Help
▸ Making a clip
- Paste a YouTube link and press Load. A StatVolley highlights
link goes in the same box — it is recognised and read into
potential clips.
- Or use the File tab for a video on this computer:
Choose… opens the normal file dialog, or type a full path
(~ works). The video is read where it
sits — nothing is copied or uploaded, so a folder on an external
drive is fine.
- Find the moment. The buttons under the video jump by 1, 10 and 30
seconds, and the speed box slows it down or speeds it up.
- Press Set start, then Set end. Both boxes can be typed
into if you want to nudge them.
- Press Add to planned. Repeat for as many as you want.
- Press Make clips.
Clips land in the folder shown under Your clips, and the in and
out points are kept so you can come back to them.
▸ Potential and planned
Planned is the queue: press Make clips and these get made.
← Prev and Next → sit above each list and walk
the same cursor: potential first, then planned, carrying on from one
into the other rather than stopping at the end. That is how to get
through an imported list — watch, decide, promote the keepers.
Whatever is playing is named under the video, with its place in the
list and — when the list spans more than one — which video it came
from. It stays there after the clip ends, because the question is
usually asked then: which one was that?
▶▶ Auto does the walking for you: each clip plays
to its out point, then the next one starts. It runs through potential
and on into planned, skips anything whose video will not load, and
stops at the end rather than going round again. Press it again —
it reads ■ Stop while running — to take back control.
Importing adds to what is already there, so two lists — or a list plus
something you marked by hand — sit in the queue together. The same
moment is not added twice, though: import the same link again, or
reopen a list that is already open, and it says what was skipped
rather than staging a second copy of everything.
The queue is not tied to one video. Load another, add clips from that,
and both are made when you press Make clips — local files and YouTube
links can sit in the same queue. When it holds more than one video, a
Video column appears saying which is which.
Potential is a staging area for clips you have not decided on —
anything imported from a file, or reopened from a video you worked on
before, arrives here. Watch them, then promote the ones worth cutting.
Taking something out of planned sends it back to potential rather than
deleting it; potential is the only place a clip is actually discarded.
Save to, beside Make clips, says which collection they go in.
A collection is a real folder in your clips folder, so what you see
here and what you see in a file browser are the same thing — which is
what makes them findable months later, or when you are picking clips
to upload somewhere else. Type a name that does not exist yet and it
is made. Leave it empty and they sit at the top with everything else.
Clips are named after the video and the moment they came from, so a
folder sorts into the order the match was played.
Folder… saves them somewhere else on this computer instead.
Clips written outside your clips folder are not kept in
Your clips: no thumbnails, no joining them together, and
nothing here will tidy them up later. To have both, save them to a
collection and use Copy to a folder… in Your clips to put
copies wherever you need them.
If a clip would land on a name already there, you are told before
anything is cut — both are kept, never replaced.
✂ on a clip cuts a shorter clip out of that clip, rather
than going back to the video. ✎ beside it does the
opposite — it reloads the original and lets you move the start or end,
which is what you want while the video is still there. Trim is for
when it is not: a video taken down, a file moved, a drive unplugged.
The clip plays, you mark a start and end on it, and the new clip still
records where it really sits in the match — trim eight seconds into a
clip that began at 41:02 and it is filed at 41:10, not at 8 seconds.
Something not working? Show diagnostics, under
Dependency status in the menu, prints everything anyone would ask you
for: which programs were found and their versions, what this computer
can encode with, how full the disk is, how much downloaded video is
cached, and the settings that change what gets produced. A Copy
button appears beside it, to paste the lot into a message. It is the
same report overc-clips doctor gives in a
terminal, with the folder and the settings added.
If a run takes hours, look at Dependency status in the menu.
Normally only the seconds you asked for are downloaded; some videos
refuse that, and then the only way to get a clip is to fetch the whole
match — one to three gigabytes each. An out-of-date yt-dlp makes
that far more likely, and its version and age are listed there, with
Update now beside them when it is past ninety days — the same
thing as Settings → Check for updates, which updates both the
downloader and this program. You are asked before any whole video is
downloaded; Settings → When only part of a video cannot be
fetched decides whether to ask, always do it, or skip those clips.
