About Vid2Shorts
A small tool with one job: take a long video and give you back a vertical Short worth posting. This page covers why it exists, how the difficult part actually works, and the things we have decided not to do even though they would make us money.
Why this exists
Short form video is the cheapest distribution ever handed to somebody with no audience. The feeds do not care how many subscribers you have; they care whether people finish watching. That is a genuinely unusual opportunity, and almost everybody with a back catalogue of long video is sitting on a hundred clips they never make.
The reason they never make them is friction, not laziness. The traditional route is to export the source, drag it into an editor, hunt for the moment, reshape the frame to vertical, discover the crop has cut somebody in half, fix it by hand, add captions, export again, and repeat. That is most of an afternoon for four clips, which is why the overwhelming majority of people who decide to start clipping have stopped by week four.
Meanwhile the tools built to solve this mostly ask you to sign up before you can see whether they are any good, and then to pay monthly whether you clip four times that month or zero. That is a reasonable business for somebody producing at volume. It is a bad deal for the far larger group who would clip occasionally if it took two minutes.
Vid2Shorts is built for that second group. Paste a link, get a finished vertical clip, close the tab. No account for your first one, no subscription sitting there while you are busy.
The part that is genuinely hard
Cutting a video is easy. Captions are close to solved. The step that quietly ruins clips, and the reason this tool exists as a product rather than a script, is the reshaping.
A widescreen frame is 1920 pixels across. A Short is 1080 across. At the same height, that means roughly 56 percent of the width has to be discarded. Where it gets discarded from is the whole quality question, and there are only three honest answers.
- Crop the centre. Fast, and correct only when the subject happens to be dead centre. On the standard interview two shot, the centre of the frame is the empty gap between two people, so this produces a vertical video of a table. It is what most free converters do and it is why so many converted clips look subtly broken.
- Fit the whole frame. Place the entire widescreen picture inside the vertical canvas and fill above and below. Nothing is lost and the subject is smaller. Correct for screen recordings and slides, where detail at the edges matters more than scale.
- Move the window to the subject. Analyse the actual footage, work out where the person is, and place the vertical window over them, following as the conversation switches speakers. This is what our Auto-frame does, and when it cannot identify a subject with confidence it stays centred rather than committing to a wrong guess.
A confidently wrong crop is worse than a merely imperfect one, which is why the fallback behaviour matters as much as the clever part. You can see the difference on the homepage, where the same real frame is cropped both ways side by side.
How it works, plainly
Underneath, the pipeline fetches the source, obtains a transcript from the platform captions or from speech recognition, and either hands that transcript to a model that proposes self contained moments or hands you a timeline to choose your own. The chosen window is cut with frame accurate seeking, reshaped, captioned word by word, and encoded. Working files are deleted when the job finishes and finished clips expire on their own.
What we will not do
No invented numbers
No fake review counts, no star ratings nobody left, no counter of clips made that is really a timer. If you see a number on this site it came from somewhere real, or it is not there at all. This costs us conversions and we are keeping it.
No signup wall in front of the product
You get a finished clip before you get a form. The cost of that choice is that the free tier has to be metered per device and carries a watermark, because there is no account to attach a fair usage limit to.
No selling data, because there is nothing to sell
Guests are anonymous to us. Accounts store an email, a name and a plan. We run no advertising trackers and we do not train models on your content. The privacy policy is short because the truthful version is short.
No pretending competitors are bad
Our comparison page tells people to use OpusClip or Klap when those genuinely fit better, and says plainly that if you clip every week a subscription tool will serve you better than we will.
No dark patterns in billing
The price at checkout is the price. Unused purchases are refundable within three days, no argument required, which is spelled out on the refund page rather than buried in the terms.
Who builds it
A small independent team, self funded, with no investors to answer to and no growth target that requires us to make the free tier worse. We also build YTCut, a precise YouTube clipping tool that has been in production since 2025 and shares the same processing engine. Vid2Shorts exists because a large share of YTCut users kept asking for the vertical version.
Being small is the reason for most of the decisions on this page. We do not have a marketing department that needs a testimonial wall filled by launch day, so we can wait until real people leave real reviews. We are not spending someone else's money, so we do not need a subscription from a person who would rather pay once.
If something is broken, or the tool did something strange to your footage, we would genuinely like to know. Write to info@vid2shorts.com or use the contact page. A person reads it.