YouTube Shorts maker: shorts cut from your own long videos
The shorts for your channel are already sitting in the videos you published. The problem is getting them out. You scrub the timeline, mark a spot, notice that the setup started ninety seconds earlier, move the start, crop to vertical, type the captions, export, repeat. Zenuro reads the transcript of the video instead, picks the moments that work without the rest of the video around them, and returns finished vertical 9:16 shorts with captions burned in and the text for the upload page already written. Paste a link, come back to a folder of clips.
Try it free: 30 min a month →How it works, step by step
The video is fetched from the link, so you do not have to dig the original file out of a drive or re-export it from the editor. A file upload works the same way. Anything up to ten hours is accepted.
Zenuro transcribes the audio and reads the whole transcript looking for passages that hold up alone: a question answered, a story finished, a claim made and backed up. Not the loudest seconds, the complete ones.
Each short starts where the thought starts and ends where it lands. Passages that only make sense with the previous ten minutes attached get moved back to the setup or dropped. Pauses and dead air are removed inside the clip.
Faces are detected and lip movement decides who is talking, so the vertical crop sits on that person and cuts to the other one when they take over. A cut, not a slow pan across the empty space between two chairs.
Animated captions are burned in, a hook line holds the first 2.6 seconds, and every short gets its own title, description and hashtags written from what is said inside it. You download the files ready to upload.
Why this is not slicing by a timer
Any tool can chop a long video into equal pieces, and plenty of them do. The result is a wall of clips that open mid sentence and end mid argument, which is a lot of uploads and very little watch time. The list below is about where the cut points come from and what happens to the picture after the cut.
Splitting an hour into sixty second pieces is fast and gives you sixty clips nobody watches. A short is not a duration, it is a finished idea. Here the boundaries come from the transcript, so a clip runs 22 seconds or 80, whatever the moment actually needs.
The usual way a hand cut short fails is an opening like the phrase and that is exactly why. The viewer has no idea why, and scrolls. Openings that depend on the rest of the video are pushed back to where the setup begins, or left out.
Centre cropping an interview to 9:16 gives you the gap between the chairs and half a shoulder of each person. Speaker tracking puts the frame on whoever is speaking, which is what makes a vertical cut of a two person video watchable at all.
Karaoke highlighting, word by word reveal, glow, a single word on a plate, in the font you pick. Most shorts are watched muted in the first seconds, so burned in captions are not decoration, they are the audio.
The same pass also yields long horizontal segments for the main channel. Shorts bring new viewers in, long clips give them a reason to subscribe. One upload covers both instead of two separate jobs.
Captions can be translated into 14 languages. A video recorded in English reaches viewers who would never have typed the search in English, without recording anything again.
What one run gives you
One link, one run. Everything below comes out of that single pass, so there is no second export for the captions, a third for the thumbnails and a fourth for the horizontal version.
Sized for YouTube Shorts, and the same file works for Reels and TikTok. The frame tracks the active speaker rather than sitting in the middle of the room.
Self contained topic segments cut from the same video, for the main feed of the channel, on the Pro plan.
Karaoke, word by word, glow or a word on a plate, in your choice of font and colour. Nothing to import into an editor afterwards and nothing to sync by hand.
A short line over the opening of the clip, five styles to pick from. It is generated as its own phrase, not trimmed off the front of the title, because the trimmed half is usually the part people click for.
Written per clip from the content of that clip. Pasting the description of the full video under every short is the fastest way to teach YouTube that they are all the same thing.
Pauses and dead air go away. Optional looks change the picture: noir, film, cinema.
A generated thumbnail for every clip, three styles, on the Pro plan.
For footage where the talking is not the point. Cuts follow what happens on camera instead of what is said, which is the mode for vlogs, travel and gameplay.
Getting them onto the channel
You download the files and upload them yourself. Zenuro does not post anything to your channel and does not ask for access to your YouTube account, which also means there is nothing to revoke later. What it does take off your hands is the part that stops most people from posting shorts regularly: the title, the description and the hashtags for each one, written from the content of that clip.
That matters more than it sounds. Ten shorts carrying the same copied description of the full video compete with each other in search and tell the algorithm they are ten copies of one thing. Ten shorts with their own titles answer ten different questions, and each one can be found by someone who was not looking for your channel.
If a clip needs a fix, it opens in an editor: trim the ends, correct a word in the captions, change the caption style, and it re-renders with that change instead of sending you back to a timeline.
Price and the free 30 minutes
Minutes are counted on the length of the video you put in, not on the number of shorts that come out. A 40 minute video costs 40 minutes whether it yields three clips or twelve.
30 minutes a month, no card required. Clips carry a small watermark.
300 minutes, no watermark, clips up to 1440p.
1200 minutes, long topic clips, AI covers, vlog and action mode, clips up to 4K.
Payment goes through an international card, a Russian card or SBP, or cryptocurrency, which activates immediately and works from any country. The free 30 minutes are there to answer the only question that matters before you pay: whether the moments it picks from your video are the ones you would have picked. Full breakdown on the pricing page.
Questions people ask first
Paste the link to the video into Zenuro. The audio is transcribed, the transcript is read for passages that stand on their own, and each one is rendered as a vertical 9:16 clip with the frame on the speaker, animated captions, a hook line, a title, a description and hashtags. You download the finished files and upload them to your channel.
A link is enough, including a link to a video on your own channel. Uploading the file works too, which is the way to go for footage that is not published yet. The limit is ten hours of source video on every plan.
As many as there are moments that survive without the rest of the video around them. An hour of talking usually gives five to ten. You can set the number before the run if you would rather have three good ones than ten average ones.
Usually between twenty and ninety seconds. The length comes from the passage itself rather than a preset, so a sharp forty second exchange stays forty seconds instead of being padded out to fill a slot.
For vlogs, travel, gameplay and similar footage there is a separate mode on the Pro plan that cuts by what happens in the frame instead of by speech. On a talking head video the transcript based mode is the better one.
No. Zenuro renders the files and writes the text for them, and you upload them yourself. Nothing is posted anywhere on your behalf and no access to your YouTube account is asked for.
The median across our jobs is about eight minutes per video and three quarters finish within fifteen, so you can start a run and come back later. The free plan is 30 minutes of processing a month with no card, and the clips carry a small watermark that the paid plans remove.
Working from a podcast rather than a back catalogue of videos: see podcast to shorts. Comparing tools before you start: how Zenuro lines up as an Opus Clip alternative. Or read the plans and limits in full.
Free plan · no card needed · crypto accepted