How to Turn a YouTube Video into Shorts

By NUR Technologies · October 28, 2026 · 5 min read

A long video already contains your best short clips. The work is finding them and reshaping them as vertical, captioned Shorts. This guide covers a workflow on a Mac, and a note about rights that matters.

First, a note about rights

Use videos that are yours, or that you have permission to reuse. Cutting up someone else’s video and posting it as your own can break copyright and platform rules, even if the tools make it easy.

A simple workflow

1. Get your video into OffcutsDrop the file into Offcuts. You can also paste a link to a video instead of a file, and Offcuts downloads it and does the rest (only for your own videos or ones you may use).
2. Let it find the momentsOffcuts listens to the whole video, scores every second and picks the strongest moments, cut cleanly at the end of a sentence.
3. Review and trimKeep the moments you like and trim the rest.
4. Add captionsOn-device AI writes captions with word-level timing. Pick a style and highlight each word.
5. Export in batchChoose 9:16 for Shorts and export every clip in one go.

What works for Shorts

• A strong start: open on the point, not on a slow introduction.
• One idea per clip.
• Captions: many people watch without sound.
• Keep it short: cut until removing more would lose the point.