Turn YouTube Videos Into Shorts with AI

Cutting Shorts out of a long video by hand means watching the whole thing, marking the moments that work on their own, cropping each one to vertical, keeping the speaker in frame and captioning every clip. For a one-hour podcast, that can take hours.

A YouTube clip maker does that work in one pass. StoryCut downloads the video from the link (or takes your upload) and transcribes it. The AI then reads the whole timestamped transcript and looks for moments with a strong opening and a complete thought. It aims for about one clip per two minutes of video, between 3 and 12 in total, and gives each one a virality score built from four parts: hook, story, emotion and shareability. Each clip is then reframed to 9:16 and captioned. You sort by score, open the ones you like in the editor (switch the caption style, fix words, or add magic zoom, sound effects, AI music or clean audio on Pro) and export. AI clips are included in every plan, with no add-on to buy.

Clips are picked from the transcript, so talking content gives the AI the most to work with: podcasts, interviews, webinars, lessons, commentary and vlogs where someone explains something. Videos that are mostly music, gameplay without commentary or visuals without speech give it little to choose from.

A few things help. A clear audio track. One topic per segment. Speakers who finish their thoughts instead of trailing off. For two-person podcasts filmed wide, keep face tracking on so the crop follows whoever is talking. And only clip videos you own or have permission to reuse.