find Actors for: YouTube transcript extraction, video clipping
Copy Actor URLs to the Workflow Configuration node

Credentials
Add your Apify API Token to Workflow Configuration
Connect Google Sheets OAuth2 credential
Connect Anthropic API credential (for Claude)

Google Sheets Setup
Create a sheet with columns: Url, Mp4 360p, Mp4 720, Mp4 1080, Mp3
Update the Document ID and Sheet Name in "Save Clip Links" node

Optional: Local Downloads
Set localSavePath in Workflow Configuration
Ensure directory exists and n8n has write permissions

Test
Open the form Test URL
Submit a YouTube URL with a clip description (e.g., "funny moments" or "key insights")
Verify clips appear in Google Sheets

Resources

Apify Platform
n8n HTTP Request Docs
Google Sheets API
Anthropic Claude

Extending the flow

Slack/Discord notification** – Add a node to ping you when clips are ready.
Batch processing** – Modify to accept multiple YouTube URLs at once.
Custom AI prompts** – Tweak the Agent system prompt for different clip styles (tutorials, highlights, quotes).

Describe what you want, let AI find it, get clips—zero manual scrubbing.