When a whole match has to be downloaded it is kept, so cutting
another clip from the same match is quick. That adds up — one tester's
reached tens of gigabytes — so Your clips shows how much is
there with a Delete downloads beside it. Deleting is safe: your
clips are not touched, and anything needed again is downloaded again.
The row is hidden when there is nothing in it.
Everything here can be done from a terminal too:
overc-clips lists,
overc-clips points and
overc-clips clips show what you have saved;
overc-clips make --list "…" --collection "…" --join "…"
cuts a saved list and joins it in one go. Mark clips here, cut them
from a script.
Your clips are a library, not just a folder. The clips, their
collection folders, what is known about each one, your recent videos,
your saved clip points and your saved lists all live in it together.
Inspect clips library with file browser, at the foot of Your
clips, opens it.
Point Save clips to somewhere else in Settings and you are
asked what you meant. If that folder already holds clips, you can
switch to it — nothing is merged and nothing is moved, so the library
you were using is left exactly as it is and you can switch back. If
it is empty, you can take your library with you. Either way nothing is
deleted, and the downloaded video kept for re-cutting stays behind,
since it can always be downloaded again.
▸ Bookmarks
Recent videos is a rolling list of the last few, and is meant
to be — it answers what was I just working on. A season's match
recordings are neither recent nor finished with, and fall off the end
of it within a fortnight.
Press ★ on a video, in Recent videos or in Your clips, and it
is kept under Bookmarks in the top bar. Tap one there to load
it again. Press ★ again to stop keeping it.
A bookmark is the same video, not a copy: its saved points, its
collection and its clips come with it. And it outlives everything —
the recent list moving on, and Forget all videos.
▸ Coming back to a video
Watching does not count as using. Previewing a potential clip loads
its video, but that alone does not put it in Recent videos — playing
through a nineteen-video highlight list would otherwise fill the list
with all nineteen. Pasting a link, or picking a video from this menu,
does count. So does making a clip from one.
Clear video, beside the box you loaded it from, puts the
player back to empty — for when the wrong thing is loaded and you do
not yet have the right thing to replace it with. Planned clips are
left alone: they may be from other videos entirely.
Videos you have used are listed under Recent videos in this menu.
Any clip points you saved against one are kept with it — open the arrow
beside it to see them, watch them, or load them back in.
That list only holds the last few. Your clips holds every video
you have saved points against, however long ago — so if a video is not
in Recent videos, look there.
Save for later, under potential clips, keeps a whole staged set
under a name, without making anything. It appears in this menu under
Saved lists as one entry, however many videos it spans — which
is the point: an imported highlight list is a list, and comes back as
one. Click it to reopen every point in it; rename renames it,
✕ forgets it. Saving under a name already used replaces
it, so working through a list and saving what is left keeps one entry
rather than piling up copies.
Two save buttons, two different jobs. They look alike and are
not:
- Save clip points, under planned clips, keeps points against
one video. It answers “where had I got to on that
match?”, and you find them again through the video — in
Recent videos, or in Your clips.
- Save for later, under potential clips, keeps the list
under a name, across as many videos as it spans. It answers
“where is that list?”, and you find it under Saved
lists.
If a planned queue holds clips from several videos — promote a whole
highlight list and it will — then Save clip points has nothing
to attach to, so it becomes Save as list… and asks for a name.
Saving that as points would file it against every video separately,
which is not what was staged.
Clearing them from recents keeps them: they stay in Your clips,
which is the archive. Only the library deletes them for good.
▸ Your clips, and re-cutting
Every clip you make is listed under Your clips, grouped by the
video it came from. Use + collection to file a video under a name
— a team, a season — and up to one level below it.
Two clips with the same name both survive: the second becomes
Dig (2). Replacing one on purpose is the ✎ button,
which asks first.
A ⚠ beside a clip means it is not h264 — it plays as a
black picture with working sound in QuickTime and Safari. Clips made
before this was detected can be like that; re-cut one with
↻ on its video and the new copy plays anywhere.
Select, above the list, turns on a checkbox for every video and
every clip. Tick what you want and delete the lot in one go — ticking a
video takes its clips with it. Select all shown respects the
search box, so searching first and then selecting all is the quick way
to clear out a batch. The confirmation says exactly what goes: files
deleted, points forgotten, videos removed.
A video with no clips is in the list only because clip points were
saved against it — an imported list you never cut, say. ✕
on its row removes it and those points. Nothing on disk is deleted,
because there is nothing to delete.
