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Turn a long video into a YouTube Short

You've got the 20-minute video. The Short is a good 40 seconds of it, vertical, tight, captioned. Cut the segment in your editor, upload it here, and InstaZap does the rest of that sentence.

Preset: tight cut, Clean captions, 9:16

Drop your clip here

Any talking-head clip. We'll take it from here.

  • MP4 or MOV
  • up to 500 MB
  • first 3 are free
  • Deleted after 24 hours
  • Ready in about a minute
  • Never used to train anything

Why it works for this

16:9 in, 9:16 out

The preset reframes to vertical around the centre of the frame — where you are in a talking-head video — and never scales up, so the picture stays as sharp as the source.

Tight, because Shorts are

The Tight setting is preset: every pause goes. A Short has no room for the breath before your next point.

Captions that don't fight the picture

Clean style is preset — white text, thin outline, one line. It carries the words without turning the Short into a text post.

How it works

  1. 01

    Cut the segment

    In your editor, export the 30–60 seconds you want as a Short.

  2. 02

    Upload it here

    The preset is 9:16, Tight cutting and Clean captions — the Short recipe.

  3. 03

    Process

    The clip is reframed, the pauses cut, the captions burned in — about a minute.

  4. 04

    Upload to YouTube

    Download the MP4. It's vertical and under a minute, which is all a Short needs.

Questions

Do I upload the whole long video?

No — cut the segment you want as a Short first (up to 60 seconds free, ten minutes on Pro) and upload that. InstaZap edits the clip; it doesn't pick the clip for you.

What if I'm not in the centre of the frame?

The vertical crop keeps the middle third of the width. If you sit to one side in the original, keep the original shape here and crop in your editor instead.

Will YouTube treat it as a Short?

A Short is any vertical video up to 60 seconds (YouTube has extended this to three minutes). The 9:16 output here qualifies; keep the length under the limit.

Your first 3 are free, and we don’t keep your video

No card to start. The upload is deleted as soon as it’s processed and the result 24 hours after it’s ready. Nothing is used to train anything.