How to turn long YouTube videos into Shorts

Why repurpose instead of film new Shorts

You already did the hard part — the research, the recording, the best lines. Shorts cut from existing videos let you post daily without filming daily, and they double as trailers that send new viewers to the full upload. YouTube actively surfaces Shorts to people who don't subscribe yet, so each one is a discovery surface.

Pick moments that stand alone

The best Shorts make sense with zero context. Look for the strongest 20–45 seconds: a sharp answer, a demo, a hot take, a 'here's the trick' moment. Skip anything that references earlier parts of the video — a Short viewer hasn't seen them.

Don't want to scrub the whole video? Paste your link below and Nova will surface the highest-scoring moments for you — free, right here:

Reframe 16:9 to 9:16

Long-form is horizontal; Shorts are vertical. A naive center-crop often cuts off the speaker or the on-screen action. Face-aware reframing keeps the subject in frame as they move, so the vertical version looks intentional, not chopped.

Add captions and a hook

Open with a one-line hook on screen and keep word-by-word captions running throughout. Both lift retention, and retention is what gets a Short pushed to more feeds.

The fast workflow

Paste the YouTube link into an AI clipper, let it transcribe and rank the moments, review the suggested clips, and download the vertical captioned versions. One long video becomes four or five Shorts in minutes — no timeline scrubbing required.