Why VODs make good uploads
A stream is hours of finished content that already exists. YouTube rewards long watch time and keeps serving a video for months, and a good share of your audience missed it live. The two things that stop streamers doing it are language and length. Length is a trimming job. Language is the real problem: the VOD opens with the loudest reaction of the night, and strong language early and throughout is exactly the pattern YouTube's advertiser-friendly content guidelines single out for limited ads. Fix that and a VOD is a near-free upload.
Get the VOD out of Twitch
- Before you stream: Settings, Stream, turn on Store past broadcasts. It is off by default on new channels, and nothing is kept without it.
- After the stream: Creator Dashboard, Content, Video Producer. Each past broadcast has a menu with Download. Twitch prepares the file first, which takes a while for a long VOD.
- Do it soon. Past broadcasts are only kept for a limited window, longer on some plans; the current rules are on Twitch's video on demand help page.
- Skip Twitch's built-in Export to YouTube. It uploads the raw audio, swearing included, and there is no step in between where you can clean it.
What you get is one MP4 at your stream quality with everything mixed into one track: your mic, the game, alerts, and any Discord call. There is no swear-free stem to swap in, which is why this is a transcription job and not a mixing job.
Decide what to do about the music
Music is the other thing that follows a VOD. Twitch may already have muted parts of the VOD where it detected licensed tracks, and YouTube's Content ID can claim or block a video for the same songs. Censoring does not touch this: Redactify changes only the censored words and leaves the rest of the mix, song included, exactly as it was. Listen through the VOD's quiet patches before you spend time on it, and if a stretch is already muted by Twitch, cut it rather than upload a silent twenty minutes.
Clean it
- Upload the VOD to Redactify. Files can be up to 8 hours long. Size limits are 500 MB on Free, 2 GB on Pro and 5 GB on Premium, and a long 1080p60 VOD can be bigger than that, so either trim it to the part you will post or run it through a quick re-encode at a lower bitrate first (HandBrake's default preset is fine; YouTube re-compresses everything anyway).
- Choose YouTube Ad-Friendly. It includes light profanity and religious terms, which the stream presets leave alone. Add or remove categories if your channel has its own line.
- Turn on mouth blur if you are on camera. When the speaker list appears, mark your face on three clear shots from different points in the stream, and mark Discord friends as voice only.
- Review the list. Every catch has a timestamp; untick anything that is not a swear in context, or keep one in on purpose.
- Download. The clean file is the same length, same resolution and same frame rate as the VOD, with the chat overlay and alerts untouched.
What to expect from mouth blur on a VOD
A stream is the hardest case for mouth blur, and it still works well on the common layout: a facecam in the corner, lit by a monitor, looking at the game. Mark your face on three shots with different lighting and angles, say one from the start, one from the middle and one from a moment you turned to the camera. Where the cam is covered by an alert, the face is turned away, or the cam is off, the word is bleeped and not blurred, and the review list marks it so you can see which. People on the Discord call are marked voice only and simply bleeped. Nothing else in the frame, chat and overlays included, is touched.
Cut, chapter, upload
Trim from the clean file, not the original: drop the starting-soon screen and any dead air, and if you cut highlights or Shorts, cut them from this file so every clip is already sorted. Add chapters in the description (the first one at 00:00) so a three-hour video is navigable. Keep the title and thumbnail free of swearing; they are judged separately and strictly.
At upload, self-certify the clean version honestly, say it is not made for kids, and let YouTube generate captions: they are made from the audio you upload, so the censored words are not in them. If you add your own subtitle file, use the redacted export (Pro) rather than the raw transcript.
What it costs and how long it takes
Credits are charged by the minute: 1 credit a minute for audio censoring, 2 with mouth blur. A three-hour VOD with the blur is 360 credits; without it, 180. New accounts start with 30 free credits, Pro is $5 a month for 75, Premium is $20 for 350, and top-ups are $0.10 a credit. Processing time scales with the length of the file. You can close the tab; the job carries on, shows up in your history, and stays available to download for 30 days.