On a clip: ▶ plays the finished file, ✎ puts it
back in the editor to adjust its start or end, ↓ saves a
copy, and ✕ deletes it. ↻ on a video reloads
all of its clips as points, to re-cut the lot.
When you adjust a clip you are asked whether the new one should replace
the old file or keep both.
▸ Importing times from another tool
Press Import times… under the video box at the top. A header
line is optional, and columns may be separated by commas, tabs,
semicolons or bars.
name,start,end
Block at the net,00:01:12,00:01:24
Serve run,00:04:05,00:04:38
Names are optional — two columns of times is enough. Times can be
written as plain seconds (any number of them — an hour into a match is
3825), as minutes and seconds, as decimals, or as timecode with a
frame count, so all four of these mean the same span:
72,84
1:12,1:24
00:01:12.500,00:01:24.250
00:01:12:15,00:01:24:00
Times from more than one video. Add a link column and each row
says which video it belongs to — one file can carry a whole session's
work across several matches. Rows without a link belong to whatever is
loaded, so you can mix both.
name,url,start,end
Block,https://youtu.be/AAAAAAAAAAA,00:01:12,00:01:24
Dig,https://youtu.be/BBBBBBBBBBB,00:04:05,00:04:38
A StatVolley highlight list. Paste the link to a highlights page
into the video box at the top, where you would put a YouTube link, and
press Load. Every highlight becomes a clip point, keeping its
description and the video it came from — one list often spans twenty
matches. You can also save the page and import the file, which works
the same way.
Rows that cannot be read are reported and skipped; the rest import.
▸ Joining clips into one video
There are two ways in. From planned clips, Join clips
beside Make clips brings the whole queue here — nothing is cut yet, so
the order, the labels and the cards are all still yours to set. Press
Join them here and it cuts them and joins the result in one go.
The spans can be YouTube, files on this computer, or a mix.
Clips cut that way are removed once the video is safely made, since
they were only a step on the way. Keep the clips it cuts keeps
them. Nothing is removed if the joining fails — the pieces would be
all that is left.
Or, for clips you already have: open Your clips, press
Select, tick what you want, then Join these — or pick
Join clips straight from the menu. It takes
over the whole page rather than sitting in this menu, because it is a
list to read and write in. Order can be changed with ↑
and ↓ — third in the list is third in the video — and
anything can be dropped with ✕. ‹ Back returns.
Chapter marks are written at every join, named after the clip,
so a player can jump from play to play instead of scrubbing. VLC and
QuickTime read them; a browser does not, and neither does this page's
own player.
YouTube ignores chapters inside a file — it builds them from
timestamps in the description instead. That is what the
.chapters.txt file beside the video is for:
paste its contents into the description and the scrub bar gets the
same marks.
Each clip has a label you can edit in the list. It starts as
the clip's own name, and it is what the chapter mark is called — so
kill through the triple block rather than a file name.
Show each clip's label on the picture draws it in the corner
for the first few seconds of each one, which is the annotating most
players do. It means re-encoding everything, so it takes longer.
Closing card ends it. Every reel gets one, carrying a small
line saying it was made with OverC Clips — so a video that turns up
somewhere else can be traced back to what made it.
Your own words go on that same card, not a second one: what
you type appears large, with the small line beneath it. A club, a
website, thanks for watching.
Say what made it turns the small line off if you would rather
it were not there. The card then only appears if you have written
something, and shows only your words.
Open with a card puts a title on the front — a name, a club, a
season. The first line is the big one and the rest go under it, so
there is nothing to lay out. It gets a chapter mark of its own, so the
first clip's mark still lands on the first clip.
Clips cut from one match join in seconds, untouched. Clips from
different matches have to be made to match first — different sizes are
fitted inside one frame rather than stretched, and a clip with no
sound gets silence rather than muting everything after it.
A joined video remembers what went into it: how many clips, and
which videos those came out of. It is on its row in Your clips,
and written into the file itself — so it still says where it came from
after it has been sent to somebody.
The result lands in Your clips under Videos you made,
which is its own heading — a joined video has no match behind it, so
it would otherwise sit in the unnamed group with everything else whose
source is unknown. It is an ordinary clip: watch it, download it,
delete it, or put it in another one.
