How to Convert YouTube Videos into Shorts (Step by Step with AI)

Short-form videos are becoming increasingly popular:

From TikTok to Instagram Reels to YouTube Shorts, people are consuming more short-form videos than ever before. This shift in consumption habits has made short-form videos a powerful tool for businesses and creators.

However, creating short-form videos from scratch can be time-consuming. If you've ever tried to manage just one video content channel, you know how tricky things can get.

From the idea to clicking upload, there's a lot of work involved – creative and otherwise. But wait, if you also want to expand to other platforms or formats like TikTok, a content recycling routine threatens to blow up your schedule.

Fortunately, your pace doesn't have to suffer here. Opus Clip is the prodigy among tools – equipped with AI power to:

• Find the viral moments in your video.
• Pack them into short clips, perfect for TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram Reels.
• Manage everything that makes videos successful on these platforms – a captivating title, automatically styled subtitles with emojis, and (soon) AI B-Roll to make your message really pop.

Using it is a breeze. You simply submit the URL of the video you want to repurpose. Then treat yourself to a quick coffee break – or take care of other work if you prefer.
Opus Clip works in the background and creates magic. When it's done, an email notification arrives.

But let's start from the beginning, because in this article I'll show you the entire process, from signing up to uploading your first Short video on TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram...

1. Sign Up and Pricing

Before getting started with Opus Clip, you need to create an account. You can do this either by entering your email address or using your Google or Facebook account.

Thanks to the "Free Forever" plan, you can use and test OpusClip directly without worrying about any payment processing.

As a new user, you can really test extensively since you have access to the Pro version for 7 days before being moved to the "Free" plan, meaning you can have 90 minutes of video material analyzed in the first week and your videos won't be watermarked with the Opus Clip logo, so you can test their viral potential on TikTok, Instagram, or as YouTube Shorts right away.

The Free plan is actually free and offers you 60 processing minutes every month. You cannot edit the videos and they will be watermarked – sufficient for hobbyists, those who want more should upgrade to at least the Starter plan.

The Starter plan is $9/month, offers 150 upload minutes, AI curation, and automatic posting to YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, as well as the full editor and videos without watermarks.

The Pro plan isn't much more expensive and offers so much more. The only catch is that you commit to OpusClip for a year, meaning instead of $9 monthly for the Starter plan, you pay $9.50 monthly here. But in one sum for a year, so $114 for 3,600 processing minutes (equivalent to 60 hours of video material), 2 accounts for potential team members, and much more is totally reasonable.

2. Upload

To recycle your content with OpusClip for other social media platforms, it's a prerequisite that you've already created content in video form. If you're still lacking ideas or tools for this, check out our AI video generators comparison, where we've presented a comprehensive selection of tools that anyone can use to create high-quality videos.

To get started with OpusClip, you can either upload your video file directly in mp4, mov, mkv, or webm format, or link to an already published video on YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (or X), as well as Google Drive, Zoom, and Rumble. Once you've uploaded the video or entered your link, it's on to the second-to-last step, the settings...

3. Settings & Templates

To use your videos perfectly for their intended purpose, you now have a few choices on how OpusClip should process your video.

First, you select the language for the captions (subtitles). Your options range from "Auto" (the video language is automatically detected if possible) to German, English, French, and 17 other languages. On request, the video can also be translated into English.

Your next option is the so-called "Caption presets" (or your own templates, but more on that later). Here you can view 9 templates of how other creators have successfully incorporated captions into their short videos, e.g., like MrBeast, Youshaei, or Alex Hormozi, or OpusClip's own templates Simple, Karaoke, or Popline. (My colleague Patrick always uses the "Beasty" style for his Shorts. Hey, after all, MrBeast is the most successful YouTuber of recent years.)

Since OpusClip 3.0 (February 2024), it's also possible to just add captions to your videos without cutting them, meaning if you've already gone through the trouble of setting your cuts manually in another tool, OpusClip simply supports you with captions – why not?!

In the last section of settings, things really get down to business. Here you can not only save credits but also specify the video genre and, more importantly – specify your preferred video length.

Some of these features are still in beta as of March 2024, such as "Genre of video." OpusClip says about this:

Every video genre has its own versions of 'viral moments', which is why we've revamped our selection strategy and introduced the genre-specific selection model.

With the new selection model, you can specify your video genre (Q&A, Vlog, Listicle videos, Webinars, etc.), and we'll adjust our approach accordingly to achieve better results.

We will continue to improve our existing selection models and expand them to more video genres.

So your video will probably be cut differently if you upload a webinar than if you use a product review as a template, but it's work in progress.

The next two options are, in my eyes, the most important besides the caption templates:

The "Processing Timeframe" and the "Preferred Clip length."

In plain terms, you can limit the video material to save credits here. For example, exclude the greeting in the first minute and the farewell in the last minute to save credits for 2 minutes of video processing.

Additionally, you can define the desired output length. The range goes from short-form content (less than 30 seconds to 3 minutes) to mid-form clips with a length of up to 15 minutes, although for mid-form content some features like AI B-Roll are not yet available. YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels can be a maximum of 60 seconds long, and according to their own statements, longer videos on TikTok (up to 3 minutes) are currently being shown more frequently.

