Microsoft Clipchamp - a unified business video experience

For years, organizations leveraging Microsoft 365 have benefited from rich video streaming capabilities of Microsoft Stream. Despite its many advantages, Microsoft Stream has remained relatively unknown among business users. Now, Microsoft aims to combat this as they revamp their video strategy with a unified brand for business video – namely, Microsoft Clipchamp. In this blog post we will share a bit of background of Clipchamp and highlight some of the areas where business users can greatly benefit from having easy access to a modern video app in their Microsoft 365 toolbox.

What is Clipchamp?

Clipchamp is an easy-to-use, web-based video app designed for end users to create and consume everyday video content. Founded in 2013 in Brisbane, Australia, Clipchamp's creators initially aimed to build a distributed supercomputer. However, they soon pivoted to focus on developing video creation and editing software, leading to the birth of Clipchamp. Microsoft acquired Clipchamp in September 2021, and in July 2023, it was officially announced as generally available to Microsoft 365 business users.

Business use cases for Clipchamp

Video is becoming a more widely used format for information and communication in today’s digital workplace. Meeting recordings, event broadcasts, product tutorials, internal communications, the list goes on and on for how video is used in corporations today. Typically, editing these videos has been reserved for users with specialized media production software and experience. Now that the ability to create professional-looking videos is available to all users within your organization as part of their Microsoft 365 subscription, video production is democratized. While not everyone may be inclined or interested in creating videos, having access to a tool that enables you to quickly edit and enhance a video can be incredibly useful.

Getting started with Clipchamp

As with any new tool, the best way to understand its benefits is to dive in and explore. Users can easily access Clipchamp in the Microsoft 365 app launcher by going to the Microsoft 365 home page.

Here, users are greeted with a single welcome page for viewing, editing, and creating videos. Users can create new videos by uploading media, recording their webcam or screen, or edit an existing video.

The entire experience is fully web-based, and any video production files are automatically saved in the users’ OneDrive.

Our favorite highlights of Clipchamp

Depending on your video needs, you will appreciate different capabilities in Clipchamp. With that said, here are some of our favorite highlights:

1. Intuitive drag-and-drop interface

Whether you want to cut out a few minutes of your Teams meeting recording, or add text to a marketing video, the intuitive web-based interface of Clipchamp makes video editing very straightforward. You can drag-and-drop various layers of content such as text, music or screenrecordings on a visual timeline to create your video.

2. Auto-captions

Clipchamp enables you to automatically generate captions (in numerous languages) that you can add to your videos to make them more accessible. Using AI you can transcribe a video and then manually correct the transcript before adding it as captions in the video. 

3. AI-generated voice-over

If you want to add voice-over to a video, you can either narrate it yourself or use the AI-based text-to-audio feature. This way you can add voice-overs in a wide range of different languages without the need for recording equipment or hiring voice-over talents. Yes, the voices are AI-generated so it might not be suitable for all situations, but probably “good enough” for a lot of scenarios.

4. Brand kit

 To ensure you align with your corporate branding, you can create or import your corporate brand kit and apply to your video. This way you easily apply your logos, colors, and fonts, resulting in a more professional and cohesive look. 

5. AI-generated videos

Best highlight for last! If you have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, you can create videos by just entering a prompt in the Visual Creator Copilot agent. In a few seconds, a video is created by adding snippets from various videos in Microsoft's stock video library - which you can later edit using Clipchamp. This takes video creation to a whole new level! 

Looking Ahead

As Microsoft announced in the end of 2024, Stream and Clipchamp will be unified under a single brand, namely Microsoft Clipchamp. This rebranding will not affect the functionality or require any video migration (this work was already done when organizations migrated from Microsoft Stream Classic to Stream on SharePoint). However, this change offers organizations a prime opportunity to highlight the many business benefits of using Microsoft Clipchamp. So, take the opportunity to spread awareness of this extremely powerful application your users now have access to. Storyals is here to help!