What video editing tool should a founder use for LinkedIn clips?

9.9 minutes

on average to cut a podcast teaser when a transcript editor suggested clips, against 16.7 minutes with the transcript alone, in a 2024 Columbia University study

What kinds of editing tool are there?

• Transcript-based editors. They turn your recording into text, and you edit the video by editing the words. Delete a sentence and the matching footage goes with it.
• Timeline editors. The traditional approach, with clips laid out on a track. They can do anything from effects to multi-camera edits, but take longer to learn and longer to use.
• Phone apps. Quick trims, captions and resizing on the device you recorded with, which is fine for simple clips and fiddly for longer ones.

Why do transcript-based editors suit founder clips?

Because most founder clips are someone talking, and talking is easiest to edit as text. As researchers at Columbia University put it in a 2024 paper, editing words is much easier with text than on a traditional video timeline, and many professional editing tools now offer it. Cutting by text means removing filler, false starts and tangents without scrubbing through footage to find them.

Tools that suggest cuts go a step further. In the same study, people making podcast teasers took 9.9 minutes on average when the editor suggested clips, against 16.7 minutes with the transcript alone, though only ten people took part.

Keeping the final say matters too. In a 2026 study by the University of Hamburg and Adobe Research, experienced video editors rated a tool that marked suggested cuts for them to review as more efficient and satisfying than both editing by hand and a fully automatic cut.

What should you check before choosing?

• Captions. Many people watch with subtitles on, and an AP-NORC poll in 2025 found a third of US adults always or often use them for TV and films. Accurate captions you can correct and burn into the video matter more than any effect.
• Formats. Vertical and square exports cover LinkedIn and the short video platforms from a single recording.
• Fit with LinkedIn. LinkedIn's developer documentation for video uploads lists MP4 files from three seconds to 30 minutes long, which almost any editor can export.
• Speed on your typical clip. Time how long a short talking clip takes from raw recording to finished file, because that tells you more than any feature list.
• Who does the editing. If someone else edits for you, choose what they already know.

Do you need a separate editing tool at all?

Not always. If your clips are short and mostly one take, the trim and caption features in your recording app may be enough. A dedicated editor earns its keep once you post video every week and the editing starts to eat into the time you meant to spend on what you say.