YouTube creators can now turn old VODs into new Shorts

YouTube says its newest Shorts feature will “bring fresh life” to creators’ “classic content.”

How?

By letting creators convert up to 60 seconds of content from their long-form videos into new Shorts.

The tool—which simply pops up as “Edit into a Short” if you’re watching a VOD on mobile—lets creators use YouTube Shorts’ suite of editing tools to turn the selected clip into a full-fledged short-form video.

The published Short then links back to the source content “so that people watching your Short can see the original video too,” Team YouTube said in a Community post about the feature. (That’s good, considering the fact that Lyor Cohen, YouTube’s global head of music, just told Bloomberg short-form content that doesn’t push viewers to a creator’s long-form content is the digital video equivalent of “junk food.”)

To be clear, YouTube Shorts already has two sampling/remixing features that let users clip audio and video from long-form content to use in Shorts. The difference with this tool is that only the original creator of a long-form video can repurpose that video for Shorts. (We’re guessing that’s because this tool allows for up to a minute of content to be repurposed, while the other sampling feature only lets users select up to five seconds of content to cut.)

Lifestyle creator Hannah Warling (444K subscribers) tells Tubefilter she sees the new tool as a way for long-form creators to break into making short-form content. And, vice-versa, it’ll allow creators who’ve grown popular on Shorts to feed those viewers over to their perhaps lesser-seen long-form videos.

“When making content, creators have a limited amount of time which often leads to them having to choose between one format or the other,” Warling says. “By allowing creators to easily repurpose content they’ve worked so hard to make, you’re giving them more opportunities for their hard work to reach the largest possible audience, as well as providing the most opportunities for monetization.”

YouTube says this feature is now rolling out to all creators on iOS and Android devices.