YouTube Shorts, the company’s short-form video TikTok competitor, has proven to be a big success for the platform.
But YouTube is still synonymous with its longer content and its well known long-form content creators. To help remedy this, the platform is releasing a brand-new tool to help YouTubers pull 60-second clips from their existing long-form videos and quickly create content for YouTube Shorts.
“We want to empower creators to easily take a moment from one of their VODs [videos-on-demand], bring it into our tools and easily edit it into an engaging Short for their viewers,” said YouTube Shorts creation product lead Vadim Lavrusik in a statement provided to Mashable.
This new feature, announced by YouTube in a post on Thursday, will start rolling out today and should reach all mobile users in the next few weeks. The tool is only available within the YouTube app on iOS and Android devices.
“To use this feature, all creators need to do is to navigate to their channel and choose a video that they’d like to Edit into a Short,” explained Lavrusik.
Just tap “Edit into a Short” and any YouTube creator can make a Shorts clip out of long-form video content.
Credit: YouTube
After clicking the “Edit into a Short” option while on the watch page for one of their own videos, “they’ll be able to choose a video segment up to 60 seconds in length to create a new Short with,” he continued. “Similar to importing a video from your device gallery to create a Short using our tools, this simply allows you to import a segment from one of your already uploaded YouTube videos.”
In addition to expediting the process of clipping longer videos, creators will also be able to add additional content to the Short if the clip is shorter than the 60-second maximum length to make a YouTube Short video. This could help creators add additional context or new updates to Shorts they make from older long-form clips. Creators can also utilize all other YouTube Shorts editing features such as filters, text, and more.
YouTube noted to Mashable that this feature is only available for the creator of the original piece of long-form content. There are other previously existing features, such as Clips and Cut for viewers to repurpose their favorite channels’ videos.
One real interesting aspect of this new feature for YouTube’s long-form video creators is that it provides an attribution to the source material. If a creator clips a 60-second segment from a longer clip for YouTube Shorts using this feature, YouTube automatically provides a link back to the original long-form video right within the Shorts Player.
Attribution is a key component to this Shorts feature.
Credit: YouTube
“Attributing content and raising viewer awareness of a creator’s vast array of videos is an important part of this feature,” said Lavrusik. “Viewers can easily tap the link to navigate to the video it came from and watch the full thing if they want to go deeper.”
With the audience for YouTube Shorts being wholly different than the platform’s viewer base, attribution can really help short-form-content viewers discover new creators who make longer videos.
Hannah Warling, a YouTube creator who has already used this feature, believes Edit into a Short will help creators who usually upload long-form content become more familiar with YouTube’s growing Shorts platform.
“I expect to use this tool to not only drive my short form audience to my long form, but vice versa,” she explained. “I also believe it will allow me to post more consistently in both formats. When making content, creators have a limited amount of time which often leads to them having to choose between one format or the other. By allowing creators to easily repurpose content they’ve worked so hard to make, you’re giving them more opportunities for their hard work to reach the largest possible audience.”
