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Sources for your courses

Technical tips and practical advice for finding and using library-licensed resources in your instruction.

Creating clips from Youtube and Vimeo videos

There is a lot of great content on YouTube and Vimeo, but sometimes you only want a small segment of a clip to teach your point. 

Before you start clipping

First, consider the legalities.Some creators do not mind you cutting up their clips, others will not allow it. You'll need to find videos that are licensed under Creative Commons for re-use. Here is some guidance from Youtube on what you can adapt and here are some guidelines from Vimeo.

Rule of thumb: If there is no mention of licensing and reuse alongside the video, consider the video not licensed for your edits.

FInding re-usable videos

Vimeo 

Browse the Vimeo Creative Commons collections.

Youtube 

Start with a standard keyword search on YouTube.

  • Directly above your search results, click "Filters"
  • Under Features, select "Creative Commons". The videos in your results list should now all be CC-licensed.
  • To confirm that a video is available for reuse, click "Show More" beneath the video's description.

Using Vibby to create clips

Vibby lets you snip one or more pieces of a video from Vimeo, YouTube, and other hosting platforms.

  1. Create an account.
  2. Paste the URL for the video you want to clip
  3. Select your start and end times. 
  4. You will generate a new Vibby URL for just the clip(s) you want.

More tips

Want to do more with YouTube and Vimeo? Here are some helpful explainers for popular functions: