If you have a YouTube channel and are looking for a new way to grow your audience you’ve probably been using YouTube Shorts from time to time. While this is a fantastic way to entice users to your channel it can be a fair bit of work to keep coming up with content. As a result, YouTube has now added an option that allows you to create Shorts from normal videos you’ve already created.
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YouTube Shorts are still a controversial topic among long-time YouTube users, however, there is no doubt that they are growing in popularity each and every day. At least count YouTube revealed that Shorts are now getting 1.5 billion views each and every month. Which is a staggering amount of watch time. While YouTube Shorts aren’t for everyone they are something you shouldn’t neglect if you are trying to grow your channel.
All it takes is for one lucky Short to hit the big time and your channel has the potential to explode. While this is almost entirely luck at this stage, it’s still a chance and an important reason to always be innovating and utilising new features that are introduced to any service. In a recent update, YouTube also added the ability to create shorts from normal videos which means you can take up to 60 seconds of content from your traditional videos and crop them into YouTube Shorts.
How do you turn normal YouTube videos into Shorts?
In order to turn YouTube videos into Shorts (You can only sample your own), you will first need to update the YouTube app on your mobile device. Once you have done that, you’ll need to continue with the steps below.
- First, open the YouTube app on your device, then go to your channel page and select a video that you would like to create a YouTube Short from. Any video will do, just remember that your Short can’t go for more than 60 seconds and will be a portrait crop of the original video.
- Now that you have selected a video tap the new Create icon that appears next to the Share icon just below the video.
- Next tap Edit into a Short, then drag the time slider and the selection tool to the section of the video you want to capture. Remember you can only go up to 60 seconds.
- You can also change the part of the screen you want to capture by sliding it either left or right. Once you have everything set tap Next.
- On this screen, you can add text, filters, or adjust the timeline. You can’t add music though as all original audio will be captured in the new Short.
- Finally, tap Next again and you’ll be able to add a Title and some hashtags etc. Then all you have to do is tap UPLOAD SHORT and it will be published.
While this feature is handy it is very limiting for the simple reason that you can only crop a small vertical part of a video. If the video moves around or has text etc it will be a mess. You’ll know exactly what we mean once you start experimenting with it. If YouTube were to add an option that allowed you to move the selected area as the video progressed it would make the feature a lot better and certainly more useful. For now though, it works best for super short clips around 15 or so seconds. While we’re talking about YouTube don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
