Turn YouTube Videos Into Shorts Automatically
Paste a YouTube URL and ClipSonic downloads it, finds the best moments, reframes them to 9:16 with face tracking, and burns in captions — so one long video becomes a batch of ready-to-post Shorts.
Turning a long YouTube video into Shorts by hand means re-watching your own upload, marking timestamps, cropping each moment to vertical, and captioning it. ClipSonic collapses that into one pass: give it the link, and it handles the download, the transcript, the highlight picks, the reframe and the captions.
Because the whole pipeline runs on your computer, your video is never re-uploaded to a third-party service to be clipped. The YouTube download runs in the background, everything after it is local, and you export as many Shorts from a single video as you want.
From YouTube URL to posted Short
Paste the YouTube URL
ClipSonic downloads the video in the background — pick a quality tier up to 1080p — and extracts the audio for transcription.
Transcribe
Use Groq or OpenAI, or run Whisper locally on your GPU with no API key. Word-level timing feeds the captions later.
Find the highlights
AI Viral Clips returns ranked moments with a title, a hook reason and a viral score. Or use Smart Viral Clips for on-device scoring with no key.
Face-track the reframe
Each clip is cropped to 9:16 with the speaker kept in frame, switching layout on every shot change in the source.
Caption and export
Pick one of six animated caption styles, adjust in/out points, then render one clip or batch-export the whole set.
Why the YouTube workflow is one step
Built-in downloader
No separate yt-dlp step — paste the link and ClipSonic fetches the video with live progress and cancel support.
Clips across the whole video
Long uploads are chunked so highlight detection covers the end of a video, not just the first ten minutes.
True 9:16 output
Face-aware vertical crops, plus 4:5, 1:1 and 16:9 if you post to more than one platform.
Captions from the transcript
Word-by-word highlighted captions, burned in — no separate captioning tool or manual sync.
A week of Shorts per upload
Approve five to fifteen clips from one video and export them together.
No re-upload
After the initial YouTube download, cutting, framing and rendering never leave your machine.
Common questions
How do I turn a YouTube video into a Short?
Paste the video URL into ClipSonic. It downloads the video, transcribes it, suggests ranked clips, reframes each to 9:16 with face tracking and adds captions. You approve the clips you want and export them.
Does ClipSonic re-upload my YouTube video anywhere?
No. The only network step is the initial download from YouTube. Clipping, reframing, captioning and rendering all happen locally.
Can it automatically find the best moments?
Yes — AI Viral Clips ranks moments with a hook reason and viral score, and Smart Viral Clips does on-device scoring with no API key.
Can I export more than one Short from a video?
Yes. There is no per-clip fee or export cap — batch-export every approved clip from a single video.
What if I only have the video file, not a URL?
Drop the file in directly. MP4, MOV, MKV and more are supported, with no size or length limit.
Does it add captions to the Shorts?
Yes, burned-in animated captions generated from the transcript, in six styles, with word-by-word highlighting and drag-to-position.
Related pages
Paste a link, get Shorts
Download ClipSonic free and turn your next YouTube upload into a batch of face-tracked, captioned Shorts.