Provided is a system for efficiently creating snippets or clips from media assets without re-encoding the entire portion of already encoded media content falling within the snippet boundaries. The system partitions and encodes the original media asset as set of slices with each slice encoding a different temporal chunk of the media asset. The system identifies a first slice that encodes a duration of the media asset spanning the snippet start time, and a second slice that encodes a duration of the media asset spanning the snippet end time. The system produces a snippet start slice from decoding, clipping, and re-encoding the first slice and a snippet end slice from decoding, clipping, and re-encoding the second slice. The system generates the snippet from the snippet start slice, an unmodified subset of the set of slices between the first slice and the second slice, and the snippet end slice.