How to Cut Three Shorts From One Long-Form Script, Before You Record

Most long-form scripts contain two or three passages that would work as Shorts if they were lifted out and given their own first line. Finding them after the edit means scrubbing through footage. Finding them on the page, before recording, means you can deliver those lines so they cut clean, and the Short is a copy-paste job instead of a rescue.

This guide covers the rules YouTube publishes, the word budgets, the five tests a passage has to pass, and a free tool that does the first read for you.

What YouTube counts as a Short

YouTube's rule is about shape and length, not intent: "Any videos uploaded on or after [October 15, 2024] with a square or vertical aspect ratio up to three minutes in length will be categorized as Shorts on YouTube" (YouTube Help). Two consequences for a creator cutting from long-form:

• •A vertical clip of any length up to three minutes is a Short. There is no setting to make it long-form. YouTube's own answer to "Can I prevent my video from being turned into a Short?" is to "use a wider aspect ratio such as 16:9".
• •Longer Shorts carry a copyright rule the shorter ones do not: "Any Short that is over one minute in duration with an active copyright claim of any type, including manual claims, will be blocked globally on YouTube." The page also notes that most library songs can be used "for up to 90 seconds in a 3 minute Short", with some tracks limited to 60 or 30 seconds. If your long-form video uses claimed music under a passage you plan to cut, the Short needs different music or no music.

How many words fit

The budgets below come from 3,923 English YouTube videos across 1,434 channels, measured as caption words divided by full runtime (median 178 words per minute, middle half 154 to 201). They describe finished long-form video, pauses and b-roll included, so a Short with no silence will run slightly faster.

The practical reading: a 60-second Short is about 164 words, which is one idea, one example, and one turn. A three-minute Short is about 480 words, which is enough for a short argument but not for setup. The how many words in a 1-minute video page has the full distribution, and the words to minutes converter converts any count at your own pace.

The five tests a passage has to pass

Read the long-form draft once and mark every passage that passes all five.

1. •It opens on a claim, not a connective. "And that is why" fails. "Nobody checks this number" passes. The first line of a Short is the hook, and a line that referred back to the long-form video has no hook.
2. •It needs nothing the viewer has not heard. No "as I said earlier", no name introduced three minutes before, no callback. If a passage leans on one earlier fact, you can usually fold that fact into the first sentence.
3. •It holds one idea. A passage that covers two points is two Shorts or none. Cut at the turn.
4. •It ends on a turn, not a hand-off. The last line should land the point or flip it. "Now, moving on" is a long-form seam, and the Short ends one sentence before it.
5. •It fits the budget at your pace. Count the words. If the passage is 400 words and your pace is 178 words per minute, it is a 135-second Short, which is legal but long. The Shorts feed decides in the first seconds, so the budget that matters most is the first line.

A passage that passes four of the five is usually fixable: write the missing first line, or fold the missing fact in. A passage that passes three is a different Short in disguise.

Mark it in the script, then record it twice

Once a passage is chosen, mark its first and last line in the long-form script. When you record, deliver the first line of the marked passage as a cold open, as if the viewer had just arrived, and deliver it again in its long-form phrasing if the two differ. The editor then has a clean in-point and an out-point that do not depend on cutting mid-breath.

If you write a dedicated first line for the Short, write it now, in the script, so it exists in the recording. The Shorts hook library has 15 opening shapes that begin with the premise. Writing it after the edit means re-recording or a text-over-silence opening, and the stayed to watch metric is decided in exactly those seconds.

A worked example

Illustrative example, written for this guide. A 14-minute script on choosing a first camera contains this stretch at minute nine:

"And that brings up the thing nobody mentions in reviews: the lens you can afford matters more than the body you want. A used lens from 2012 on a cheap body will out-resolve the kit lens on the body everyone recommends. I tested this with the same scene on both, and the cheap combination won on sharpness, and lost only on autofocus speed, which does not matter for a talking-head video. So before you spend on the body, price the lens."

The passage fails test one ("And that brings up") and passes the rest. The fix is one new first line, written into the script: "The lens you can afford matters more than the body you want." Delivered cold, it is a 95-word Short, about 30 seconds at the corpus median, with its turn in the last sentence.

Let a tool do the first pass

Shorts From Script reads a pasted long-form script and returns the three stretches that can stand alone as a Short, 20 to 60 seconds each, with a hook line and a caption to start from. It applies the tests above; you still make the call. Pair it with the chapters generator if the same read is going to produce the long-form timestamps.

For the long-form side of the same script, the free script check returns a relative attention-risk map over the draft and the biggest flagged passage with its rewrite. The stretches that score best as self-contained Shorts are often the same stretches the long-form audit marks as top moments, which is a useful sanity check in both directions.