How to Make a YouTube Short: Phone, Computer, and the Faster Way
To make a YouTube Short, you need a vertical or square video up to 3 minutes long. On your phone, open the YouTube app, tap Create, choose Short, record or pick a clip, add text and sound, then tap Upload Short (or save it as a draft). On a computer, you edit the video in any editor, then click Create, Upload videos in YouTube and pick the file; YouTube treats it as a Short because of its length and shape. That is the whole mechanism. Everything else in this guide is about making the Short worth watching, and about what to do when you need one every day instead of once.
We make Nichecast, a tool that produces Shorts for faceless channels, so there is a section near the end about it. The steps before that work with no tool of ours at all.
What YouTube accepts as a Short
As of September 2026, YouTube’s own help pages set three limits for a Short you upload:
| Rule | What YouTube says |
|---|---|
| Length | Up to 3 minutes |
| Shape | A square or vertical aspect ratio |
| Resolution | A maximum of 1080p for an uploaded Short |
In practice that means a 9:16 video at 1080 by 1920 pixels. A horizontal video, even a short one, is published as a regular video and shows up in a different place. If your finished file is landscape, it will not become a Short, whatever you title it.
Length is the rule people get wrong most. Three minutes is the ceiling, and most Shorts that hold attention run well under a minute. A Short is watched in a feed where the next video is one swipe away, so the first second carries more weight than the last thirty.
How to make a YouTube Short on your phone
This is the fastest route for anything you can film yourself.
- Open the YouTube app and tap Create (the plus button).
- Choose Short. The Shorts camera opens.
- Record one clip, or several segments in a row. You can also pick a video already saved on the phone.
- Trim the clip, then add text, a sound, or a filter from the editing screen.
- Write a title. Keep it short and specific to what happens in the video.
- Tap Upload Short to publish, or Save draft to finish it later.
The built-in camera is good for talking to the lens, filming something happening in front of you, or reacting to another video. It is weaker for anything that needs a script, a voiceover laid over footage, or captions you have styled yourself. For those, most people edit first and upload the file.
How to make a YouTube Short on a computer
The computer route is for Shorts you build in an editor.
- Write the script. Aim for one idea, told in the order a curious viewer would ask for it. Open with the most surprising line.
- Record the voiceover. A phone in a quiet room is enough to start. Read the script twice and keep the cleaner take.
- Cut the visuals to the voice. Use your own footage, licensed stock clips or images. Change the picture every few seconds so the screen never sits still.
- Add captions. Many people watch Shorts with the sound off. Large, centred, word-by-word captions keep them watching.
- Export vertical. Set the project to 9:16 at 1080 by 1920 and keep the video under 3 minutes.
- Upload. In YouTube, click Create, then Upload videos, and select the file. Add a title and description, choose who can see it, and publish or schedule it.
If you plan to post a lot of these, the faceless channel guide walks through picking a niche and keeping a steady schedule, which is the part this page leaves out.
What makes a Short worth finishing
The mechanics above are the quick part. What takes the time is making a Short someone watches to the end. A few habits help more than any tool:
- Start in the middle. The first line should be the hook, a claim or a question, with no greeting and no “in this video”.
- One idea per Short. If you have three points, you have three Shorts.
- Say it faster than feels natural. Cut every sentence that repeats the one before it.
- Captions in the safe area. Keep text away from the bottom and right edge, where YouTube draws the title, buttons and comments.
- End on the payoff. A Short that ends on its best fact gets rewatched. One that ends on “subscribe for more” gets swiped.
Copyright deserves one line of its own. YouTube’s help page warns that using copyright-protected material in an uploaded Short can lead to a Content ID claim or a strike, so stick to footage and music you made or have the right to use.
Where making Shorts gets slow
One Short is easy to make by hand, and it gets quicker every time. The trouble starts when a channel needs a Short every day. The steps that repeat for every single video are the heavy ones:
| Step | Done by hand, per video |
|---|---|
| Research and script | Find a topic, check the facts, write 100 to 200 words |
| Voiceover | Record, retake, clean up the audio |
| Visuals | Find or film footage that matches each line |
| Captions | Time every word to the voice |
| Render and upload | Export, upload, fill in the title and description |
None of those steps is hard. Together they are what makes most people who start a Shorts channel stop posting after a few weeks. If you only post occasionally, the manual route is fine. If the channel lives or dies on posting daily, the repeated steps are the part worth handing off.
How to make YouTube Shorts faster with Nichecast
Nichecast takes over the repeated steps for faceless channels, the kind where the video is a voiceover over footage rather than a person on camera. You describe the channel once: a niche, a style, and any rules you want it to follow. From there, each video it makes goes through the same pipeline:
- It writes the script for the channel’s niche.
- It records the voiceover.
- It picks footage and images to match each line.
- It adds captions and renders a 9:16 vertical video.
- It uploads the video to your own YouTube channel as unlisted.
Nichecast never publishes. Every video waits in your YouTube Studio as an unlisted draft. You watch it, change the title or thumbnail if you want, and press publish yourself. That step is deliberate: YouTube’s policy on inauthentic content asks that a video made with automated tools still show the creator’s own judgement, and the review is where you give it.
As of September 2026, the pricing page lists a Free plan with 5 videos to start, no card required, and a Pro plan at $29 a month for 30 videos a month. A video that fails to render is refunded automatically. If you want to see what comes out before signing up, the free script generator needs no account, and the home page plays a full sample video it made.
Start with the free videos if you want to try it on your own channel.
The manual way next to the faster one
| By hand | With Nichecast | |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes the script | You | Nichecast, from your channel description |
| Voiceover | Your voice or a recording you make | Generated for you |
| Footage | You find or film it | Chosen to match each line |
| Captions | You time them | Added in the render |
| Who publishes | You | You, after reviewing the unlisted draft |
| Works for on-camera videos | Yes | No, faceless channels only |
| Cost | Your time, plus any tools you already pay for | Free for 5 videos, then $29 a month |
When the manual way is enough
Handing the work to a tool is not the right answer for everyone. Keep making Shorts yourself if:
- You are on camera. Talking-head Shorts, tutorials where your hands are on screen, and reaction videos need you, and the YouTube app’s camera already does the job.
- You post once a week or less. The repeated steps above only hurt at volume.
- You enjoy the edit. For a lot of creators the cutting and timing is the fun part, and the style it gives the channel is hard to hand over.
- You are repurposing long videos. If you already film long-form content, a clipping tool that cuts Shorts from your footage fits better than one that starts from a blank niche. Our Opus Clip review covers that kind of tool.
If you are comparing tools
Several products automate some part of making Shorts, and they draw the line in different places. Some post for you on a schedule, some only cut clips, some stop at a finished file. Our overview of YouTube Shorts automation lays out which step each one takes over, and the AI Shorts generator comparison covers the ones that make the video from scratch.
A YouTube Short in one sentence
A YouTube Short is any vertical or square video up to 3 minutes long, made in the YouTube app or uploaded from a computer; making one is easy, and making one every day is the part worth planning for.