How to turn a long video into shorts.

What it does

You drop one long video: a talk, a lesson, a podcast. shortshort transcribes it word by word and proposes distinct shorts aimed at 15 to 90 seconds: up to 3 per video on the Free plan, 5 on Starter, 10 on Creator, 20 on the Studio plan. Before you generate, What to look for stays on Auto or points the AI at one of 7 kinds of moments (funny moments, key insights, stories and anecdotes, strong opinions, emotional moments, tips and how-to, quotable lines), or at moments you describe in your own words, up to 200 characters; the AI favors them, and the target length and complete sentences still come first.

The AI picks passages that open and close on complete sentences, then checks the end of each short against the transcript; when an exact ending cannot be confirmed, the studio says so. How the end of each short is checked. To finish the sentence a short may run 25% shorter or longer than your target: 22.5 to 37.5 seconds for a 30-second target. Inside one short, the AI may join a few non-overlapping excerpts of the same video to make one self-contained point: up to 3 for a 15-second target, 5 for 30 seconds and 8 from 45 seconds, each listed in the studio with its start and end. Passages are never reused between the shorts of one series, and each short gets its own title and edit. How the passages are chosen: Complete-sentence clips.

Every proposal is an edit you can change: cuts, title and captions; framing and zooms are set automatically. Nothing is rendered until you ask for it.

Import and limits

MP4, MOV or WebM. Within these limits the whole video is analysed with its audio, not a summary, so a passage is chosen for what is said and how it is said. A video can be at most 12 hours long, but the file size is what usually limits: how many hours fit in 2 GB depends on the bitrate, and a lower bitrate or resolution reduces file size without changing the duration. A public or unlisted YouTube video of yours can be pasted as a link instead: it is downloaded on our servers at up to 720p (480p or 360p when 720p would exceed 2 GB) with its audio, within the same limits. It needs a free account. Private, age-restricted and live videos cannot be imported, and YouTube sometimes refuses downloads from servers: if an import fails, upload the file instead.

One credit is one minute of source video, whatever the number of shorts you ask for. Paid plans start at 12 EUR a month before VAT for 480 credits, eight hours of video: see Credits and plans.

A free account runs the AI analysis, opens the editor where you retouch its proposals and exports the MP4; it starts with 30 credits, no card.

Read next, in the guides:

• How many shorts can you get from a one-hour video? How many vertical shorts to cut from a one-hour talk, podcast or course, how long each one should run, and what YouTube, TikTok and Instagram allow.

Framing and captions

The 9:16 crop is placed on the most visible face and moves with it, with automatic zooms between x1.0 and x1.6; slides, screens and wide shots are kept full-frame. It does not tell who is speaking, and there are no manual framing controls. In 9:16, the zoom on a tracked face stays at x1.0 or x1.04 for each shot, with gentle push-ins up to about x1.11 on emphasized words, and x1.6 is reached only on a passage that is not tracked. In 4:5, the shot zoom brings a small face to about 20% of the frame height, at most x1.4, and push-ins top out near x1.5, under the x1.6 ceiling of every format. Framing and zooms are automatic; what you change by hand are the cuts, the title and the captions. In detail: Face framing.

Captions are timed on the audio: the passages you keep are transcribed a second time, word by word, so each word appears as it is said. If the timing of a word cannot be confirmed, the timing from the first analysis is kept and marked as estimated. You can also import an SRT file timed to the source. In detail: Word-timed captions.

• Spotlight: the default. Uppercase captions where the word being spoken is highlighted, one after the other.
• Impact: bold uppercase captions with one highlighted word per line.
• Karaoke: words light up as they are spoken.
• Minimal: quiet, readable captions without effects.

Export, save and publish

Each short exports as an MP4 (H.264, 30 fps) in 9:16 at 1080 x 1920, the default for Shorts, TikTok and Reels, or in 4:5 at 1080 x 1350 for the Instagram feed, a choice made at export for the whole series on every plan. A 4:5 export is framed again for its own shape, with the face tracked anew rather than the 9:16 crop made wider. There is no 1:1 or 16:9 export, no 4K and no 60 fps. Scheduling a short always takes its 9:16 version; a short that exists only in 4:5, such as a 4:5 copy edited after its 9:16 export, goes out in 4:5, and YouTube and TikTok show it with bars. With an account, generation and rendering run on our servers on every plan: once the upload finishes you can close the tab and come back to finished shorts.

Each MP4 downloads on its own, or all of them at once in a ZIP that holds every short twice, with its captions and without. The Publish page connects your YouTube channels: pick a day and time for each short, or let shortshort fill the calendar, and each one goes out with a title and description written in the language you choose. Publishing to TikTok is in early access and not open to every account yet. Instagram and the rest you post yourself from the MP4. Scheduling in detail: YouTube publishing. Saved shorts from the same video share one source file, so they stay grouped in My projects. The studio can also write the edit plan of the open short to a JSON file for your own renderer: JSON edit plan.

Your upload and your drafts stay private until you export; the temporary copy made for the analysis is deleted once it is done. A short you export joins the community by default: its page shows the short, the original video it was cut from, the transcript of the short and your first name and initial; the page stays out of search results unless shortshort has confirmed the rights to the source video. A 4:5 export stays out of the gallery unless you publish it yourself.

On the Free plan the export also carries a watermark. Any paid plan removes the watermark and can keep your shorts out of the community with one account setting. Any account, Free included, can withdraw a published short at any time, and it leaves the gallery at once.