YouTube Shorts gives your existing long-form content a second life. A 20-minute tutorial can yield three or four Shorts; a 45-minute webinar recording can produce a dozen. Shorts are indexed separately from regular videos, appear in their own feed, and can surface your channel to viewers who have never seen your long-form content. This guide covers the complete free workflow — from identifying the best moments in a long video to uploading a finished Short that meets YouTube’s requirements.

YouTube Shorts Requirements

Before clipping anything, understand what YouTube requires for a video to be classified as a Short:

Step 1: Find the Best Moments to Clip

The best Shorts from long-form content share one characteristic: they answer a single, self-contained question or deliver a single punchy insight without requiring any context from the rest of the video. When watching through your source video, look for:

• Definition moments — "here’s what X actually means" segments that stand alone completely
• Surprising facts or statistics — something that makes a viewer stop scrolling
• Before/after demonstrations — a clear visual contrast that reads immediately in vertical format
• Mistake corrections — "most people do X wrong — here’s why" formats perform extremely well as Shorts
• Step 1 of a multi-step process — the first step of a tutorial, framed as a complete tip, with a CTA to watch the full video

Use the Video Screenshot tool to quickly grab still frames from candidate sections and preview how they’ll look cropped to vertical before committing to the edit.

Step 2: Trim to 60 Seconds or Under

Once you’ve identified your clip, use the free Video Trimmer to cut the exact segment. Set your in-point a half-second before the relevant content begins — avoid cold starts. Set the out-point immediately after the payoff lands, before any trailing silence or transition to the next topic. A tight trim is one of the most important factors in Short retention.

Step 3: Convert to 9:16 Vertical

Use the free Format Converter to resize your trimmed clip to 1080×1920. If your source is 16:9, this crop removes the left and right edges and fills the vertical frame with the centre column of your original video. Before converting, review the trimmed clip and confirm that all important content — your face, hands, product, or on-screen text — is in the central 56% of the frame. For a full explanation of aspect ratio conversion, see the guide on how to crop and resize a video for any aspect ratio.

Step 4: Add Captions

Shorts autoplay without sound in the feed. Burned-in captions are essential — they allow viewers to follow the content without unmuting and dramatically improve watch time and completion rate. Use the free Add Subtitles tool to embed captions directly into the video frames. For a Short, keep captions large, centred on screen, and use two lines maximum per entry. See the SRT format guide if you need to create the subtitle file first.

Step 5: Check Format and Upload

Before uploading, confirm the file is MP4, 1080×1920, and under 60 seconds (or under 3 minutes if targeting the extended Shorts format). If the file is large, run it through the Video Compressor — a Short should ideally be under 50 MB. In YouTube Studio, add #Shorts to the title or description to ensure proper classification in the Shorts feed.

For guidance on building a YouTube content strategy that systematically identifies which topics to turn into Shorts, see the full guide on how to make a YouTube video from start to finish.