When you're happy with all the settings, click the "Get clips in 1 click" button and proceed as described in our introduction. Treat yourself to a quick ☕️ break or take care of other work.
Opus Clip works in the background and creates magic. And when it's done, the email notification arrives.

If you're interested in what happens in detail, here's a brief overview of the steps Opus Clip performs:

The Process: A Step-by-Step Overview

1. Big Data Analysis: First, Opus Clip analyzes your video by using Big Data to gain comprehensive insight into the content with regard to current social and marketing trends. This analysis enables data-driven decision-making for content recycling.
2. AI Curation: Using advanced AI algorithms, Opus Clip curates the most valuable segments from long videos. It identifies the most engaging parts, extracts relevant highlights, and seamlessly arranges them into engaging and coherent short clips.
3. Polishing: Next, the curated clips are refined by adding cool animated emojis and highlighting keywords in the subtitles. Opus Clip also ensures that the speaker always remains centered and in focus, giving the short videos a quality comparable to viral clips.
4. Final Results: With just one click, Opus Clip delivers the finished results. You can easily share these short and captivating clips on popular social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and others. Opus Clip is particularly effective for videos longer than 10 minutes that contain spoken words, as the AI curation process is based on text content.

4. The Results List

After clicking the link in the email, or if you haven't closed the page, you'll arrive at the results list. In our case, a 3:54 minute YouTube video was turned into six short-form videos with lengths between 17 and 54 seconds.

The results list is sorted by virality score, a metric the developers created to estimate how likely a clip is to take off online. The engine is powered by OpenAI's GPT models, which are really good at understanding video content: The titles aren't simple variations of the topic, and sometimes really interesting perspectives and side topics come out that I wouldn't have expected.

This understanding is also reflected in a snappy summary of each video that hits the mark and suggests how it might affect the viewer.

This virality score is composed of the four sub-points Hook, Flow, Engagement, and Trend, and is of course just an attempt to predict video virality. What ultimately happens on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube Shorts also depends on other factors.

For the first point "Hook," what matters is whether and how the short video captivates the viewer. Whether the opening captures the audience's attention or just kind of drifts along and needs improvement.

The "Flow" factor is about the structure of the video, whether it's logically organized and contains a satisfying conclusion for viewers. Maybe you also know those Reels that you just watch 3-4 times because the ending fits the beginning so well and vice versa.

"Engagement" evaluates whether viewers are directly addressed and whether there's a call-to-action that motivates viewers to interact with the video through comments, likes, or shares. Because ultimately, each social media platform wants exactly that – engagement with your content so users stay on their site or app as long as possible.

Finally, OpusClip evaluates the timeliness of the video in the "Trend" section. It's naturally easier to go viral when you're talking about the latest news or your topic is currently trending.

However, evergreen content that isn't currently trending but is relevant to your target audience shouldn't be completely ignored, so this metric should be taken with a grain of salt.

5. The Editor

You can play all clips on the results page to see how they work. Not satisfied? One click is all it takes to trim the selection in the editor or adjust the subtitle settings:

You can directly shorten or extend the clip selection using the text on the left side, depending on where the beginning and end seem most sensible to you.

Colors and emojis in the text are also displayed as subtitles, meaning you can really get creative here and edit the selected short video however you like. Here applies: "What You See Is What You Get!"

In the "Design" menu item, you can turn B-Roll, emojis, and captions in your videos on or off, as well as set a watermark for your created videos.

Using the advanced "Layout settings," you can also change very basic settings for your short video, such as the aspect ratio or layout. You can easily adjust the selected section of the original video visible in the short video (here the news presenter in orange) using your mouse.

If you're no longer satisfied with the captions you selected before processing your video, there's another chance to choose between different templates and decide on a different style.

Theoretically, you can even adjust colors, fonts, transitions, and capitalization at this point, but you shouldn't get too caught up here.

Perfection has rarely gotten anyone to their goal, and the font color or type is probably not what determines whether the video goes viral or not.

Finally, through the "Fillers & Pauses" selection, you can automatically have annoying filler words like "um," "uh," or long pauses deleted.

All changes in the editor are processed and implemented once you click "Save & Compile," and then you'll be redirected back to the results page.

6. Publishing & Download

Happy with your short video? Then you can simply click the purple Publish button and upload the video directly from Opus Clip to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook (login to the respective site required) and hopefully go viral.

Alternatively, download your video locally and continue editing it or publish it elsewhere.

7. Alternatives to OpusClip

Of course, you don't necessarily have to use Opus Clip to create viral short videos from longer videos that easily expand your reach and ideally even make you money.

It's simply the tool that has specialized extremely strongly in this one use case and therefore offers exactly that.

If you're working with other tools like Adobe Premiere Pro anyway, or already have good videos in short-content format and just need B-Roll or "fancy" subtitles, then other tools like Vidyo.ai, submagic, or simplified might be perfectly sufficient or more suitable for you. You can find a detailed overview of these tools and other alternatives to OpusClip in this blog article.