YouTube to Shorts: turn long videos into ready-to-post Shorts.

Use links to your own videos — from your channel, your church, your podcast, the client who hired you — or to videos whose owner has given permission to clip and repost.

A channel that clips other creators only holds up with the original creator's authorization. Without it, the clip can be taken down and the channel penalized. If that's your model, read about how to build a clip channel the right way.

Want to reuse the idea of a video that isn't yours? Then there's another path: the Copy an idea format creates a new video with the same structure, without using the original.

Podcasts with full episodes on YouTube: each episode becomes a week of podcast clips.

Churches that stream the service: the sermon becomes church sermon clips for the week.

Clip channels working with authorized material: see the clip channel routine.

Agencies clipping clients' videos, each client in their own profile: see video automation for agencies.

Leave some margin. Don't try to hit the exact second. Mark a block a little bigger than the moment you remember; the AI finds where the sentence starts and ends and cuts there.

Prefer single-topic blocks. A stretch about one thing from start to finish yields clips that make sense on their own. Jumping between topics every minute makes it harder.

Use what your audience already pointed out. Comments with timestamps, retention peaks in YouTube Studio and recurring questions are good clues about where to mark.

Think of the title before you mark. If you can't sum up the section in one sentence, it probably won't stand on its own. Each clip already comes with a title and hashtags, but the right section starts with your choice.

Spread out your Shorts. Instead of releasing them all at once, schedule one a day and let the virality score decide the order. For footage recorded on your PC, see how to turn a long video into short clips straight from the file.