Guide

How to turn a YouTube video into Shorts

One long upload is usually three or four Shorts you have already filmed. The trick is picking the moments that stand alone, cropping to 9:16 without decapitating anyone, and captioning for a muted autoplay feed.

About 5 minutes per clip No download needed

Start from the link, not a download

Copy the ordinary youtube.com/watch?v=… URL. There is no need to download the file first — paste the link and the video is fetched on our servers, which also means you are not burning your own bandwidth on a 40-minute upload.

One limitation to know up front. Age-restricted, private and members-only videos need a signed-in session, so they cannot be fetched from a link — including some of your own, if they are unlisted behind a sign-in. Download those and upload the file instead.

Pick moments that stand alone

A Short has no context. Whatever you cut has to make sense to someone who has never heard of you and arrived mid-sentence. The moments that work are the ones with a self-contained setup and payoff inside the clip — a claim and its proof, a question and its answer, a reaction and what caused it.

If you are doing it by hand, your own retention graph is the best map you have: the spikes are where people rewatched something. ClipFinder does the same job from the transcript and the frames, and hands you candidates already trimmed to length.

Mind the Shorts rules

  • Vertical, 9:16. A letterboxed 16:9 clip technically qualifies but looks like a repost and performs like one.
  • Under 3 minutes. That is the current ceiling for vertical video; most Shorts that do well are far shorter.
  • Hook in the first second. Trim the throat-clearing. There is no thumbnail to set expectations — the first frame is the thumbnail.

Crop and caption

Cropping the middle of a 16:9 talking-head shot often puts the subject half out of frame, because people do not sit dead centre. A crop that follows the speaker keeps the face where it belongs through the whole clip.

Captions burn in from the clip's own audio. Keep them clear of the bottom of the frame, where YouTube puts the title and the channel name.

Questions people actually ask

Does posting Shorts from my long video cannibalise it?

No — Shorts live in their own feed, so a clip reaches people who would never have clicked a 40-minute video, and some of them go and watch the full thing.

Can I clip a video I did not upload?

Only with permission, or where fair use applies where you live. Reuploading someone else's content as your own Short is how channels collect copyright claims.

What does it cost?

$7 for a single video with no account. Monthly plans if you are posting regularly.

Try it on your last upload

Paste a YouTube link and see what comes out. You can edit by hand instead at any point.

Make Shorts from a video