Create Short Videos from Long Videos Quickly

Short form videos are a great way to increase your reach. With platforms like Tiktok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, X and Pinterest all supporting them you’re seriously missing out if you’re not creating them.

For my new project, Estepona.Life I’ve gone in hard with social media.

I’ve been publishing daily on all the social networks and most days I’ll post a short video.

And I’ve found that it’s working really well, especially on Instagram.

I do create a lot of the videos from scratch as native short videos but I also create long-form videos and turn them into short videos.

To help me do this, I’ve been using Vizard.ai.

I find it very helpful as it makes editing the short, creating captions and inserting cool emojis really easy.

It can also automatically chop your long videos into short clips using its AI (however, I don’t often use this feature).

Watch the video above for my full process of how I use this tool in the video, but he’s an overview if you’re in a hurry:

My Long to Short Video Process using Vizard

You’ll need to sign up for Vizard.ai first, of course.

Why not try the free plan to get you started?

Step 1: Copy and paste the video link into Vizard

Grab your link from YouTube and paste it into the tool. If you’re not on YouTube for whatever reason, you can just upload the file from your computer.

Step 2: Generate some clips using AI

Click the button, and it will generate some edited clips for you. You can skip this step if you want to edit manually (like I do), but I often run this process anyway because I’m always curious to see what it comes back with.

If you like the clips you can jump into the editor and make your final changes.

Step 3: Decide what you want in your short

I prefer to choose what’s going in my short video. I find the AI often just chooses one section at a time to create the clips whereas I like to use multiple parts of the longer video to create the short.

To do this, click on the edit original video button.

You’ll want to unhighlight the bits that AI has chosen (probably).

You can then go through the transcript and highlight the bits that you want.

You can also correct any errors in the transcript at this point.

Once you’ve highlighted what you want click on the highlights buttons and tick all of the ones you want (all of them probably).

Then click Create Clip, and it’ll do some magic for you.

You can get the tool to auto-reframe, but again I like to do this myself.

It usually only takes a few seconds to create the clip.

Step 4: Make edits to the clip

The editor is pretty easy to use if you’ve ever edited videos before.

Which I’m guessing you have as you’ve got long-form content.

The main thing you’ll need to do is the reframing. Click on the video and adjust the crop and position to do this.

You’ll probably also need to adjust if it’s in 9:16 format or 16:9 format. In the example in the video there is a section where I walk into the pub and it doesn’t look good in vertical format so I adjust it to be widescreen.

You’ll find loads of cool layouts to do this by clicking on the layouts button.

You can also add a background. I always go for the blurry option.

If you need to split sections of the clip, switch to audio view (the toggle is just above the timeline), select where you need to split with the scrubber, and click on the scissor icon.

You’ll want to ensure the video is less than 60s as platforms like YouTube shorts only like videos of that length.

You can reduce the length by dragging the ends of the sections in the video when in audio view.

Step 5: Sort out the captions

Vizard will of already created and added the captions for you.

But you’ll want to position them, style them and probably add some emojis. 🤪

Click on subtitles on the left side.

To add Emojis automatically click on the AI button and you’ll find the option.

To style the captions click on style. There are loads of templates included and you can also create your own look.

You can position the captions by dragging them.

You’ll want to position the captions towards the bottom but don’t put them too low or they will be obscured by the text and stuff the social platforms display over your video.

To make further corrections, click on the words in the left-hand panel.

You can also manually add colors and emojis.

Step 6: Export and upload to your social accounts

You’re about done! 👍

Click on export in the top right corner, and your video will be made. You can then download it as an MP4, ready to upload.

To speed up my upload process I use Buffer so I can post to all the networks in one place.

Remember, you can post short videos to YouTube, Facebook Reels, Instagram Reels, X, and Pinterest!