The page stays open while it works and says when it is done, so
there is no need to go looking. Long ones take a few minutes, and you
can leave the page — it carries on either way.
▸ Stopping and restarting
Most settings apply the moment you change them. A few cannot: where
clips are saved, the address and port, and whether the page opens in
its own window are all decided when the program starts.
Settings → Restart it stops and starts it for you, so
those take effect without hunting for the icon. Clips, saved points
and saved lists are all kept. Stop it shuts it down and leaves
it down.
The page you pressed it from comes back on its own, in place — so a
restart leaves you with exactly what you had, not a second copy of
it. The one exception is when you have just changed Open in:
then the new window or tab is the point, so it opens and this one
tells you it can be closed.
▸ A window of its own
Settings → Open in chooses between a browser tab and a
window with no address bar and no tabs, which behaves like an ordinary
application and gets its own entry in the Dock or taskbar.
It is the same page either way — the program still runs underneath,
so a phone on your network can still reach it. Nothing extra is
installed: it asks Chrome or Edge for a plain window. On a computer
with neither, it quietly opens a tab instead.
A tab is still worth having, which is why it stays the default: the
address is visible, so it can be bookmarked or sent to a phone, and
you can have several open at once.
Opening it again shows the window you already have rather than
making another — on Windows, and on a Mac once the page is installed.
A Mac where it is not installed is the awkward case: the browser does
not list a window opened this way, so there is nothing to pick out,
and the best that can be done is to bring the browser forward.
On a Mac the window has no Dock icon of its own. That is the
platform: a browser window opened this way belongs to the browser. If
you want a real one, open the page in Chrome or Edge and use
Install OverC Clips (in the ⋮ menu, or the small install button
in the address bar). After that it is an application in its own right,
with its own icon and Dock entry — and it can be brought forward with
no permission prompt at all. On Windows the window already has its own
taskbar button and there is nothing to do.
Closing the window stops the program, the way closing any other
application does. Closing a tab does not — a tab is a view of
something running, and people close tabs without meaning anything by
it. Reloading the window is not closing it, and a window closed while
clips are still being made leaves the program running until they are
finished.
Because it really does stop, anyone using it from a phone at the
time loses it too.
Takes effect the next time the page is opened — from the icon, or by
starting the program again.
If the window does not appear: wait a few seconds. The program
notices that nothing arrived and opens a browser tab instead, and says
so. Change the setting back from there.
It is also always reachable at the address shown under
Open this on another device in the menu — the program is
running whether or not a window turned up.
▸ Using it from your phone
The address under How to reach this that starts with a number
works from a phone on the same wifi. The video work happens on this
computer; the phone is only the remote control.
It is not on the internet, and it only works while this computer is
running OverC Clips and awake.
▸ Length limits and quality
Anything longer than the clip limit is split into equal parts — a
4½ minute span becomes three 90 second clips rather than two long ones
and a stub. The limit defaults to 2 minutes, for coachology; change or
remove it in Settings.
Advanced in Settings has the resolution to fetch, whether to cut
exactly (slower, but starts precisely where you asked) and the encoding
quality.
▸ I cannot find the icon
On a Mac it sits in the menu bar along the top of the screen.
On Windows it is hidden until you allow it. Click the ^
arrow beside the clock, or open Settings → Personalisation →
Taskbar → Other system tray icons and switch it on. In that list
it is called Python, not OverC Clips — look for the blue square
picture. Once it is on you can drag it next to the clock to keep it
there.
You do not need the icon. Double-clicking the desktop shortcut again
opens this page, Settings → Stop it closes the program, and
Settings → Update updates it — on Windows it closes and
reopens itself to finish, because Windows will not replace a program
while it is running. Update OverC Clips in the Start menu does
the same thing the long way round, for when it will not start at all.
▸ When something goes wrong
A video will not download. YouTube changes often and an
out-of-date downloader is the usual reason. Settings →
Check for updates.
A clip is taking a very long time. Press Stop beside it.
Some videos refuse to hand over just the part you asked for, and the
whole video has to come down first.
Stopping the program. Settings → Stop it, or the icon in
the menu bar or by the clock. Starting it again from the desktop icon
while it is already running simply opens this page.
Clips are yours and stay on this computer. Nothing is uploaded.