Turn a YouTube video into Shorts

From a YouTube link to finished Shorts

Paste the link of a long YouTube video, pick how many Shorts you want and how long they should be, and the converter does the rest: it fetches the video, transcribes it word by word, scores every section for hook and payoff, cuts the best moments, reframes them to 9:16 around the speaker and adds animated captions

Only convert videos you own or have permission to reuse. For your own channel or client work, uploading the original file instead of the YouTube link gives cleaner quality and avoids download limits

What makes a Short work

Shorts are judged in the first two seconds. The converter favours clips that open on a clear statement or question, keep a fast pace and land a payoff before the 60-second mark, and it trims dead air at the start so the hook is the first thing viewers hear. Captions are sized and placed for sound-off viewing on a phone

How the converter picks the moments

Converting a YouTube video to Shorts is mostly a choosing problem. The audio is transcribed with Whisper at word level, then split into overlapping windows. A language model scores each window for the strength of its hook, whether it pays off, its pacing and whether it makes sense without the rest of the video. A second, stricter critic pass reviews the top candidates, moves their start and end points to clean sentence boundaries and drops the ones that need context

The picture counts too. Laughter, applause and audio peaks, visible reactions and scene changes raise a moment's score. Each Short comes with the reasons it was picked, so you can see why it made the list and skip the ones that do not suit your channel

Reframing a landscape video to 9:16

Most YouTube videos are 16:9. A Short is 9:16, so two thirds of the width has to go, and a fixed centre crop often cuts out the person talking. The converter tracks faces through each clip and matches voices to faces, so the vertical frame sits on whoever is speaking and moves when the speaker changes. When two people share a moment, it switches to stacked split tiles. On sports footage it follows the ball and players

The crop is a keyframed layer you can adjust in the editor, so a shot the AI framed differently from how you would takes a few seconds to fix

Which YouTube videos convert well

Podcasts and interviews, commentary and reaction videos, tutorials with a presenter on camera, talks and keynotes, vlogs, livestream archives and sports footage. If a person is talking or there is clear action, the converter has signals to work with. Screen recordings with no face, slideshows and music videos give it less to go on; you can still get clips from the transcript and set the crop by hand

Long videos are fine. A two-hour stream or podcast is scored from start to finish and you see the credit estimate before anything runs

Try it before signing up

The free clip finder at /tools/youtube-clip-finder takes any YouTube link and returns the three best moments, with no account. If you want to see the whole pipeline, /try/clipper shows a full sample run on a 42-minute podcast, from scoring to finished vertical clips

Editing before you post

Each Short is a normal project in the Studio, so you can retime a cut, change the caption style, add a logo or music, and export again without starting over. Free exports are 720p with a small watermark; paid plans export without one, at 1080p on the $10 Clipper plan and Creator, and 4K on Pro

You can also schedule the finished Shorts from the calendar, together with YouTube Shorts, TikTok, Instagram Reels, Facebook Reels, LinkedIn, X, Threads and Pinterest, each with its own title and hashtags

What it costs

The free plan includes 300 credits a month. A Short costs about 20 credits, so that is roughly 15 Shorts a month; your first 3 clip exports are free and each one after that costs 10 credits on the free plan. The Clipper plan is $10 a month for 1,000 credits, about 50 Shorts, at 1080p with no watermark and 300 clip exports a month. Creator ($19) and Pro ($49) add more credits and the rest of the studio. A failed run is refunded automatically