Your long videos already hold your next Shorts. A forty-minute video with a few strong answers or stories can keep the Shorts shelf busy for weeks, and each Short can send viewers back to the full video. Here are three ways to get them out, from the quickest to the most thorough, and the rules that decide whether they help your channel.
What YouTube counts as a Short
A Short is a vertical or square video of up to three minutes. YouTube decides this by itself when you upload, from the length and the shape of the video, so there is no Short checkbox to tick. Anything wider, such as the 16:9 frame of most long videos, is treated as a regular video however short it is.
Two details catch people out. A Short longer than a minute that carries a Content ID claim, usually for music, can be blocked. And links in a Short’s description are not clickable, so the way to point viewers to the full video is the related video setting, which adds a link to the Short in the player.
Option 1: Edit into a Short, inside YouTube
The YouTube app can turn part of one of your public videos into a Short. Open the video, tap Remix, then Edit into a Short, and choose up to 60 seconds. You can add text and filters before you post.
It is the quickest way to make one Short, and it costs nothing. The limits show up when you want more than one: you still have to find each moment yourself by scrubbing through the video, and the framing and any captions are up to you.
Option 2: Cut them yourself in a video editor
Any editor that exports vertical video will do. The work is the same everywhere: find the moment, set the in and out points, reframe the shot to 9:16 so the speaker stays in the middle, add captions and export. For one Short that is half an hour well spent. For ten, it is most of a day.
If you go this way, start from the transcript rather than the timeline. Most editors and many recording tools can give you one, and reading is much faster than scrubbing. Mark the moments in the text, then cut.
Option 3: Let an AI clipping tool do the first pass
An AI clipping tool reads the transcript for you and proposes the moments. In Vidoveli’s YouTube Shorts maker you paste the link to your video, choose the part you want to work from, and get vertical clips with captions and the speaker kept in frame. Recommended clips come with a score and a written reason, so you can decide quickly which ones to keep.
Videos that live somewhere else work the same way: paste a Google Drive or Dropbox link or a direct link to the video file, or upload it. Either way the AI only proposes. You still choose which clips go out, and you can move any clip’s start or end word by word before you export.
How to pick moments that work as Shorts
Whichever method you use, the choice of moment matters more than the editing. Look for these in the transcript.
- An answer to a question your audience asks all the time.
- A specific number or result: “we cut the intro and watch time doubled”.
- A short story with a turn and a payoff.
- A clear opinion, especially one that goes against common advice.
- One step of a tutorial that makes sense on its own.
Make the first two seconds count
In the Shorts feed nobody has chosen your video yet, and they decide in a moment whether to stay. Spoken answers usually start slowly (“so, yeah, that’s a good question”), and that opening is the first thing to cut. Start on the sentence that carries the point, even if a little context goes with it.
If the moment needs a setup, put it on screen instead: a short title at the top of the frame can say what the clip is about while the speaker gets to the point. Our guide to finding hooks in your recordings goes deeper.
Keep them short, but complete
Three minutes is the limit, not the target. Most clips cut from talk land between 20 and 60 seconds, which is usually enough for one idea told well. A complete thought at 45 seconds beats a rushed one at 30, and a story that needs 90 seconds can have them. There is more on this in how long a short clip should be.
Frame and caption for a phone
Keep the speaker’s face in the upper half of the frame and the captions near the middle, clear of the title and buttons the player puts along the bottom and right side. Plenty of people scroll with the sound low or off, so captions are part of the clip, not decoration.
Converting a wide video by hand means moving the crop every time someone moves. A vertical video converter with speaker tracking does that for you, and an auto caption generator times every word.
How many Shorts to make from one video
As many as there are good moments, and no more. Three strong Shorts from one video will do more for a channel than ten weak ones, because every Short people swipe away early is a signal too. Spread them over the days after the long video goes live rather than posting them all at once.
A routine that takes about an hour a week
Publish the long video. The same day, run it through your clipping method of choice and pick the three to five best moments. Fix their first lines, check the captions, and schedule one Short every day or two in YouTube Studio, each with the full video set as its related video.
After a month, look at which Shorts sent the most viewers to your long videos, and look for more moments like those.
